Chapter 13: Destroy the lighter and throw out the cigarettes

Destroy the Lighter and Throw Out the Cigarettes

What else needs to change to make change happen?

If you want to quit smoking, you have to get the cigarettes out of your house, your car and your desk. You have to crush the lighter under your boot heel. You have to stop putting yourself in the situations that make you want to smoke. You have to replace the pleasure of the cigarette with some other kind of reward or stress reliever – like yoga or starlight mints. These are the systems and structures that can help you quit smoking or hinder your path to health.

When you’re dealing with organizational change, the same rules apply. As we discussed last time, how you staff, communicate, reward, organize, allocate resources, measure success and use technology all have an impact on your current state and your desired future state. In other words, in order to make your change successful and lasting, some of these things are going to have to change too.

Figuring out what else needs to change can be overwhelming, especially when you look at that all-encompassing laundry list above. But it’s helpful to narrow down to the things that are having the greatest impact, and we have two simple tools to do that.

The first tool is a simple prioritization matrix. The X axis contains all the categories we listed above, and the Y axis is simply the impact of each of those categories, from low to high. Pull your project team together. If you don’t have some subject matter experts on the team, bring them in too.

Once the team is assembled, have them determine the level of impact that each category has – positive or negative – on maintaining the status quo or on promoting the status quo futurus. This doesn’t need to be an exhaustive analytical exercise. Gut feel is good enough. The goal is to simply get a picture of which areas you’ll need to focus on.

In the example below, you can see that communication has the greatest impact, followed by measures and information systems, tied for second, followed closely in turn by rewards. This doesn’t mean that the other areas aren’t important. It just means that these four areas are going to make the biggest bang.




Knowing which areas have the greatest impact is only half the struggle though. You also need to know which way those areas are leaning, i.e. are they leaning toward the past and present state, or are they leaning toward the future state? Are they helping you move change forward, or are they hindering? Once again, a simple tool helps.

The helping/hindering table below is a simple way to look at all the moving parts, figure out which ones are on your side and which ones are your enemies, and then think about how you might tip them in your favor.



As you can see, it doesn’t have to be difficult to get a grip on the systems and structures that need to change in order for your primary change initiative to be successful. Like everything else we’ve discussed in this series, it just takes a little planning, a little discipline and a little structure.

One of those categories above, communication, almost always has a high impact on change. Next time we run into each other, let’s talk about the critical role that communication plays, shall we?

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 12: Change enablers and change derailers

Change Enablers and Change Derailers

When last we met, I told you a sad story. I told you that most change efforts fail, and that a bunch fail even after the initial change has been implemented. Old habits die hard and people slip back into old behaviors. The momentum and good intentions that brought the change to fruition gives way to day-to-day realities and busy-ness as usual.

If you’re like most Americans, you’ve probably already broken your New Year’s resolutions. In doing so, you learned that willpower and self-control are not the keys to ditching old behaviors and ingraining new ones. Don’t feel bad. Studies have shown that our ability to control our own behaviors and resist old habits is limited. We have to line up a bunch of other factors to support our goals. And the same is true with organizational change. If we want it to stick, we have to set the organization up for success.

As you think about change, look around your organization at all of the things that support the status quo. The allocation of resources – human and otherwise – to the work that needs to get done has an extremely powerful influence on the way your organization operates today, as do your IT systems, the structure of your organization, how performance is measured and rewarded, and how people are hired, trained and developed.

Depending on the kind of change you’re leading, these factors might have varying degrees of influence. Obviously, if you’re implementing a new sales compensation plan, the measurements and rewards are going to leap to the top of the list. But you’ll also have to keep an eye on whether you have the right people in place to do the measuring and calculate the rewards, and you’ll have to make sure that your IT system’s limitations don’t stand in the way.

Similarly, if you’re altering the structure of your organization, simply changing job descriptions and rolling them out won’t be enough. To turn those customer service reps into quality assurance technicians, you’ll have to make sure they have the training they need to do the new job, that their measures of success are adjusted from customer satisfaction to accuracy and that their raises, bonuses and other rewards are tied to those new metrics.

But while changing systems and structures that support the status quo so that they support the status quo futurus is absolutely necessary, you don’t want to do it haphazardly. In order to ensure optimal results, you’ll need to be careful about what you change and what you don’t. Next time, we’ll talk about two simple tools to help you determine what you need to tackle and what you can ignore.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 11: How do you make change last?

How Do You Make Change Last?

I’m going to tell you a sad story. Most change efforts fail. In fact, in spite of our best efforts to create a shared need, shape a compelling vision, counter resistance and mobilize the right levels of commitment, many change efforts fail after they’ve been implemented.

That last statement might raise some questions. How can a project fail if it has been implemented? Isn’t that the end goal of an initiative, to implement some kind of change?

Well, no. A change initiative – like any project – is only successful if it lasts. You wouldn’t say you were successful at building a house if it fell down the first time you opened the front door. You wouldn’t say you were successful at learning to speak Portuguese if everything you’d learned left your head when class was over. And you can’t call a change effort successful if things go back to the way they were 30, 60 or 90 days later.

In the hurried and harried world of corporate business and busyness, the two categories of behavior that are most often rewarded are strategy (essentially, having good ideas) and execution (essentially, acting on those ideas). And while those two categories are really important, rewarding only those can lead to a world where we feel we should always be coming up with new ideas and acting on them – a world where change for change’s sake becomes the order of the day, destabilizing the organization and making everything feel uncertain.

The fact of the matter is that constant change isn’t really change at all. It’s chaos. It isn’t really change unless it sticks, unless it is institutionalized, unless it simply becomes the way people work. The most effective leaders of change know that every initiative competes for mental energy, time and money, and that the real skill lies in acquiring the necessary resources (of all sorts) to embed new behaviors in the organization and ensure that they don’t slip back into old habits.

To make change last, you must make sure that the change is reinforced– consistently, tangibly and with great visibility. Influential voices in your organization need to reiterate that the world is different now and that new behaviors are expected. You must make sure that attention is paid to making your change the new status quo.

Of course, there’s more to making change last than simply lip service. The systems you use, the design of your organization, your rewards and compensation, the way you measure performance and many other factors need to be aligned in a way that supports, embeds and ingrains the change into the way people work. We’ll dig into all of that next time we meet.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant