How do we measure who in the tribe is ready for change?

WRITTEN ON September 18th, 2007 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Ideal Goverment - project, Transformational Government, What do we want?

We want government and public services to treat people with respect, as if they were the servants not the masters, cost less money, sort out problems honestly and quickly and behave in a generally ideal manner. That means, I think we can agree, a pretty deep and broad culture change in the best part of 5m people and a huge number of institutions – many tens of thousands if you go count all the schools and smaller NHS organisations as well as the Number 10s and Treasuries.

So here’s a question. Is there a simple way of measuring how ready people are to change? Is there a quick and easy psychometric test or something which checks whether people “get it” and can cope with the workload of change? Presumably when a huge, deep, long-lasting change happens different people play different roles, advocating change, visionary leadership, adopting it early, pointing out all the potential drawbacks, adjusting new processes so they really work, or resisting it until death or retirement. There are 101 ways to be unresponsive to people’s needs, waste money, destroy people’s trust in the integrity of public services. There’s every imaginable way to block change. But how many ways are there to start to get it right?

Surely there’s a body of work and experience on this issue.

It seems to me, from the people I’ve encountered over 20-odd years in public services, that there are loads of ways we can describe the qualities needed to get us to our destination: public-service ethos, professionalism, skills in the various professions, empathy etc. The outputs can be considered in the three dimensions of service quality, cost and trust. But when you’re asking how ready people are to change does it just boil down to two dimensions: energy and wisdom? And would a quick & dirty measure of both help us work out who needs what? I’m thinking like a two-dimensional GCSE result based on the minimum questions that ask do you care/get it and have you the energy to do anything about this.

Then you have this plotted n a 2D matrix. Perhaps a small anonymised sample. Perhaps it’s not anonymised at all, but has names and job titles. Perhaps itsn ot a sample at all, but a census of anything up to 5m people.

Something like this is important to do because there’s no point preaching to the converted, or galvanising people who are misguided. You need to galvanise the converted and reason with or instruct people who are full of energy but just “don’t get it”.

The bombastic politician who pushes daft policies on war, drugs or ID cards oblivious to rational evidence is all energy and no wisdom. But the seasoned official who can tell you exactly what’s wrong with everything but won’t do anything about is is all wisdom and no energy. If you’re trying to create deep change both these types will be invaluable allies but only if you approach and draw on them in the right way.

Of course there will be plenty of people – perhaps millions – with neither energy nor wisdom. They get left till last. And, thank heavens, there are people with both energy and wisdom in abundance, and it is with them that the change starts. I’m sure you find many such people in front line services everywhere (though I cant begin to name them). And in the centre of government we’re fortunate to have Alexis Cleveland and Sir David Varney.

How are they to know who is with them? Somehow they have to find out Who “gets it” and who will block customer-oriented change while saying the right words. Is there some way of structuring a “club of the converted”, or will the civil service always progress as a series of informal networks lurking behind the organisations and job titles.

And do they need sticks, carrots or a torch? Probably all three, plus copious resort to the “JFDI”* instruction, but you need to know which to use when.* “JFDI” = just do it

9 Responses to “How do we measure who in the tribe is ready for change?”

William Heath wrote on September 19th, 2007 12:12 pm :

S writes to say

It may be reducible to two dimensions, but if it is, the two I would suggest are person and context.

If the context is right (open, supportive, ambitious, customer-focused), more of the people will be right. If the context is wrong (closed, fearful, resistant to change, organisation-focused) not many people will break out. And of course, context is itself a function of people: the context will be right when a critical mass of the people are right. Context doesn’t have to be the whole organisation or even, at least to start with, a large part of it. But it does have to be somewhere where change pays off – for customers *and* for the agents of change.

For any given point on the context scale, some people will get it more than others – but most of the five million act the way they do because
that is the way their organisation’s culture, management and history encourage them to act. If the context changes enough, the tipping point
can be reached without getting anywhere close to requiring one to one proselytising five million times over.

