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You Need a Strategy Not a Slogan to Overcome Resistance to Change

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You Need a Strategy Not a Slogan to Overcome Resistance to Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

When we’re passionate about an idea, we want others to see it the same way we do, with all its beautiful complexity and nuance. We want to believe that if others can just understand it, they will embrace it. That’s why most change management practices focus on persuasion, explaining the need for change and creating a sense of urgency.

But consider recent research that finds that we can’t even agree on simple concepts such as what a penguin is and it becomes clear that for any given initiative, people are bound to see it differently. The simple truth is that change doesn’t fail on its own, it fails because people resist it. If we are to bring about genuine change, our first job is to overcome that resistance.

We need to internalize that humans form attachments to people, ideas and other things and, when those attachments are threatened, we act in ways that don’t reflect our best selves. Every change strategy has to begin with that. Clever gimmicks or snappy slogans won’t bring about true transformation. We have to build a strategy to overcome resistance from the start.

First, Follow The Energy

There’s something about human nature that, when we’re really excited about an idea, makes us want to go convince the skeptics. That’s almost always a bad idea. A much better strategy is to start with people who are enthusiastic about your change, who want it to succeed. They can help you strengthen it and spread it to others, who can spread it further still.

For example, in his efforts to reform the Pentagon, Colonel John Boyd began every initiative by briefing a group of collaborators he called the “Acolytes,” who would help hone and sharpen the ideas. He then moved on to congressional staffers, elected officials and the media. By the time general officers were aware of what he was doing, he had built up too much support to ignore.

In a similar vein, a massive effort to implement lean manufacturing methods at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began with a single team at one factory, but grew to encompass 17,000 employees across 25 sites worldwide and cut manufacturing costs by 25%. The campaign that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević started with just 5 kids in a coffee shop.

One advantage to starting small is that you can identify your apostles informally, even through casual conversations. In skills-based transformations, effective change leaders often start with workshops and see who seems enthusiastic or comes up after the session. Your apostles don’t need to have senior positions or special skills, they just have to be passionate.

“You have to go where the energy is,” John Gadsby, who built a movement for process improvement inside Procter & Gamble that has grown to encompass 60,000 employees, told me. “We’ll choose energy and excitement and enthusiasm over the right position, or the person at the right leadership level, or the person whose job it is supposed to be to do that.”

Identify Shared Values

Humans naturally form tribes. In a study of adults that were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI studies noted hostility to out-group members. Similar results were found in a study involving five year-old children and even in infants. Evolutionary psychologists attribute this tendency to kin selection, which explains how groups favor those who share their attributes in the hopes that those attributes will be propagated.

So it’s natural that when we feel passionately about an idea, we want to focus on how it’s different, to create our own tribe. For example, the Agile Manifesto has inspired fierce devotion and helped build a vibrant community around Agile product development. So it shouldn’t be surprising that when evangelists try to attract others to the movement, it’s the Agile Manifesto that they want to emphasize.

Yet for those outside the Agile development community, its principles can seem strange and impractical. It emphasizes adaptability over planning which can appear to be chaotic for those who are used to a more traditional approach. If you want to bring in new people, it’s better to focus on shared values, such as the ability to produce better quality projects faster and cheaper.

One of the biggest challenges in driving transformation is that while differentiating values make people excited about an idea, it is shared values that help build genuine and widespread support. That doesn’t mean you abandon or water down your beliefs. It just means that you need to meet people where they are, not where you wish them to be.

Design A Dilemma Action

Unfortunately, building a shared purpose isn’t always possible. Whenever we set out to make a significant impact you are bound to get pushback, not for any rational logic, necessarily but because, for whatever reason, but because for whatever reason, it offends some people’s dignity, their identity, their sense of self. A simple truth is that we all form irrational attachments and when those are threatened, we tend to act out in ways that don’t reflect our best selves.

When that happens — and it always does eventually — we can get sucked into a conflict, which will likely take us off course and discredit what we’re trying to achieve. Yet, here too, developing empathy skills to identify shared values can be extremely helpful. They can help us to design a dilemma action, which puts the opponents into an impossible position.

Dilemma actions have only recently become an active area of research, but have been used by practitioners for at least a century — famous examples include Gandhi’s Salt March, King’s Birmingham Campaign and Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels. They are just as effective in an organizational context, using an opponent’s resistance against them.

One of the great things about dilemma actions is that you approach them exactly the same way you approach building allies — by identifying a shared purpose. Once you do that, you can design a constructive act rooted in that shared purpose that advances your agenda. Your opponent then has a choice: they can disrupt the act and violate the shared value or they can let it go forward and let change progress.

For example, I was once leading a transformation project that was being impeded by a sales director hogging accounts. Although it was agreed that she would distribute her clients, she never got around to it, so I set up a meeting with a key account and one of our salespeople. When she tried to disrupt the meeting, she violated the shared value we had established, was dismissed from her position and everything fell into place after that.

Planning To Survive Victory

Many change leaders assume that once they win an initial victory that everything will get easier after that. They work for months — and sometimes years — to get a project off the ground. Yet just when they think they’re turning the corner, when they’ve won executive sponsorship, signed up key partners and procured enough financing to have a realistic budget, all the sudden things seem to get mired down.

