Lockdown learning: #2 More blessed to give…

 

A short series of 2 minute observations…

Motivation is fascinating … and not just to those who watch soaps. A degree in economics (which when I completed it focused much more on economic theory and behaviour than statistics) and many years in marketing has fed my interest in this area for many years.

Now lockdown is further stimulating my interest – especially around the ever warm topic of altruistic vs selfish motives for doing things. There are two opposite schools of thought on what is best for individuals. The neo-classical school of economics makes the ‘simplifying assumption’ that people always act in their self-interest (aka selfishly) and that this produces the best result. At the same time, Jesus famously said that “it is more blessed to give than receive” (Acts 20:35 in the bible) which suggests that the giver is happier than the getter.

Lockdown certainly seems to have unleashed a dose of the latter motivation. I live in the territory of the Warwickshire Scrubbers who have sewn massive quantities of scrubs and bags for the NHS and I observe people wanting to be able to do something valuable for others – shop, run errands, bake cakes, give flowers, volunteer to help. In all, do something that contributes to helping others.

Clearly we operate out of multiple motivations, something which economics finally recognised in the field of behavioural economics which with its test and learn approach and multiple tests repeatedly confirms our mixed range of motives and their impact on real market behaviour. 

But which actually might be better for us?

This was the subject of a very interesting article in the Economist last week which cited a study that had examined loneliness and mental health – clearly another warm topic with our Covid-19 restrictions.

This study found that giving has a profound positive impact on our physiology that is measurable. Doing something for someone else reduces our sense of loneliness. This in turn changes the number and type of myeloid cells in blood which in turn impacts our resistance to viral infection and levels of inflammation.

In the study by Dr Cole, Dr Lyubomirsky and Megan Fritz, they discovered that people who carried out acts of kindness for others significantly reduced their sense of loneliness and improved their myeloid response. They felt a lot better and were healthier.  Merely buying things to care for oneself did not do this, there was something special about the act of giving.

In short, giving really is better for us (presumably because of the feel good sense of value and connection that it brings?) and this is something we can see during lockdown too.

I have to confess that rather pleases me… whatever the mess it makes to micro-economics.

Lockdown learning: #1 Social unsociability

A short series of 2 minute observations …

We are only just over 40 days into ‘lockdown’ and yet already there are new routines established by many people on furlough, home-working, unemployed or retired. Additionally we see new customs from queuing to enter shops, respecting one-out one-in policies, one way systems for walkers etc etc.

I want to call out just one of these changes in behaviour. It indicates the strength of our social instinct – something which historically our public policies and economics have sometimes ignored.

We see it when we go out for our exercise and choose to walk.

One minute people are walking towards you. The next they have swapped pavements to avoid you. Families are spread over the pavement and then suddenly younger family members or dogs are corralled to avoid interrupting your stroll. Perhaps my favourite is the dance that we sometimes do at ten paces when we seek to work out who will take which side of the pavement to pass.

So many of these actions result in a smile, an expression of thanks or a greeting or a comment or brief conversation; things that were pretty rare prior to March 23rd in our neck of the woods.  

As we are forced to socially (or in reality – physically) distance we seem to have generated an equivalently strong desire to engage with others, acknowledge and connect and recognise them. Hence the popularity (and increasing length) of the Thursday evening applause when for many they are talking with neighbours for the first time in years, the emergence of street WhatsApp groups and local offers of help.

In a tangible way, going for a walk has become a lot less isolated and more sociable than it used to be – even though you stay farther away from others in the process. It feels much friendlier than it did and there is a greater sense of being part of a society. At the very moment when we are in the midst of being terrifically antisocial by avoiding people, we are reaching out to connect with them and recognise not just their presence but also their support in upholding this new social etiquette. 

That is something very new for most of us. In our age of ‘expressive individualism’ (to use Robert Bellah’s famous term) we seem to feel the need to appreciate the actions of others, to modify our behaviour for others and to act in a way that recognises our interdependence and desire for the welfare of others. 

Might we not quite be wired in the way much of public discourse suggests? 

Could this new norm even last beyond the lockdown?

Change lessons from Covid-19

What can we learn about leading change from our response to Covid-19?