That still leaves the question of how the process of change gets started. Increasingly my sense is that the key attribute is unreasonable dissatisfaction with the way things work now. It’s terribly easy to think that the way things are done now is the way that they have to be done, or to think that even if there is a better way,
it’s too difficult to get there from here. The people who are dissatisfied will look for and find the tools they need to develop a better way. There is no guarantee that being familiar with the new ways of doing things carries with it the level of dissatisfaction needed to push change through.

Ruth Kennedy wrote on September 20th, 2007 4:52 pm :

I like the way you are thinking, S, and it resonates a lot with my experience of central govt. I think the key question is whether those who have unreasonable dissatisfaction with the way things work now are able to survive long enough within the system to effect change. It takes an incredible amount of energy just to keep swimming against the tide of ‘current ways of viewing the world’ and you don’t get thanked or rewarded for it: as you note, change needs to pay off both for customers and the agents of that change.

So I think that even a DGI Cabinet Secretary (instructed by an energetic and superbly GI Director Gen of Transformation) could bring about some symbolic (eg structural or performance management) changes which would signal permission and reward to those who can see the opportunities and potential to do things differently and better. Given such (maybe small but critical) context changes, more GIs might be unearthed who are able to ignore organisations’ (not just their own) history, culture and management, and JDI .

Ideal Gov administrator wrote on September 21st, 2007 1:29 pm :

Context is good. That suggests a 3D model. I can see a simple questionnaire probing

– do you think you’re customer focussed ie can you perceive the need for change
– do you have the energy/capability to change or are you stressed out/atthe end of your tether/demoralised
– is your environment/context supportive of teh change that needs to happen

We could maybe do this with FDA….

Ideal Gov administrator wrote on September 27th, 2007 5:05 pm :

Oh. Recent conversation points out that that there’s a quite different question: Who needs to buy in to this, and who doesn’t matter (yet)? How do we identify the probably relatively small number of people who are really key to getting this started? How do we get them on the bus? What is the bus, whose is it and who’s driving?

Ideal Gov administrator wrote on September 29th, 2007 6:59 pm :

Pete Reed writes

1) Expect different individuals, and different roles to have different levels of exposure to external forces, different levels of understanding of what is happening now, different levels of understanding of what will happen in future
2) Consider barriers as well as readiness to change: reluctance to consider new ideas, fear of erosion of power, fear of unknown, concern over security/prospects, protection of vested interests; indecisiveness, lack of ownership / blame culture
3) Expect different groups to have different agendas, objectives priorities, perceptions – this is normal, not an aberration, so it has to be dealt with
4) Rule of thumb: 37% of people will emerge as supporters of change (understand the need and care about outcome), roughly 10% will be observers (understand but do not care); roughly 14% will be loose cannons (care but do not understand); and 39% will be dead wood (neither understand, nor care). The supporters are crucial, the loose cannons are the biggest problem – (these numbers are from an old survey in a commercial organisation, not public sector)
5) As a general rule those closest to the client will care more, and recognise the need for change more, because they are exposed to the external world (but they will not necessarily understand what needs to be done, or agree)
6) test commitment to organisation / goals separately from commitment to clients / outcomes
7) the bad news is that making fundamental change happen “bottom up” is a major undertaking, and it can only go at a pace acceptable to the people involved (internal and clients) – so only get into this when (a) circumstances allow you sufficient time and (b) the issue is big enough to justify the effort (and the associated budget). If the situation is urgent, or the problem can be handled differently then do so.
8) the good news is that you do not need everyone on board – so use energy sparingly by identifying the most important actors – normally client facing, making a significant contribution to the overall client outcome (but don’t forget those who support the most important actors, they can easily scupper the result)
9) invest most effort to earn support where change is difficult but everyone is fundamentally on side – change is difficult where processes require high degree of individual judgement, and where the agenda is ill-defined; invest less effort where it is relatively easy to effect change (highly structured processes, agenda is well defined)
10) sometimes there is conflict between personal / professional goals and organisation goals – here change will have to imposed, so don’t pretend it can be earned – apart from wasting time it is dishonest

In other words it is not just about who is on side, it is also about where it matters that they are on side.