That’s no accident. Just because you’ve won a few early battles doesn’t mean opposition to your idea melts away. On the contrary, faced with the fact that change may actually succeed, those who oppose it have probably just begun to redouble their efforts to undermine it. These efforts are often not overt, but they are there and can easily derail an initiative.

As Saul Alinsky once put it, every revolution inspires its own counterrevolution. That’s why every change effort must plan from the beginning to survive victory. You need to anticipate resistance, think about where you’re vulnerable and how you’ll mitigate those attacks by leveraging shared values.

The truth is that change is always a journey, never a particular destination, which is why lasting change is always built on the common ground of shared values. The answer doesn’t lie in any specific strategy or initiative, but in how people are able to internalize the need for change and transfer ideas through social bonds. A leader’s role is not necessarily to plan and direct action, but to inspire and empower belief.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2025Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are September’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI — by Robyn Bolton
  2. Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers — by Robyn Bolton
  3. Growth is Not the Answer — by Mike Shipulski
  4. The Most Challenging Obstacles to Achieving Artificial General Intelligence — by Art Inteligencia
  5. Charlie Kirk and Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
  6. You Just Got Starbucked — by Braden Kelley
  7. Metaphysics Philosophy — by Geoffrey Moore
  8. Invention Through Co-Creation — by Janet Sernack
  9. Sometimes Ancient Wisdom Needs to be Left Behind — by Greg Satell
  10. The Crisis Innovation Trap — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in August that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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Three Strategies for Overcoming Change Resistance

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Three Strategies for Overcoming Change Resistance

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Max Planck’s work in physics changed the way we were able to see the universe. Still, even he complained that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

For most transformational efforts we need to pursue, we simply don’t have that kind of time. To drive significant change we have to overcome staunch resistance. Unfortunately, most change management strategies assume that opposition can be overcome through communication efforts that are designed to persuade.

This assumes that resistance always has a rational basis and clearly that’s not true. We all develop emotional attachments to ideas. When we feel those are threatened, it offends our dignity, identity and sense of self. If we are going to overcome our most fervent opponents we don’t need a better argument, we need a strategy. Here are three approaches that work:

Strategy 1: Designate An Internal Red Team

Resistance is never monolithic. While some people have irrational attachments based on their sense of identity and dignity, others are merely skeptical. One key difference between these two groups is that the irrational resistors rarely voice their opposition, but try to quietly sabotage change. The rational skeptics, on the other hand, are much more eager to engage.

While these are different groups, they often interact with each other behind the scenes. In many cases, it is the active, irrational opposition that is fueling the skeptics’ doubts. One useful strategy for dealing with this dynamic is to co-opt the opposition by setting up an internal red team to channel skepticism in a constructive way.

Red-teaming is a process in which an adversarial team is set up to poke holes in an operational or strategic plan. For example, red teams are used in airports and computer systems to see if they can find weaknesses in security. The military uses red teams to test battle plans. Perhaps most famously, a red team was used to help determine whether the conclusions that led to the raid on Osama bin Laden’s hideout were valid or if there was some other explanation.

Recruiting skeptics to be an internal red team provides two benefits. First, they can alert you to actual problems with your ideas, which you can then fix. Second, they not only voice their own objections, but also bring those of the irrational opposition out into the open (remember, irrational resisters rarely speak out.)

What’s key here is to make the distinction between rational skeptics and the irrational saboteurs. Engage with skeptics, leave the saboteurs to themselves.

Strategy 2: Don’t Engage And Quietly Gain Traction

Have you ever had this happen?: You’re in a meeting where things are moving slowly towards a consensus. Issues are discussed, objections raised and solutions devised. Toward the end of the meeting, just as things are shifting gears to next steps, somebody who had hardly said a word the whole time all of a sudden throws a hissy fit in the middle of the conference room and completely discredits themself.

There’s a reason why this happens. Remember saboteurs are not acting rationally. They have emotional attachments that they often can’t articulate, which is why they rarely give voice to their objections, but rather look for more discreet opportunities to derail the process. When they see things moving forward, they panic.

This doesn’t happen just in conference rooms. Those who are trying to sabotage change prefer to lurk in the background and hope they can quietly derail it. But when they see genuine progress being made, they will likely lash out, overreach and inadvertently further your cause.

This behavior is incredibly consistent. In fact, whenever I’m speaking to a group of transformation and change professionals and I describe this phenomenon to them, I always get people coming up to me afterwards. “I didn’t know that was a normal thing, I thought it was just something crazy that happened in our case!”

It’s important to resist the urge to respond to every attack. You don’t need to waste precious time and energy engaging with those who want to derail your initiative, which is more likely to frustrate and exhaust you than anything else. It’s much better to focus on empowering those who support change. Non-engagement can be a viable way to deal with opposition.

Strategy 3: Design A Dilemma Action

I once had a six-month assignment to restructure the sales and marketing operations of a troubled media company and the Sales Director was a real stumbling block. She never overtly objected, but would rather nod her head and then quietly sabotage progress. For example, she promised to hand over the clients she worked directly with to her staff, but never seemed to get around to it.