The arrival of Spring 2020 will no longer be defined by the absence of winter in our climate which I suspect would have been the main news in a ‘normal’ year. It will be remembered as the year that the Bill Gates pandemic prophecy (Bill Gates TED talk 2015) became a reality. It will be forever remembered for the Covid-19 pandemic, the death of hundreds of thousands of people and the ‘lockdown’ of society which has already engulfed over 100 countries across the world.

The new normal is a set of policies from political leaders including – movement and gathering restrictions, forced business closures and event cancellations, tracking individuals and forced isolation and travel bans. All this has happened without revolution and largely with the willing and supportive co-operation of the population.

Are there any lessons for leading change in other settings here? (apart from the seismic impact of fear on behaviour) – especially about what works and what doesn’t work?

I think I have spied a few so I thought I would share them. 

The leaders’ challenge when facing new threats

Lets observe the first thing. It takes time to recognise the scale and nature of a new threat and to realise that decision and action is needed. 

Few countries’ leaders have responded in a very timely and effective fashion – from the initial desire of Chinese leaders to penalise the messenger and deny the problem to the slow and reluctant response of the liberal Western governments to take the scale of the problem seriously and institute any effective response. One feared punishment in the face of failure, the other unpopularity. There are lessons for us from both these motivations.

Those that have done best are those with ‘battle’ experience..maybe prior experience (with SARS or MERS) and a pre-planned response. They identified a threat more quickly and acted faster. Taiwan and South Korea being amongst the best examples.

Lessons?

  • For change agility we need to genuinely learn from prior external events and threats. The sorts of hard thinking that go into scenario planning, gaming and risk identification and mitigation can have a real value if leaders use them well. These kind of exercises build resilience and speed – enacted in some pre-defined policy or plan
  • The importance of differentiating types of ‘resistance’ and facts. Humans change their minds – viruses don’t.

The need for effective decision structures

Governance is for many a boring topic and yet again it has proved to be of vital importance. 

Making change happen, in response to a crisis or to achieve something new, needs decisions to made that can then be implemented. These normally stretch across organisational and individuals silos. To identify and scale the threat and work out what to do and how to make it happen – especially at speed – needs to marshal a wide range of data and issues effectively.  In the UK, normal cabinet government is not sufficient for this. This is what the COBRA meetings are supposed to do.

The slow and chaotic response in the USA at the Federal level demonstrates the weaknesses in both the decision making and the capability deployed to respond to it (New York Times). Without governance that can reach across the natural silos of business-as-usual it is very difficult to identify the priorities, take the right decisions and implement them.

The key lessons?

They feel like reminders of good basics to me:

  • To think about governance ahead of the storm of change, and 
  • To have clearly focused and defined structures for leading change that can where necessary overcome the status quo structures and obstacles

The importance and limits of clear communication

Every leader recognises how important good communications are for launching and managing change successfully. Almost every major change will have a communications thread called out in its governance  and so much of the work that I have done with leaders over the years reminds us both that it is almost impossible to do enough communication when change is desired.

The UK has been a great place to see the value and limits of this. In the UK the government shed communications through February and into March of the importance of social distancing and the relatively benign nature of the likely illness: two very soft messages that lulled most of the population into underestimating the seriousness of the situation. It was only as the scale of potential deaths was counted and the scenes from Italy became worse that that the messaging became more deliberate and clear. However, by that time when the communication ramped up w/c March 9th it was with little effect as demonstrated by the vast and undistanced masses in beauty spots the following weekend and the enforced restrictions the day after by which time most people seemed happy to follow them.

Lessons?

  • Verbal communications need to be clear, simple and utterly consistent (over time and across leaders) to achieve maximum effect. 
  • Yet what is said is still weak in the face of multimedia reality. The footage from Italy and of bereaved families transformed the responsiveness of people. Leaders need the equivalent to cut through inertia.

There are real limits to soft power

In the UK the government is generally perceived to have moved slowly to the lockdown restrictions. Italy moved on March 9th, Denmark on March 13th and then others quickly followed but we seemed reluctant to use this tool and rather wanted to encourage and educate people to the required behaviours – avoiding crowded public spaces that would promote wider transmission (like pubs or concerts), maintaining social distance with those outside the household and washing your hands.