As a rule of thumb, in the areas where it matters, you need to take around one in five along to make change happen.

That’s a pretty high proportion of those who care and understand.

Oh, and IMHO, if the responsible managers can’t name them at the beginning, then by definition the organisation isn’t ready.

Pete

Cheers Pete. What can we add to that?

J wrote on September 29th, 2007 8:08 pm :

I think you’re absolutely right about surviving within the system. The civil service does attract a lot of capable and enthusiastic people…. but I know a lot of people who’ve had it and lost it somewhere along the way.

Working for organisational change takes, as you say, a balance of wisdom and energy, and inevitably you have most energy when you first start, but at that point you have little wisdom. Often new entrants don’t know quite what they’re going up against in trying to change the machine, don’t know how to go about it, or how to start small, and so a lot of creative energy goes to waste. And unless you see some successes, by the time you’ve gained the organisational wisdom you need to make the change successful, you’ve run out of energy or confidence that it will work.

Supporting that kind of person by genuinely rewarding and encouraging that kind of creativity, is important, but I also think it would be helpful to find some way of giving these people the skills they need to be activists for internal change, and an understanding of what it takes.

Ideal Gov administrator wrote on September 29th, 2007 11:14 pm :

Colin Muid has done a lot of work on this:

When I did my MA in Change Management in 2002 my thesis was on the
introduction of e-Government (entitled “The getting of e-ness – or boiling frogs into cathedral architects”). In my research I came to the view thatvery few senior officials and almost no politicians are systems thinkers (in the way that Peter M Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline describes systemic thinking – by seeing the real cause and effect cycle and learning
from experience so that it helps to bring about change) and that the civil service in the UK does not develop such thinking as a necessary part of the training and development of its future leadership. That means very few of our public servants (and even fewer of our political leaders) are what could be called cathedral architects; if they were, then they would be laying down a vision and blueprint for the generations that will follow in implementing those ideas and plans (cathedrals historically take decades or centuries to complete). Instead there is a propensity for short-termism, which at best is about tactical change. This does not provide the compelling reason for deeply embedded change in belief and behaviour; paradoxically it encourages stronger resistance because the expectation is that it will not last (vide Yes, Minister episodes).

Ideal Gov administrator wrote on September 30th, 2007 1:21 am :

John Philpin writes

Not sure how this plays into the debate – but to me – a NON govt person – there are two different types of people in politics

those that are voted into position and
those that are our public ‘servants’

what follows might be biased by view of the craziness of where english politics has got to ( i left the UK in 1990 and came back in 2005)

observation (and totally unsupported by any kind of analysis) … the public servant’s ‘power’ over me ‘the public’ has a direct correlation to how empowered they feel.

they currently feel VERY empowered … no need to get into that one here but i seem to find myself living in what we used to call a nanny state … where the ‘government’ knows best – and we will be informed on a ‘need to know basis’ … ie – not at all … jury out on whether ‘non flash’ Gordon will change this ….

but – ‘voted’ govt feels – IMHO very empowered.

Thus our ‘public ‘servants’ ‘ feel similarly empowered – and with power comes corruption, contempt .. you name it …

Personally I am totally fed up with people who say the problem is too large … Lou Gerstner transformed IBM from a corporation that was ‘dead’ to a powerhouse that even today remains in many ways unrivaled .. with the right leadership – government can also be changed …. the right leadership.

so to the question …

want to change people ?

-get LEADERS

-have our elected govt representatives REPRESENT us

-pay people in government a salary they can earn in the commercial world
… at the same time make them all (elected and appointed) ACCOUNTABLE
… no more defence, no more excuses, no more ‘it is too hard’

without that – and likely a whole lot more … forget it.

JP