It was obvious that she intended to slow-walk everything until the six months were over and then return everything back to the way it was. As a longtime senior employee, she had considerable political capital within the organization and, because she was never directly insubordinate, creating a direct confrontation with her would be risky and unwise.

So rather than create a conflict, I designed a dilemma. I arranged with the CEO of a media buying agency for one of the salespeople to meet with a senior buyer and take over the account. The Sales Director had two choices. She could either let the meeting go ahead and lose her grip on the department or try to derail the meeting. She chose the latter and was fired for cause. Once she was gone, her mismanagement became obvious and sales shot up.

Dilemma actions have been around for at least a century. One early example was Alice Paul’s Silent Sentinels who picketed the Wilson White House with his own quotes in 1917. More recently, the tactic has been the subject of increasing academic interest. What’s becoming clear is that these actions share clear design principles that can be replicated in almost any context.

Key to the success of a dilemma action is that it is seen as a constructive act rooted in a shared value. In the case of the Sales Director, she had agreed to give up her accounts and setting up the meeting was aligned with that agreement. That’s what created the dilemma. She had to choose between violating the shared value or giving up her resistance.

How Change Really Happens

One of the biggest misconceptions about change is that it is an exercise in persuasion. Yet anyone who has ever been married or had kids knows how hard it can be to convince even a single person of something they don’t want to be convinced about. Seeking to persuade hundreds or thousands to change what they think or how they act is a tall order indeed.

The truth is that radical, transformational change is achieved when not when those who oppose it are convinced, but when they discredit themselves. It was the brutality of Bull Connor’s tactics in Birmingham that paved the way for the Civil Rights Act in 1964. It was Russia’s poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko in 2004 that set Ukraine on a different path. The passage of Proposition 8 in California created such controversy that it actually furthered the cause of same-sex marriage.

We find the same dynamic in our work with organizational transformations. Whenever you set out to make a significant impact, there will always be people who will hate the idea and seek to undermine it in ways that are dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Once you are able to internalize that you are ready to move forward.

Through sound strategies, you can learn to leverage opposition to further your change initiative. You can co-opt those who are rationally skeptical to find flaws in your idea that can be fixed. For those who are adamantly and irrationally opposed to an initiative, there are proven strategies that help lead them to discredit themselves.

The status quo always has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. The difference between successful revolutionaries and mere dreamers is that those who succeed anticipate resistance and build a plan to overcome it.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Unsplash

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of April 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of April 2025Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are April’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Innovation or Not? – Kawasaki Corleo — by Braden Kelley
  2. From Resistance to Reinvention — by Noel Sobelman
  3. How Innovation Tools Help You Stay Safe — by Robyn Bolton
  4. Should My Brand Take a Political Stand? — by Pete Foley
  5. Innovation Truths — by Mike Shipulski
  6. Good Management is Not Good Strategy — by Greg Satell
  7. ChatGPT Blew My Mind with its Strategy Development — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Five Questions Great Leaders Always Ask — by David Burkus
  9. Why So Many Smart People Are Foolish — by Greg Satell
  10. Beyond Continuous Improvement Culture — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in March that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Build a Common Language of Innovation on your team

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

It All Starts with Wanting Things to be Different

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It All Starts With Wanting Things to be Different

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Wanting things to be different is a good start, but it’s not enough. To create conditions for things to move in a new direction, you’ve got to change your behavior. But with systems that involve people, this is not a straightforward process.

To create conditions for the system to change, you must understand the system”s disposition – the lines along which it prefers to change.. And to do that, you’ve got to push on the system and watch its response. With people systems, the response is not knowable before the experiment.

If you expect to be able to predict how the system will respond, working with people systems can be frustrating. I offer some guidance here. With this work, you are not responsible for the system’s response, you are only responsible for how you respond to the system’s response.

If the system responds in a way you like, turn that experiment into a project to amplify the change. If the system responds in a way you dislike, unwind the experiment. Here’s a simple mantra – do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. (Thanks to Dave Snowden for this.)

If you don’t like how things are going, you have only one lever to pull. You can only change.your response to what you see and experience. You can respond by pushing on the system and responding to what you see or you can respond by changing what you think and feel about the system.

But keep in mind that you are part of the system. And maybe the system is running an experiment on you. Either way, your only choice is to choose how to respond.

Image credits: 1 of 850+ FREE quote slides available for download at http://misterinnovation.com

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What Innovation is Really About

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What Innovation is Really About

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Sometimes a short and simple word-play brings out some great reflection.

  1. Resistance kills Change
  2. Fear kills Experimentation
  3. Bureaucracy kills Speed
  4. Control kills Flexibility
  5. Tradition kills Disruption
  6. Pressure kills Creativity
  7. Hierarchy kills Agility
  8. Silos kills Collaboration
  9. Organizational inertia trumps Talent

Now, read that RIGHT to LEFT.

This is in many ways the essence of innovation in my view.

Image Credits: Stefan Lindegaard

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We Need to Stop Rooting for Change

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We Need To Stop Rooting For Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Today, everyone seems to want to associate themselves with change. Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s former CEO, loved to call his firm a 124 year-old startup. Its value fell by 30% under his tenure and would later collapse. Bill Gates pointed out that the culprit wasn’t innovation or disruption, but basic mismanagement.

