Chapter 16: Change is good

Change is Good

About three and a half months ago, I began this series of articles with the simple assertion that change is a verb. It can, of course, be a noun, but that’s when it’s happening to you. When you’re taking the reins of change – when you’re leading progressive improvements and evolution in your company, in your relationships and in your life – it is most definitely a verb.

Throughout this series, we’ve defined change in lots of ways – always hard, a process, terrifically slow, painful, powerful, stressful, difficult, taxing, necessary.

But we didn’t come around to the ultimate, potent truth of the matter, and that is that change is good.

That’s right. Change is good. If it weren’t for change, we wouldn’t have things like democracy, safe drinking water or chocolate chip cookies.

This series has talked about models for change, tools for change and making change last. Refer back to it whenever you’re going through – or leading – a significant change, whether it’s at work, at home or in your community. And in the end, there are two key things you must remember:
1. You can lead the change, if only for yourself
2. Most change efforts are for the better

The first point – that you can lead change – is absolutely critical. Whether you’re the CEO or the lowest individual contributor on the totem pole, you hold the keys to successful change. By taking your own innate wisdom – along with what you’ve learned from this series of articles – and the belief that, at a minimum, you’re totally in charge of your own experience, you can also take the lead. Help folks create a shared need, shape a vision, mobilize commitment, change systems and structures, and make change last and you’ll be a leader.

The second point – that change is usually for the better – is the mindset you need to succeed. If, like most of your peers, you see the status quo as safety and the status quo futurus as a threat, you’ll have a sad, scary existence – especially in this industry. It’s not a good success strategy – or even a survival strategy. Preserving that status quo will squelch innovation, lower the ceiling of achievement and ensure stagnation. Realize and embrace the fact that most change is for the better and you’re headed toward a happier and less fearful career.

All good things come from change. The key is to adapt quickly, lead the change (even when it feels like it’s leading you) and master it. Bend it to your will.

Change is good.

Eryc Eyl
Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 15: Looking back on leading change

Looking back on leading change
By Eryc Eyl

Well, dear friends and readers, the time has come to begin winding down our weekly conversations about change leadership. If you take even one tiny morsel of a new idea away from this series of articles – something that makes you more effective, more resilient and happier – than our time together has been well spent. If you’re not sure what that morsel might be, let’s take a quick look back.

Our journey began with a choice. We could see change as a noun that victimizes us and leaves us powerless, or we could see it as a verb, an action that we do. To help us see it that way, we looked to General Electric’s seven-part Change Acceleration Process, John Kotter’s eight-step change model and John M. Fisher’s Kübler-Ross-inspired view of the eight emotional stages of transition to guide us. We were reminded that there are always two primary sides to any change – technical and human – and the latter is the crux of everything. Pay attention to it and our change is likely to be the kind of success that people write epic poems about. Neglect it and we might as well arrange for our own Viking funeral.

We faced the fact that – despite the fact that our change is the most awesome idea ever – we must be able to articulate a compelling need for change – something strong enough to overcome our natural human desire for things to always stay the same – before we do anything else. We were reminded, repeatedly that Q times A equals E, i.e. the Quality of our change multiplied by its Acceptance yields its Effectiveness. Using tools like “more of/less of” and the 15-word flip chart, we can shape a banner-worthy vision that our team is willing to march behind, and then march that banner around to the people we need to support, embrace, enact or submit to our change effort. We let data, demonstration and demands help shore up the Acceptance part of the effective change equation.

Of course, real, lasting change doesn’t happen with the flip of a switch. That’s actually the point at which many change efforts fail. After our change goes live, we still need the discipline to make it last. We have to work that change into our culture. We have to change the systems and structures – the behaviors we measure and reward, the training we give our staff, the technology they use – to support the new world and hold our ground against the powerful pull of “the way we used to do it.”

When all is said and done, though, our most powerful ally, our best friend and our secret weapon in leading change is communication. We must put as much energy into planning the communication approach that supports our change effort as we put into planning the technical change itself. By making sure the right message is truly received by the right people in the right format at the right time, with a clear indication of what those people should do with that message, we have the power to transform change from something scary to something safe, something sane, and possibly even something sexy.

