Change with a bang: why the bolder the change, the safer it is.

The Take

The bolder the change, the safer it is. It sounds backwards. The change most likely to fail is the modest, one-thing-at-a-time kind, and the reason is not strategy or resourcing. It is how we process emotions.

The role is yours. You have been handed the mission, and now you need to deliver on it. You might be tasked to take the organization to a higher or new playing field. The company has steady performance, it is a recognized player in the industry, its customers are constructive. Evolving what is already good is the right thing to do. So you jump on an incremental change: you start fixing what is highest-impact and highest-urgency, and you work through a list of similar high-impact changes you need to make. A few months in, nothing sticks. Your executives are paying lip service to your mission, employees are complying but not truly embracing it and finding every excuse to do things the old way, and you are not moving the needle.

What's happening on the ground

What you are seeing from employees and executives is a normal human reaction, and at the core of it is how we process emotions. People faced with incremental change, "bettering up" the way we do things, get the signal that what is going to happen is not any major situation. There is no real threat, since things will happen in isolated units and maybe at progressive speed. This low-threat mechanism results in superficial coping: employees do not need to engage their emotional coping system, since there is nothing to cope with. Paradoxically, while that might seem like the better place to be for employees, what it means is that people get distracted and get on with whatever is coming without really processing the event and giving the change the attention it needs. And since this is perceived as something minor, employees do not need to look for meaning, and instead look for ways to get past the announcement.

What you should do about it

Now imagine a situation in which you are integrating a company almost the same size as yours. Everything will change. Employees suddenly stop. They intuitively understand that things are not going to be the same, and they start evaluating the threat to themselves. This leads to active coping strategies and looking for meaning. Every change comes with uncertainty, but when the uncertainty is high, employees must stay actively engaged to follow every twist and turn, and that leads to more awareness, which in turn can lead to more acceptance and adoption.

So the lever is not the size of the change. It is the threat that the change is perceived to carry. A large integration creates that perception on its own. When the change is smaller, your job is to create it deliberately.

If you do not have to integrate a huge entity, or go through a major divestiture or anything of that scale, there are still ways to make even incremental change be announced with a bang. The core of it is in the comprehensiveness of the change strategy and in the deliberateness of the change communication at every turn. Usually incremental change, such as refocusing the product roadmap on quality versus volume, still offers the possibility to make it an all-in transformation. A good change strategist knows how to do this: map how the change will affect each part of the organization, and deliberately create adaptations for the units that won't directly face the major intensity, so that everyone is actively coping and adapting. Because in the end it is about people, and in organizations it is not about some people, it is about all people.