It seems that, these days, Immelt’s leadership is closer to the rule than the exception. Everybody wants to be an innovator. Nobody wants to be associated with the status quo. Even political conservatives describe themselves as a “movement,” a seeming contradiction in terms. Change has become gospel, an end in itself rather than a mere means to an end.

The truth is that innovation is less about new ideas than it is about identifying meaningful problems. Too much happy talk about change can actually undermine meaningful transformation. If your focus on the fabulous yonder obscures your view into the day-to-day, you’re most likely headed for trouble. We need to start taking change more seriously.

Change Is Hard. People Are Struggling

Humans struggle to adapt. Our brains are not wired for change, but build synaptic pathways based on past experiences. These can change over time, but with some difficulty. We are also greatly influenced by those around us, whose brains have been shaped by similar experiences. Finally, there are often genuine switching costs that need to be overcome.

The notion that transformation can be challenging is nothing new. What managers often fail to account for, however, is that change never happens in a vacuum. It must be seen in context of everything else that’s going on in people’s lives, including pressures related to family, economic and health concerns.

Consider that research points to a dramatic increase of anxiety and depression since the start of the pandemic. Another study reported in Harvard Business Review found that 76% of employees in 2021 reported at least one mental health symptom, up from 59% in 2019 and 50% have reported leaving a job due to mental health concerns, compared to 34% two years earlier. Those are dramatic increases on already high levels.

Yet even before the pandemic there were signs of trouble. A 2014 report by PwC revealed that 65% of respondents in corporations cited change fatigue, 44% of employees complained they don’t understand the change they’re being asked to make, and 38% say they don’t agree with it. Should we be surprised that so many change initiatives fail?

Too Much Early Talk Ignites Resistance

Managers launching a new initiative often seek to start with a bang. They work to gain approval for a sizable budget as a sign of institutional commitment. They recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast, gain scale and generate some quick wins. All of this is designed to create a sense of urgency and inevitability.

Yet this approach can often backfire. Any time you ask people to change what they think or how they act, there will be some who won’t like it and they will work to undermine you in ways that are often dishonest, underhanded and deceptive. Starting a transformation initiative with a big kickoff just gives them an early warning that they’d better get started sabotaging you or change might actually take place.

Unfortunately, there are perverse incentives involved in many initiatives. When change involves new capability, there are inevitably vendors involved and consultants are brought in to manage the process. Often, in addition to helping to design and procure systems, these consultants are given the assignment for organizational change management as well.

At first, it may seem intuitive and sensible that the same vendor that designs the system helps implement the program. However, what is often missed is that these consultants are much more heavily financially incentivized to close the deal, which can often be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, than to drive genuine long-term transformation.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that what passes for “organizational change management” is often little more than an internal communication strategy and a training program implementation. That clearly doesn’t suffice.

Change Is Nonlinear. There Are Advantages To Starting Slow

People who are passionate about change naturally want it to happen as soon as possible. This is especially true of action-oriented managers, who pride themselves on executing a plan quickly and efficiently. There are often informal organizational incentives as well. Executives who are seen to be hard-charging and who “get things done” can be more likely to move up the corporate ladder.

Yet consider the case of Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence. Soon after returning to India from South Africa, he called for nationwide strikes in response to the repressive Rowlatt Act. The people immediately rose up, but things quickly spun out of control and ended in tragedy. A decade later, he learned from his mistake and set out on his Salt March with just a small, disciplined cadre, which would inspire the world and help lead to Indian Independence.

Similar strategies have proven highly effective in organizational transformations. When Wyeth Pharmaceuticals began its shift to lean manufacturing, it started with a single team in a single plant, but success there led to a transformation involving 17,000 employees. When Experian sought to shift to a cloud-based enterprise, it started with internal API’s that had limited effect on its business, but helped lead to genuine and complete change.

What each of these had in common is that they started with a keystone change, which had a concrete and tangible goal, involved multiple stakeholders and paved the way for future change. While the initial wins were small, they showed what was possible and, because they were successful, they were able to build momentum and grow exponentially.

Change isn’t linear. Success grows exponentially on success. That’s why you often need to start slow to move fast.

Making Change Meaningful

My friend Srdja Popović once told me that the goal of a revolution should be to become mainstream, to be mundane and ordinary. If you are successful it should be difficult to explain what was won because the previous order seems so unbelievable. Yet many leaders approach change initiatives as if they were swashbuckling heroes in their own action movie.

The simple truth is that every change initiative starts out weak and vulnerable, without a track record of success. People are bound to be suspicious. They already have everyday struggles and don’t want someone else’s idea to add to their burden. Most often, they’ll pay lip service, take a “wait and see” approach and then turn away at the first sign of trouble.

The problem with cheerleading change is that it puts the cart before the horse. People don’t embrace change because you came up with a fancy slogan, they adopt what they find meaningful, that creates genuine value to their lives and their work. Without that, all the happy talk just seems like a con.