Chapter 14: Talk to me, listen to me

Talk to Me, Listen to Me

The critical role of communication in successful change

If you’ve started to notice that leading and managing change is kind of like managing a relationship, you’re on to something. Creating and maintaining a satisfying relationship requires foresight, planning, shared goals, a supportive community, commitment and changing some pretty fundamental systems and structures.

Above all else, though, a good relationship requires good communication, and so does a successful change initiative. And though there’s more to successful change than just communication (otherwise, we wouldn’t have had the 13 other articles in this series), all things being equal, the most effective change leader is an effective communicator.

To make change happen and make it last, you have to make sure the right people have the right information in the right format at the right time so that they can do the right things. In fact, those are the five pillars of effective communication to support healthy change: audience, message, medium, timing and purpose.

Before we go any further, though, let’s get really clear on what we mean by “communication.” It might help to say what it isn’t.

Communication isn’t an email you send. It isn’t an article in the company newsletter. It isn’t a one-hour lunch meeting you have with the CEO. Communication might happen as a result of any of these things, but these things, in themselves, are not communication.

So what is communication? It is a message received. It makes no difference what’s said in that email, that article or that meeting if that isn’t what is heard and understood by the listener or recipient. The effective communicator’s job – and therefore, the effective change leader’s job – is to make sure the intended message is received. This means listening, checking for understanding and reiterating the message. If you wonder why people don’t seem to know what you’ve already told them, and you catch yourself saying, “But I communicated that,” you’re wrong. You haven’t communicated until the message is received. Like the FedEx delivery driver, your job isn’t just to ensure delivery, but to ensure receipt as well.

Effective communication begins, like all effective behaviors, with a plan. If you want to make sure you hit all the bases (audience, message, medium, timing, purpose), you can’t do better than a simple communication plan like the one below.

As you can see, the change initiative in question has to do with replacing all the junk food in our company’s vending machine with fresh fruits and vegetables. We’ve gone back to the stakeholder analysis we did ages ago to make sure we’ve capture everyone (the illustration is abridged), and then we’ve worked with our project team to determine what each person needs to know, who should tell them, how we should tell them, when we should tell them and what we’d like them to do after we tell them.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be painful. It just has to be intentional. In that way, it’s a lot like creating and maintaining a relationship. If you want your change initiative to be that romance you’ve always dreamed of, you’ve got to communicate.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

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

Chapter 10: "Prove it!"

"Prove it!"

Much like death, taxes and election rhetoric over both, resistance to change is inevitable. No matter how good your idea is or how clear to you the need is, someone (and probably several someones) is going to see it differently.

However, there is good news. Whether the resistance you encounter to your change effort is technical (“I can’t”), political (“I won’t”) or cultural (“I shouldn’t”), there are tactics for overcoming – or at least mitigating – it. In fact, looking once again to GE’s CAP model, there are three: data, demonstration and demand (no extra charge for the alliteration).

You know that woman who works in the cubicle in the corner whose nose is always buried in Excel spreadsheets? How about the CFO who can’t have a conversation without drawing a bar chart? These are people who live and breathe data. They can’t get enough of it. If you want to bring these folks over to your side, you have to be able to produce numbers, graphs and statistics that support your change effort.

Do you have benchmark or competitive data? How about financials? Maybe you’ve found some industry trend data in your research. Whatever it is, it’s data, and it’s often the key to overcoming resistance, especially for your more analytical stakeholders. Spend some time with your core project team to figure out what data you have that might sway resisters.

For some folks, though, data isn’t enough. They have to be able to see the success of the change before they can support it. I call these people Missourians because they practically scream, “Show me!” They need a demonstration.

For your Missourians, you’re going to need examples of similar change efforts that were successful, perhaps in admired organizations. Industry best practices can be powerful demonstrations, as can small pilots of the change or even testimonials from impressive figures or organizations. Your change team might have to do some homework to be able to demonstrate the value of your initiative, but it’ll be worth it when you encounter a “Show me!” among your key stakeholders.

However, even with all the demonstrable benefits and data proving the value of your change effort, you’re still going to encounter some resistant holdouts. For those folks, sometimes the most compelling influencer of all is a demand to change.