The failure of these over the weekend of 14/15 March moved the government to up their messaging on social distance and safe working but this still had little effect in the good weather that continued that week and led to a legally enforced lockdown on 23rd.

Lessons?

– Leading in our world needs to be recognised as legitimate and this often means we lean to use soft power rather than hard power, especially when we are seeking commitment. Yet hard power makes a vital contribution to reducing the freeloader problem and in garnering people’s attention and can be used without losing legitimacy if used in a timely and proportionate way.

Conclusion

As I write this we are starting to stare down the road forward which looks like it goes well into 2021 until there is a good treatment protocol or a vaccine available.  Hopefully we will not face a similar threat again but given that we likely will, we need to be good at learning our lessons this time round.

photo courtesy of Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Strategic change – are you soft or hard?

The challenge

I have been working with many different organisations in the last few years including not-for-profits and church organisations. Working with not-for-profits, churches, social enterprises and other community focused organisations it is clear that they march to a different drum from commercial bodies, even if they share many of the same challenges and processes that exist in any organisation.

A part of this is that they conceive, articulate and launch strategic changes differently from commercial organisations.

It is as though the different drumbeat becomes even more significant when change is needed. Whether change is to address strategic misalignment, operational misfiring, financial issues, rapid capacity change, poor HR practice or a non-specific ‘cultural’ malaise, the need to instigate change heightens everyone’s senses. In this flashpoint for organisational conflict it seems to provoke leaders to rely on ‘heritage’ levers to effect the change, especially if it is strategic.

Having observed this across all different sorts of organisations I have noticed that the result is that leaders tend to lean towards one of two slightly different toolsets to lead the change – either to soft or hard tools – and this shapes how they visualise and articulate the need, goals and approach:

Sometimes the focus is the tangible – metrics, resources, structures, planning, new or changed services, different task roles. Easy to express and visualise, much more manageable for the programme team to track and leaders to defend spend on. Its all hard factors and goals.

At other times it is the intangible – values, education, attitudes, skill development, concepts and ideas looking for engagement and discussions, shifts in thinking, commitment and new ways of conceiving what is being done. They emphasise the soft.

Yes, this sometimes reflects the nature of the change that leaders think is needed but just as often it seems to be a reflection of their conception of the nature of the organisation or their personal preferences and a response to the natural risk of change.

Rarely do I see changes which consciously span both aspects and weave them together. Yet this weaving is so important in the definition and realisation of the best outcomes and sustained, substantive changes.

Even a brief look at sports or military action reveals the immense power of combining the power of both hard and soft factors to help make changes work well.

The incredible success of British cycling over the last 20 years has been down to a rich combination of soft and hard working together (see Guardian) with funding, technical edge, training, motivation of the masses and sports psychology all playing their part to such effectiveness that after Rio other countries were left scratching their heads – even after large investments (BBC News). At a more localised level those who watch tennis can readily see the impact of both technique and mental strength as factors in individual match performance.

Similarly in battles the combination of skills, armaments and logistics alongside morale, ideas and leadership provide a similar endorsement of soft~hard combinations. Many famous battles have been won by commanders using the same combination of morale and personal commitment plus tools and strategy.

Yet too often we seek to address change in organisations reaching largely for only one part of the potential toolbox rather than both.

I think that this might be for many reasons in addition to our risk averse tendencies:

  • The mental model that we create of the nature of the change is framed on a partial view, perhaps an analogy that leans to the technocratic or the interpersonal, the activities needed or the being desired
  • The personal character and style and functional experience shapes the most comfortable tools to use (a hammer has always worked for me…)
  • Our approach to strategic change is shaped by supporting third parties who justify their existence by a focus on one or other toolset
  • We see the issue in terms of only a limited set of dimensions or causes and therefore seek an angle on the issue rather than a probing to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the solution
  • We simply don’t devote the time needed to make the change work and stick. We do something and once the first elements are showing promise we move on only therefore engaging with a part of the requirement

 

Sadly this often means that the big shifts needed in an organisation rarely get tackled soon enough or effectively enough and often reoccur until an existential crisis destroys that area or aspect of the organisation.

Solutions?