We need to have more reverence for the mundane and ordinary. For better or worse, it works and it’s what people know. To create genuine transformation we need to get out of the business of selling ideas and into the business of selling success. If we can help allies to make change successful, even on a small scale, they can bring in others who bring in others still.

That can’t be done through persuasion, we have to start by identifying people who are already enthusiastic about change. Change isn’t about communication, but empowerment.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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Four Reasons Change Resistance Exists

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Four Reasons Change Resistance Exists

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Probably the greatest misconception about change is that it fails because people don’t understand it. The truth is that change usually fails because it is actively sabotaged. The status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. Anytime you ask people to change what they think or how they act, you can expect resistance.

Yet not all resistance is the same. Some people are merely skeptical about change, they are looking for evidence based, rational arguments that the proposed action will achieve positive results. Often, however, resistance is irrational and no amount of evidence will be persuasive. People are actively working to subvert change efforts.

We can’t let our transformation efforts be defined by those who want it to fail. Not everyone will embrace change. Instead of wasting time and effort to convince the opposition, we should focus our efforts on empowering those who want it to succeed. However, we need to learn to recognize different kinds of resistance so that we can address genuine issues.

1. Change Fatigue

In recent years, business pundits have embraced the change gospel. We are told that we live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous). Therefore, we must “innovate or die.” This creates an environment in which leaders have strong incentives to be seen as dynamic change agents who drive multiple initiatives.

Yet the truth is that, for most industries, we live in a decidedly un-VUCA world. In fact, a report from the OECD found that markets, especially in the United States, have become more concentrated and less competitive, with less churn among industry leaders. The number of young firms have decreased markedly as well, from roughly half of the total number of companies in 1982 to one third in 2013.

With so much talk about change, but so little of it actually happening, it shouldn’t be surprising that a study by PwC found that 65% of workers experienced “change fatigue” and that only half felt that their organization had the capabilities to deliver change. In other words, the change gospel is undermining our ability to produce real change!

That’s why in our transformation workshops the very first thing we ask participants to define is the need for change. We simply can’t expect people to get on board with a change initiative if they don’t see a genuine, meaningful problem being solved. Change, for change’s sake, is simply a waste of everybody’s time.

So before you embark on any transformation initiative ask yourself: “Why do we need this change? What problem are we solving? What value would we derive from solving it? Is that value worth disrupting people’s lives and work?

2. Perverse Incentives

Earlier in my career my work focused on turning around media companies in Eastern Europe and I noticed an interesting trend. Managers of sales departments in struggling companies often accounted for the majority of sales (and commissions) in their companies. Because these leaders were seen as major drivers of revenue, they had an enormous amount of power.

The secret to their success had less to do with any actual sales ability and vastly more to do with the fact that, for a variety of reasons, they had managed to get the prime accounts for themselves and, even if they were managing those accounts poorly, had no incentive to spread them around. They were, in effect, being incentivized to mismanage.

The truth is that we’ve known for decades that financial incentives usually backfire. Nevertheless, when we sit down with leaders to define a change strategy they invariably want to start by devising a complex system of “carrots and sticks” to engineer the behavior they want to see and are often disappointed when they are told that it’s a bad idea.

You never want to have to incentivize people to drive change. If an initiative has real value, you should be able to find people who are enthusiastic about it and want to make it work. Even a small initial cadre should be enough to deliver a successful keystone change and get the ball rolling. After that, the issue has more to do with scaling change than anything else.

3. Switching Costs

Every change encounters switching costs. In one particularly glaring example, the main library at Princeton University took 120 years to switch to the Library of Congress classification system because of the time and expense involved. Clearly, that’s an extreme case, but every change effort needs to take inevitable frictions into account.

There are a number of reasons why switching costs can become a significant roadblock. The first is our innate bias for loss aversion. First identified and documented by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, we all have a tendency to avoid losses rather than seek out new gains. The comfort of the status quo can be more powerful than the mysterious promise of transformation.

Another important force is the availability heuristic, which reflects our tendency to overweight information that is most easily accessible. What we experience in the here and now always seems more tangible and concrete than the more distant benefits of change, which many will suspect will never come.

You never want to get bogged down in selling an idea. The switching costs will always be more real to skeptics than any image you can conjure. Rather, you want to identify people who are already enthusiastic about the change and willing to bear any costs associated with switching. If you can empower them to succeed with a keystone change, you can sell that tangible success, which is always a stronger value proposition.

A key thing to remember here is that you shouldn’t have to convince early adopters. If you feel the need to persuade, you either have the wrong change or the wrong people. Find people who are as passionate as you are and show change can work. Then you can start thinking about bringing others in.

4. Identity And Dignity

Gary Starkweather had a big idea, but his boss at Xerox’s Research Center in Webster, NY hated it so much that he threatened to fire anyone who worked on it. To him, Xerox was a copier company and the idea didn’t have anything to do with copiers. Luckily, for Gary and for Xerox, the idea meshed perfectly with the new Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)’s mission and the laser printed he developed there helped save the company.