That’s right. In spite of our independent natures and freethinking tendencies, sometimes we just need to be told what to do. The demand might come from a respected leader. It might come from a customer. It might even come from the competition. Regardless of its source, a clear and compelling call that supports the change can really get results when data and demonstration fall short. In effect, it’s the influencing equivalent of a parent or teacher telling a child, “Because I said so.” And sometimes – especially where physical safety or financial solvency is in question – that’s the necessary and expedient approach.

The person who’s resisting on technical grounds is more likely to be convinced by data, but if that person also happens to have an aversion to pivot tables, you might need someone he respects to say, “Because I said so.” On the other hand, the cultural resister who won’t support your change simply because, “That’s not how we do things around here,” might be more moved by a case study of a competitor who tried something new and then left your company in the dust.

Unfortunately, you can’t just pick one of these three approaches to winning over your constituents. Different personalities and different types of resistance are going to require different tactics, so your project team needs to be prepared with all three.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 9: "I can't, I won't and I shouldn't"

"I can't, I won't and I shouldn't"

Resistance and influence in successful change

If you’ve ever been part of an unsuccessful change effort, it should come as no surprise to you that mobilizing commitment is one of the keys that actually drives successful change.

But, as we discussed last time, it’s pretty unrealistic to expect everyone to be your change initiative’s biggest fan. Some folks aren’t going to be as supportive as you need them to be, and some are going to be actively opposed to it. To get their commitment and support, you’re going to have to get smart.

Fortunately, that’s not as hard as it sounds. First, it helps to figure out what kind of resistance you’re dealing with. The GE change acceleration process (CAP) breaks it down into just three different kinds of resistance: technical, political and cultural.

Technical resistance usually has to do with concrete and tangible reasons why the change is a bad idea or won’t work. The person who resists your change effort on technical grounds will likely be concerned with the cost of the project, the abilities of people to deal with it or insufficient resources to do it right.

The person who resists on political grounds is concerned with issues of power and authority. Perhaps she’s worried that the new, post-change world will take away her control of the sales process. Maybe he thinks the change will make his group less powerful in the company. Whatever the specifics, the political resister needs to know that his or her position won’t be threatened by your initiative.

Cultural resistance arises out of concern for the prevailing mindsets, norms or habits of behavior and interaction in the organization. The familiar refrains of, “That’s not how we do things around here,” or “That’s just not our culture,” are warning signs of cultural resistance.

The bad news about all these kinds of resistance is that you can never hope to overcome them 100% with logic and reason. There’s a lot of emotion and irrationality tied up in change resistance, and some of it runs pretty deep.

The good news, though, is that successful change doesn’t require overcoming 100% of the resistance. You simply have to ease the concerns enough that the resister moves to where you need him or her to be on your stakeholder analysis matrix. Next time we chat, we’ll talk more specifically about three techniques to do just that.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 8: Don't be afraid of commitment

Don't Be Afraid of Commitment

How stakeholder analysis ensures success

You don’t have to wait until you’ve created a clear vision of your change to start mobilizing commitment for it, but it certainly helps. A shared vision for why the change is important and what it will accomplish (created with help from the tools we spoke about last week and the week before) will make it much easier to win friends and influence people.

However, if your business is like most businesses, you know that faster is better, and if you can accomplish things in parallel, so much the better. While you’re shaping a vision, there’s no reason not to pull your team together for a little stakeholder analysis.

If that phrase – stakeholder analysis – smacks of corporatespeak to you, feel free to ignore it. It’s really just a fancy term for figuring out where important or relevant people stand with respect to the change you’re leading, and it’s a good thing to do.

Sure, you can plow ahead with your initiative without paying attention to how other people feel about it, but it’ll probably bite you in the asparagus sooner or later. Every change involves and impacts people with titular or situational power in your organization, and if those folks aren’t as supportive as you need them to be, they’re likely to undermine the effort, either through active sabotage or through passive non-compliance. Either way, you’ll be stuck.

As a change leader, it’s your job to bring your key stakeholders along to where you need them to be, and in order to do that, you first have to know where they are. The table below is an example of a quick and dirty stakeholder analysis for a company rolling out a new product. Here’s how the project team used it.

