In all kinds of organisational change, whether small and local or major, involving many parts of an organisation, one of my principles of change is to include the people involved. To be clear, I mean serious inclusion; as in being asked to dance, be one of the players in this game of change. If the change involves the whole organisation, then everyone needs to be invited to participate.
You need to have your people drive the change. As soon as people smell that they will be told how to work, you will get compliance, not engagement. People and teams need to have high degree of autonomy in most dimensions and be invited to participate in every important decision around the change. Not only is this ethically the right thing to do but I believe it’s also the most effective and sustainable.
K2K Emocionado is a basque consulting firm that helps organisations become self-managed (a.k.a. “bossless”). What is meant by this? Oh, just removing all the managers, turning everyone into a leader, and turning the company around from imminent bankruptcy. No biggie.
Can you imagine a more difficult job in an organisation? I can’t. Yet, their track record is amazing. So far, over 15 years, they have helped more than 80 organisations[1], mostly in basque country, with a high success rate.
How is that possible?
I think most change practitioners agree that teams should have a high degree of autonomy in how to effect change. This includes selecting what to change, which experiments to run, in what order, etc. After all, it’s their work. I don’t go around telling people at work how to do their job. That would be super rude. It would also, you know, deprive people of any ownership they might feel. Annoying, right?
Perhaps surprisingly then, the most common mistake I see is people telling other people how to do their work. It mostly happens in large corporate hierarchies, where people have grown accustomed to this kind of misguided behaviour, but it can happen anywhere a manager gets change wrong. To my mind, as soon as you impose a practice, a method or framework on your people, you don’t understand how change works.
This is an area that got me into a lot of trouble as a younger change agent and I see it in others too. I knew it was much better it teams could self-organise, including having a high degree of autonomy when it came to their working process. On the other hand, I also knew that I would have to train the teams how to perform the steps of the process correctly. Otherwise, the change will be a lost cause. So, both autonomous and be told how to work. This incoherence is unsettling.
So, the problem here is not the training but that I started from a place of imposition. The teams had to use the process. And then I wondered why I never saw any major culture change. Today, I know that humans aren’t open to changing the way they think based on behaviours that you are forcing them to perform. What you get instead is silent opposition and resistance.
“Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” — Verna Myers.
There seems to be more disagreement around goals. Should managers provide goals or should teams define them themselves? Product management expert Marty Cagan argues for teams to be given “team objectives” (problems to solve) since setting goals is a question of leadership[2]. (Yes, this is in product development, not organisational development, but it’s a similar process.)
On the other hand, The DORA research team on DevOps has this to say around transforming to DevOps: “A team’s own target conditions or OKRs must be set by the team. If they are set in a top-down way, teams won’t have a stake in the outcome and thus won’t be as invested in achieving them”[3]. In these researchers’ minds, it’s essential that team set their own goals.
To me, who is setting the goals is dependent on things like culture and team. Personally, I would hate having a manager tell me what improvement goals I should strive for (apart from a strategic, high-level directions, which I understand and feel meaningful to me). On the other hand, I have seen team go into a state of paralysis when asked to set their own objectives. They weren’t ready for it. On the whole, I do think that the more we can have teams defining and owning their own objectives, even the strategy for improvement, the better.
There are several factors that make K2K successful, of course[4]. They have the experience, they have done it themselves, and they do their work to “improve the world”[1], not to become rich. But here’s another factor that I think is vitally important: They ask everyone nicely.
Here’s how: When starting work with a new organisation, they paint a clear picture for everyone what the change will mean, not shying away from the difficult or painful parts. They also invite everyone to go visit one of their former clients to see with their own eyes and better understand what it could look like. Then they call a General Assembly and ask everyone to vote. Unless 80-85 % of the people vote for change, they leave. But if more than 85 % do, they have a really strong mandate right from the starting gate.
And that’s how you include people in major change.
[1] Leadermorphosis Podcast, 53. Jabi Salcedo and Dunia Reverter on K2K’s keys to becoming a self-managing organisation
[2] See Team Objectives – Action
[3] See DevOps culture: How to transform
[4] Lisa Gill wrote a very nice article for Corporate Rebels on K2K’s ten keys for self-managment.