Xerox PARC has since become almost synonymous with innovation, but even the researchers there could be hostile to ideas that were different. Dick Shoup and Alvy Ray Smith, were working on a new graphics technology called SuperPaint. Unfortunately, it didn’t fit in with PARC’s vision of personal computing and the two became outcasts. Smith would later team up with Ed Catmull and the technology would form the core of what became Pixar.

One of the biggest mistakes change leaders make is assuming that resistance to change has a rational basis. Very often people oppose change because it offends their identity and sense of self. We all take pride in the way we go about things, whether that involves our actions or our way of thinking about things.

This is the most visceral kind of resistance. We can motivate people to push through fatigue or bear the burden of inevitable switching costs, but we can’t ask people to stop being who they think they are. When people see themselves in a particular way, they rarely change and, in fact, will pay almost any price to stay true to their inner core.

What can be hardest about change, especially when we feel passionately about it, is that at some point, we need to accept that others will not embrace it and we will have to leave some behind. Not every change is for everybody. Some will have to pursue a different journey, one to which they can devote their passions and seek out their own truths.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credits: Pexels

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Five Key Digital Transformation Challenges

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Five Key Digital Transformation Challenges

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Each year, I sit through dozens of hours of research sessions with consumers.

If there is one theme, I hear consistently it’s that consumers expect the brands they engage with to provide a flawless digital experience in their interactions. And though that’s a notion that is consistent across all age groups, it’s a theme we hear unanimously from millennials. It only takes a quick look around various industries to see that the companies that are delivering a strong, digitally-centric value proposition make up a substantial portion of the growth.

Meanwhile, we’ve recently witnessed that many legacy brands are shrinking (i.e., The Limited) or going out of business entirely (i.e., Sports Authority). The bottom line is that companies born before the digital age must substantially transform in order to remain relevant. As Jack Welch said in the year 2000 “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” Many great brands today are in just this situation.

It takes five miles for an aircraft carrier to turn itself around 180 degrees. If you are on that aircraft carrier while it’s engaging in that ‘quick turn,’ you better hold on to something solid because you’ll soon be tilting at a 30-degree angle. Many large companies are not comfortable with making the difficult and rapid hard left required to align themselves with how the world has changed.

Being in the business of helping companies through their digital transformations, I have observed that many of the companies that struggle digitally do employ super-sharp and visionary executives who see what needs to be done. However, those executives face massive challenges when it comes to enacting the kinds of changes that are necessary in order to make that digital leap. Most of the work I do involves partnering with heroic innovators trying to change large enterprises from within. As a result, I have an insider’s perspective on the biggest challenges these companies face when taking on transformation projects and, in fact, spend most of my time working to try to overcome them.

Based on first-hand experience, here are the top five challenges to digital transformation. If you are facing any of these challenges, the list below may, if nothing else, give you comfort that you are not alone.

1. Organizational Resistance to Change

My rough guesstimate is that perhaps 10-15% of people in the world love change. They are excited by constantly having new challenges to tackle and new things to learn. But for the other 85-90%, change equals pain. It means uncertainty, a challenge to their role or identity, and, worst-case scenario, possibly the loss of a job and their family’s security. After all, once you’ve got a good thing going, its natural not to want to see your apple cart overturned. Digital transformation, by its very nature, upsets a lot of apple carts.

However the truth is that in times of change, not changing is far more risky than taking the leap. It just doesn’t always feel that way.

The consequences of resistance to change manifest itself in a myriad of ways. Digital projects vital to a company’s future success can have trouble getting funded, resourced, or marketed. These projects may be modified so as not to threaten retail or partner brands. They are held back by concerns about cannibalizing other revenue sources. They are asked to justify ROI to an unreasonable level of certainty. They are sent through endless legal reviews.

Kodak invented the digital camera, but it was the internal resistance to change that led the company to bury it because it threatened the company’s legacy film business. Imagine what Kodak could have been had it done what Bell Atlantic did when it realized how bleak the future of landlines looked — it became Verizon, which is now a dominant figure in the broadband, wireless and cable television industries. Did mobile phones decimate the landline business? Yep. But Bell Atlantic “protected” itself by accepting that change was on the horizon, and transformed by making the difficult decisions required to adapt to that change.

The great architect and innovator Matt Taylor once said, “The future is rationale only in hindsight.” When Bell Atlantic was making those critical decisions that fundamentally transformed what it was as a company, the outcome was far from clear or free of risk.

2. Lack of a Clear Vision for a Digital Customer Journey

Companies that succeed in creating a digital customer value proposition don’t get there by accident. They develop a clear vision of how they will meet their customers’ digital needs, set objectives against that vision, and execute — often over the course of multiple years. Often times, companies that are not succeeding simply haven’t painted a clear picture of what they want — or need — to be when they digitally “grow up.” While clarifying this vision doesn’t get you there by itself, in fact its only one of many steps, not having a vision is like going on a road trip without a destination. It’s always possible you could stumble into something great, but probably not.

Companies still in the dark need to do four things:

  1. Take stock of your assets – your brand, your customers, your intellectual property, and the strengths and talents of your organization.
  2. Study your market to understand your customers’ unmet needs and what your competitors are doing.
  3. Be on top of technology trends, which includes keeping apprised of relevant emerging technology and shifts in consumer behavior as it pertains to technology.
  4. Establish processes designed to generate portfolios of potential ideas for the future state of the customer journey. These processes should allow your company to create business hypotheses and vet and test them via customer research. In turn, new ideas can be aligned to the vision for how the customer of the future should interact with the brand, iterating along the way as more learnings come in.