First, the team got together with the blank matrix drawn on a flip chart. Only the column headings were filled in. The team then brainstormed all the key stakeholders, i.e. the people who were mostly directly impacted by or had the greatest ability to influence the success of the new product introduction, and tried to figure out how much support the effort needed from each of those stakeholders.

As you can see from the O’s on the chart, the new product intro doesn’t need the same level of support from everyone. While the team needs strong support from Martha and John in marketing and sales, it only needs moderate support from the CEO and CTO. Mere indifference is about all that is needed from the legal department. As long as Larry isn’t opposed, the project should succeed.

Once the team figured out where it needed folks to be, it had to figure out where those same folks stand today, in order to know whether they had work to do. This is the step where it’s tempting – but potentially fatal (project-wise) – to take shortcuts. Lots of project teams will simply give their best guesses here, but I wouldn’t recommend that. It might be OK as a first step, but to truly know your stakeholders opinions, you’re going to have to ask them. This is where it might be handy to have your vision shaped into an elevator pitch. Of course, our imaginary team did just that. They pitched the key elements of their change initiative (what it is, why it’s important now, how success will look and what’s needed from the stakeholder) and captured stakeholder responses.

After the stakeholder interviews were complete, the team reconvened and put X’s in the matrix to signify the stakeholders’ current positions. Where the team found the biggest gaps between current position and desired level of support, they documented the reasons why that person was resistant and then came up with influencing strategies to move each one along.

Next week, we’ll talk about three different influencing strategies, when to use them and how they work.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 7: Another tool for shaping a vision

Another Tool for Shaping a Vision

Last time, we talked about the power of the “more of/less of” brainstorming exercise to shape a vision of your changed world. Once you’ve got an extensive list of actions and behaviors that the group wants to see more of or less of in post-change paradise, you’re ready to pull the next tool out of the box. This one is called the "15-word flip chart," and it’s incredibly powerful.

For this exercise, give everyone present (probably the key stakeholders who are going to help make the change happen) his or her very own piece of flip chart paper and a nice fat-tipped marker. With your “more of/less of” brainstorm posted prominently, ask everyone in the room to write a vision statement of 15 words or less. To make it a little easier, you can assume that every statement starts with the words, "We will," and not count those as part of the 15.

Why 15 words? Well, it’s admittedly an arbitrary number, and the reason for it is to provide some constraints. Out of limitations, I like to think, comes creativity. If you don’t have some parameters, some folks won’t know what to write and will be overwhelmed by the blank page. Others will write treatises and manifestos. You don’t want either. Give folks some quiet time to do this, without discussing. The point is for each person to come up with his or her own vision statement. Discussion comes later.

Once everyone has a 15-word flip chart completed, it’s time to turn them all into one statement that everyone can agree on and understand. Post the various papers on the wall so everyone can see. With a nice bright color, circle every word that occurs more than once. You can probably ignore articles (words like “a,” “an” and “the”), as well as conjunctions (like “and” and “but”), but circle everything else.

Your goal here is consensus. By starting with the words that occur more than once, you’re focusing on things on which at least two people in the room agree. From that point of concord, it’s easier to build agreement around the room. Put all those words on their own flip chart for the group to see and start working with those words to create a 15-word vision statement that everyone likes.

Once you’ve led your group through the 15-word flip chart and the more of/less of exercises, you’ll find you have a much sharper vision of your finish line, which will make it a lot easier to mobilize commitment throughout your organization to the change initiative. Leading people toward a finish line they can actually see is way easier than leading them through a dark, foggy night.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 6: If you want to shape a vision, get out your tools

If You Want to Shape a Vision, Get Out Your Tools

In our last conversation, we talked about the absolute need to shape a vision for the future that everyone can agree upon and understand. We talked about needing to be able to truly see that future state so that we’re all sure we’re headed toward the same grassy knoll of successful change.

But that isn’t easy, is it? After all, words like, “We will be a world-class customer service organization” just sound so impressive and inspirational and business-y. Who’d want to muddy them up with more words?

Well, while slogans like that one are fine to put on posters or business cards, they just aren’t specific enough to allow us to chart a course to make them real, and they definitely aren’t specific enough for us to know when they have truly become reality.

