Adopting a behavioural science approach to managing change means leveraging scientific research about human behaviours and using this to better manage change. A lot of the common practices in change management are not always based on scientific research. What is assumed as common change approaches may in fact not be substantiated by research and data.
We talk to an industry veteran of behavioural science, Tony Salvador. Tony has 30+ years of research background behind him and a long-time ex-Inteller and Senior Fellow. At Intel, Tony travelled around the globe researching human factors and how people behave with technology.
There are many valuable takeaways for the change practitioner.
Some of these include:
Engineering psychology and human centric design
Analogy of pickaxe and the change approach
Principle of aversion to loss
People involvement and transactional change
Determining the nature of leadership relationship with employees
Story telling and insight into change culture
Example of Brazilian translator and people’s stories
Power of observation and listening
The nature of relationships and how they determine change
Change rationale in weaving in multiple changes
Involving people in reporting to achieve authenticity
Building the case and involving employees to derive case for change
Research on aversion to loss can explain why people don’t want to change. I spoke with senior fellow, anthropologist and ex-Inteller Tony Salvador.
It sounds completely illogical but true ….
People would be more concerned about losing something than gaining something. They would rather not lose $2 than to gain $5 for example.
This plays out in various facets of how people make decisions about choices … including in a change context.
This is just one of the many things I spoke with Tony Salvador about.
Lots of golden nuggets of wisdom takeaways for change practitioners from the man who spent 30+ years working for Intel researching about people behaviour and how they operate in social and technological environments.
Traditionally in change management, there are key ‘events’ that we pin our change strategy on when it comes to getting users to use a new system. These include town halls, leader-led team sessions, and training sessions. We anticipate that after these events that users will come onboard and that all is well. After this we can leave the user and our job is completed.
Unfortunately this is not the case.
User communication and training are only a few steps along a process where many other steps need to occur to achieve the ultimate outcome of full user adoption. We need to look holistically at the whole system and the various players that contribute to the users’ full adoption.
These include:
User capability
User motivation
User capacity
Senior manager buy-in
Manager buy-in
Communication and awareness
Measurement and reinforcement
Strategic alignment
So you can see that all of these are examples of potential levers that need to be pulled to get the outcome.
Here is an example of the initial onboarding journey for The Change Compass. What onboarding journey do you use?
Change practitioners usually classify different change impacts into people, process, technology and customer. Then, there is a great effort and focus placed on describing exactly what the change is from a project or program perspective. These can include the processes changes, and how different the new process is going to be compared to the current process.
However, adopting a user-centric view of change impact is critical.
Often what is seen as impact can be very very different from what is experienced by the end-user. Let’s take a few examples.
When a project is ‘rolled out’. There are can be a lot of different impacted audience factors to consider. These can include:
Location
Role
Gender
Digital fluency
Age
Length of service
Team size
Availability of support staff
Availability of effective 2-way communication platforms
Effective learning and development processes in place
Functional skill sets
So depending on how these factors determine the impact of the change on groups of individuals, identified specific impacts can be different. In the change impact assessment process, these should be carefully teased out and identified explicitly. Even how we express the names of the impacts should consider how the changes are perceived.
For example, is an impact ‘Team Leader briefing team members about the new process’ or ‘Weekly team meeting to discuss new process changes’? The initial wording is more focused on the new process, whereas the latter one illustrates that there can be various changes discussed in the meeting. So as a result, practitioners need to be open to the environment in which their messages will be delivered and through this better position and clarify the meaning of the change from the team’s perspective. E.g. can this change be delivered as a bundle with other process changes?
In a recent example, a person is understood by the organisation to be undergoing 6 separate initiatives each with their various impacts. Each initiative has fleshed out the various project impacts and these are listed and planned explicitly. However, this is from the organisation’s perspective. In fact, what the individual is undergoing is quite different.
There are changes that the team or division is undergoing that are not always taken into consideration such as people or team changes. On top of this there are also seasonal workload impacts from the likes of end of financial year, audits or pre-holiday season workload. On top of this, there are also various Covid considerations to take into account – the mother of all changes at the moment. Lockdown and social distancing have profound impacts on individuals leading to physical and psychological health impacts.
In the beginning, most users of The Change Compass think it’s about using data to inform business understanding and aid decision making. Whilst this is correct, it is much more than this.
A major global financial services provider has within 1 year achieved quite an extraordinary milestone in being able to exert significant influence to build the strategic change capability of the firm. What this means is that the change practice has been able to exert significant influence and enhanced the ability of leaders to make strategic change decisions. Business leaders also now have a much clearer view of their change complexity and the resulting impact on their business capacity and performance.
Think of it as a mini Oracle/SAP/Salesforce rollout. It’s not just about the system, it is about the changes in people, process, governance and capability that helps you achieve significant business performance uplift.
Specifically, there are 4 key areas that the firm has grown to reap the value of The Change Compass.
1. Optimise performance through change portfolio management
2. Powering change governance with change insights