3. Ineffective Gathering and Leveraging of Customer Data

The root of digital success is customer data. There’s more to the tree than the root, to be sure, but whether it’s Facebook, Amazon, Netflix or Uber, digital success stories have the effective gathering, storing and leveraging of customer data at the core. Many organizations today have a myriad of siloed systems containing various scraps of data about customer interactions, but no clear way to pull them together. Others have petabytes of data centralized in an information warehouse that they may use for reporting. However, they haven’t figured out what to do with all that data in a manner that provides value to the customer.

Fixing this in the most efficient way often requires starting fresh, to a degree. Determine what are the ten to fifteen key attributes of a customer that would allow us to serve and sell to them more effectively. Of course, these attributes are different depending on the sector that a company operates in, but once they have been identified, the key is to figure out how to most effectively gather and store that data in a centralized place that can be easily accessed via any touch point.

When you take a simplistic approach to creating value at the outset, you are then in a good position to start looking at more complex pockets of customer data and considering how some of that data might enable you to enhance the experience further and how to link it in.

4. Inflexible Technology Stack and Development Processes

Successful digital experiences are achieved through iteration. Successful digital properties almost always iterate to success via the “test and learn” approach — where new features are being regularly added, measured, adjusted and pruned, based on user feedback and usage data. However, it is impossible to take this approach if your development process involves quarterly release cycles. Leveraging agile processes and technologies that support frequent, if not continuous, integration and product releases are critical behaviors that lead to effective digital results.

Additionally, part of the iteration process involves the need to adjust workflows, business rules, content presentation, and (potentially) leverage data in different ways than were originally envisioned when systems were built. Companies trying to build flexible and elegant digital experiences on top of out-dated technology stacks are tilting at windmills. You don’t necessarily have to discard the mainframe, but modern enterprises must make their data read/write accessible via robust and secure APIs, and provide access to their business logic in a way that’s independent of presentation layers. If your core systems were designed more than five years ago, they probably need major refactoring in order to support effective digital execution.

5. Married to Legacy Business Model

Lastly, real success in digital is rarely about providing the exact same products and services, just through a digital pipe. Netflix shifted from DVDs to streaming. Uber created the world’s largest car service without buying any vehicles or hiring any drivers, and similarly, eBay and Alibaba created the world’s biggest retail channels without buying any inventory.

Companies that successfully “cross the chasm” to digital effectiveness often discover they need to provide for free what they used to charge for, sell as a subscription what used to be “a la carte,” monetize via advertising things that used to be paid for in other ways, and re-think how they derive revenue from the value that they create. Those that do so flexibly can often find that the adoption of a digital strategy offers more scale, revenue and profit than the legacy approach, but it takes experimentation, an assumption of risk, and — to be blunt — some failure along the way. Whereas this approach is widely accepted among startups, it is one that the management and investors in mature companies generally fear. Yet, this is the gauntlet they must run in order to achieve digital success.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: FreePik

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Innovation Mythbusters – Top 5

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Innovation Mythbusters - Top 5

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Amazingly Fabulous Tools is an award-winning, entrepreneurial market leader in the global machine engineering industry. The ambitious and proactive CEO Charlie Chaps invested in dispatching a Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley to research, investigate, and report on how to capture and emulate the critical ingredients of its “secret innovative sauce.” Upon their return, the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers created and shared a beautiful, illustrated PowerPoint presentation with the board despite secretly knowing and passively avoiding saying that Amazingly Fabulous Tools could not replicate what they had discovered, primarily due to how the top five innovation myths clandestinely operated in the organization.

The Corporate Antibodies

This is due to their overt experience with the organization’s “innovation antibodies,” which cause an organization to resist change and protect the status quo. These antibodies consist of rigid people and inconsistent processes that extinguish a new idea as soon as it begins to course through the organization. In the Amazingly Fabulous Tool company, most people, especially the founders and the board, unconsciously and powerfully neutralized any forces that threatened to destabilize the company’s current state and stunt its growth by shutting down the fresh ideas and unconventional thinking their company badly needed.

Charlie Chaps built a fantastic, largely incomprehensible strategic plan with a BHAG, strategic goals, and sets of individual KPIs. This plan provided concrete evidence that reassured the board that the company was taking action to sustain its leadership position in the market and would take the business to the next level by growing its ROI. It also aimed to leverage the collective genius of its owners, Bob the Brave Builder and Eric the Energetic Entrepreneur, to ensure a legacy was left no matter who was at the helm.

The Innovation Culture Diagnostic Findings

A quantitative and qualitative cultural diagnostic revealed that people lacked permission, safety, and trust to speak up, rock the boat and challenge the status quo. It also showed that the organization lacked rigor in its process disciplines and a focus on developing its people’s capabilities.