So the bad news is you’ve got to get specific. The good news is I’ve got some really simple tools to help you get there.

The first tool is a simple brainstorming framework that helps key stakeholders envision the actions and behaviors that will turn the vision into reality. For simplicity’s sake, I just call it “more of/less of.”

Draw a line down the middle of a flip chart from top to bottom to create two columns. At the top of one column write: “More of.” At the top of the other, write (you guessed it, didn’t you?): “Less of.” Now gather the folks who are going to help you make your change happen and start brainstorming actions and behaviors that you’ll see or hear when the change is successfully completed.

Now, that sounds deceptively easy, but the fact is that we’re all so used to thinking conceptually that it’s sometimes hard to boil our grandiose visions down to mundane, quotidian actions and behaviors. Mark my words: you’ll gather everyone together and ask what actions or behaviors they expect to see more of or less of in the changed world, and they’ll say things like, “Going the extra mile,” or “Accountability,” or “Can-do attitudes.” The trouble is you can’t really see those things very clearly, can you?

To help with this challenge, here’s a good test. If you couldn’t capture the action or behavior with a video camera or a tape recorder (does anyone even have those anymore?), then it doesn’t count, and it doesn’t go on the flip chart. Don’t reject it out of hand, however. Simply ask, “What would that look (or sound) like?” You’ll get there. Allow the group at least 30 minutes for this.

The “more of/less of” brainstorming exercise will take you a long way toward being able to visualize what the world will look like when your change is implemented. When you can picture folks running around your office, acting and behaving in accordance with that big list, you’ll have a great yardstick against which to measure the success of your change effort. But you’ll still need to boil this down into some simple words that everyone can easily communicate and understand. Next time, I’ll give you another simple tool that will get you there.

Eryc Eyl / Freelance Writer and Business Consultant

Chapter 5: Threats and opportunities

Threats and opportunities: Itchy feet make for successful change

When last we met, we talked about the fact that successful change efforts require the creation of a compelling need for change. This need has to be strong enough to overcome our natural tendency to revel in the complacency of the status quo.

One of the simplest ways I know of to create a compelling need for change – the need that overcomes our preternatural to keep things just the way they are – is to brainstorm threats and opportunities.

If you’re familiar with a SWOT analysis, you’ll recognize threats and opportunities as the T and O of that acronym (strengths and weaknesses are the S and W, incidentally). If you’re not, don’t sweat it. It’s a simple concept.

Threats are the bad things that will happen to us if we don’t change. For example, if I don’t change my socks, maybe the pair I’m wearing will wear out. Maybe my significant other will leave me, repulsed by the odor. Maybe I’ll develop some horrible toenail fungus. Or maybe my feet will just itch so badly that I won’t be able to stand it.

Those are threats.

Opportunities, on the other hand, are the good things that will happen to us if we implement the change in question. If I start changing my socks, they’ll last longer. I might discover that some socks are more comfortable than the ones I’ve been wearing. I might be able to get that pedicure I’ve always wanted.

Those are opportunities.

When you’re brainstorming threats and opportunities, pull together as many key stakeholders as you can, and remember conventional brainstorming rules and etiquette.. Quantity of ideas is more important than quality. Every idea gets captured. Even the most ludicrous idea gets air time, and no energy is wasted on shooting ideas down, even when they’re really, really stupid.

Once you’ve amassed a sizable list of threats and opportunities, there will probably be no doubt in the room that the change is necessary. However, before you move forward, you’ll want to prioritize your lists. After all, you’ll be using these to spread the need for change like a virus across the organization.

To create and communicate a vision of the future state, build commitment to the change, remove obstacles and build coalitions that will get it done, you’ll want to be carry your best ideas (i.e. the most compelling, most impacting and most likely to occur) forward. Those words can be woven into elevator pitches, rallying cries and inspirational anthems with three-part harmony.

In any project, extra effort invested at the beginning always pays dividends down the road. Put the work into creating a compelling imperative for change up front and you’ll find fewer hurdles, fewer resisters and fewer saboteurs of the effort down the road. Make your organization’s feet itch, and the rest will follow.