It also revealed that Amazingly Fabulous Tools was secretly driven by its founders’ and sales directors’ self-interest and greed due to the highly competitive profit-share sales model. Not by an obligation and commitment to creating, inventing, designing, and delivering disciplined, innovative process improvements, products, and services that their customers purchased and did not appreciate and cherish.

This was a stark contradiction and barrier to the company’s ability to sustain its enviable global reputation. Finally, people believed that Charlie Chaps’ fantastic strategic plan, BHAG, goals, and KPIs were confusing and disconnected from the organization’s current reality and would not produce a collaborative and innovative organization.

So, they did not accept or apply the plan and kept safe by conducting business as usual.

The Top Five Innovation Myths

Because the corporate antibodies revealed that people unanimously believed each of the key myths, including:

Myth # 1: Innovation is a solo activity; people believe that ” only the owners can innovate.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is impossible without inclusion and collaboration, which are achieved through practical and disciplined teaming and networking.


Myth #2: Innovation is top-down; people believed they were not responsible or accountable for planning and were forced to be reactive. “The planning is difficult, that is for sure, because we are firefighting all the time, and that goes back to the frustration of not having enough time to do what needs to get done…and resources and …tools.”
The Brutal Truth: When people have the permission and safety to challenge the status quo, make mistakes, and are trusted to learn through experimentation, innovation can emerge anywhere in an organization, or team.


Myth #3: Innovation is about the newest thing; people believed that radical innovation was needed when agility was the problem; “The scary thing is our key competitor is getting more flexible (agile); we’re just getting more reliable (stable). It’s the stupid things that are so annoying. It’s the embarrassing things.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation is guided by its strategic intent. It can be incremental, continuous, radical, breakthrough, disruptive, or differentiated, as there is no one best way of innovating.


Myth # 4: Innovation can’t be taught; people believed that they did not have to learn to improve or innovate when they encountered quality issues continuously; “A lot of times, it’s not because the customer wants the machine tomorrow but because we want to ship it tomorrow because we want to get it off the floor, we want to meet numbers, we want the cash. We usually drive the time frame and rush it out the door, creating many internal problems. It also creates problems externally with the customer when they think they’re getting a machine fully intact, but half its parts are missing….”
The Brutal Truth: Innovators are not born and are made. Anyone can learn to innovate,


Myth #5: You can’t force innovation; people were dis-empowered and did not take responsibility for influencing their environment to provide order and discipline; “It’s a traffic jam. That’s what we’ve got. It’s a traffic jam. Cars sitting bumper to bumper look like they are gridlocked. It represents the log jam of our activities. Where people are trying to push so many activities through two lanes of traffic when we’ve got six lanes worth of traffic.”
The Brutal Truth: Innovation can emerge when people have a sense of urgency, understand, and are motivated to engage in necessary, high-impact cultural and organizational change.

People must be prepared for it, change-ready and receptive, and intentionally pulled towards a compelling and desired future within an equalized environment that balances chaos and creativity with rigidity and discipline through rigorous planning.

The real costs to the organization

People believed that “This business makes money despite itself. There is potential to be truly great”. This was the most significant innovation antibody because there was no sense of urgency or even a financial or growth necessity to innovate. The company was quite comfortable with the status quo and had no reason to shift its habitual and unconscious comfort zone in ways that people and organizations must do to innovate because it involves being ready and receptive to mega-changes.

The significant investment in sending the Terrific Team of Enthusiastic Engineers to Silicon Valley sadly remained in the mythical realm of Innovation Dreamland.

So, lacking focus, discipline and rigor, the group of seriously qualified and intelligent engineers knowingly consistently dispatched faulty million-dollar machines to highly valued, global customers.

The cost of rework and brand erosion were considerable.

These machines required considerable analysis, problem-solving, and rework upon their return. Their costs were not recorded as repairs, causing the engineering division to be consistently over budget. Charlie Chaps reacted by restricting its budget and inhibiting its investment in critical research and development, which is needed to create, invent, and innovate to repair and sustain its global reputation as an innovator.

Innovation Dreamland remained a mythical and magical fantasy in Amazingly Fabulous Tools.

Sadly, the organization failed to shift its focus from challenge to opportunity because it could not resolve the corporate antibodies (implicit killers), remove the roadblocks, break down the internal cultural barriers to innovation and develop the agility necessary to become both a people-centric and customer-centric organization.

It lost an opportunity to make innovation a daily habit for everyone by failing to embed it in its organization as a way of life. It needed to empower, enable, and equip its talented, experienced and motivated people with the emotional energy, change, cognitive, and innovation agility to expose, challenge and resolve the underlying corporate antibodies.

It did not prioritize customer satisfaction and keep its promises by creating, inventing, and innovating high-value, quality products and services that improve the quality of their lives that are appreciated and cherished.

Many transformations and change-led innovation initiatives designed as strategic interventions fail due to a lack of alignment between strategy, structure, processes, and human skills, resulting in unproductive actions and poor human behaviors.

This is a short section from Chapter One of our new book, “Conscious Innovation – Empowering People to Be, Think and Act Differently in a Constantly Changing World”, which will be published in 2025.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, it is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem-focused, human-centric approach and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation. It will also up-skill people and teams and develop their future fitness within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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