Here are four ways to challenge yourself and your team to enrich your vision of the change and the routes to achieving it.

Understand your own biases

Start by asking yourself about your default approach to a change and see how it might bias your understanding and approach and where it will leave your approach weakest.

When you think of major change what disciplines do you reach into? (change as change, learning, development, strategy, design or innovation?)

What mental models come to mind – strategic or military analogies? GANNT charts? Design approaches?

Do you tend to put most emphasis on particular facets – governance, targets, values, people, activities etc?

Looking back on your successful changes what are the common strategies and tools (that you may naturally seek to lead with)?

This may help you to recognise areas that additional reflection, analysis or definition is needed in identifying the goals and vision or the strategies to pursue.

Encourage diversity of viewpoints

Gathering diverse yet committed viewpoints into the team helps in the definition and articulation of the change and in bringing a more rounded perspective. It will help challenge singular, ill-formed or limited views of the strategic needs and strategies..

Much as you might use De Bono’s six hats you can allocate different perspectives around a group to assess the situation and refine the change agenda. Perspectives might include those of different constituents (internal and external) or themes (e.g. values, behaviours, habits, the intangible, activities, products/offerings, structures, resources)

This will continue to be of value in the governance of the programme – as long as time is built into the group’s agenda to reflect and review progress and outcomes and to be curious about what is happening.

Focus on the a well defined set of outcomes or benefits

The rich thinking that is needed to generate a well-balanced vision or strategies for change is often very effectively catalysed by a determined focus on the outcomes that any change needs to create in order for it to be worthwhile. In NFP’s this might be captured by the fashionable area of ‘theories of change’, in commercial organisations it is normally framed in terms of benefits to be realised.

Thinking needs to push into outputs from the change and then beyond into the outcomes that need to be realised fo this to be a powerful approach, capturing the mental models that links these and the context under which they are operating. I have found this to be a very helpful way of pushing thinking beyond the hard to the soft and vice versa when it becomes clear often programmes define their goals at an intermediate point that puts outcomes at risk or leaves them undefined.

Choose a richer framework

We all make use of frameworks or models to probe the nature of the outcomes needed. A way of challenging your team and yourself is to deliberately use wider more comprehensive ones and press on the nature of the interdependencies that are present.

The choice depends on context but it might mean using a competency or component model, or the Burke-Litwin framework; Porter’s competitive analysis; PESTLE or other checklists and scaffolding for considering an issues more fully.

Conclusion

Thinking round the challenges and covering both softer and harder routes to the vision can help unlock  easier and more effective ways of effecting strategic change.

This helps to strengthen the change and overcome the cultural or practical barriers that undermine sustained, significant impact.

When should you change horses?

Contemplating a big change in direction but still implementing your current strategy?

The expression ‘you should not change horses midstream’ apparently comes from a speech made by Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election as he urged voters not to switch leader in the middle of the civil war. It emphasises the risk in making a change with the idea of the danger of being washed downstream as you try to change the horse that is carrying you across a fast flowing river…

The uncertainty of change

It has stuck because it captures the risk of being sunk during a transition so well. Whether it be a change of policy, personnel, machine, strategy or even job we all sense the reality of this risk. To highlight but a few…

  • A significant change almost always involves a monetary and time investment to bring it on-stream that is not easily made at the same time as running the operations in an organisation. It can derail cashflow or management attention.
  • The future performance of a new strategy or job is almost always less certain than the performance of the current approach even if it is prospectively better in the longer term. There is no track record and it may take some time to tune it effectively. It may have hidden issues or teething problems.
  • A drop in day-to-day performance exposes the organisation to risks (e.g. the loss of a key customer, missed profit target, staff discontent) that can be tough to recover from and of course, politically it also exposes the leader who instigates the change.
  • It awakens political opportunism in others as a change disturbs power relationships in the organisation. It can then lead to at the least hassle and at worst a serious threat to your position.

All these seem good reasons for postponing a change where possible, especially if we are ‘midstream’. Sometimes it simply pays to stay in a not so good position to avoid an even worse one!

As we are all so much more sensitive to losses than gains, we can all behave like this. It can even be smart. We know transition is a big risk. Some smart leaders seem to prove this in the timing  of their decision to move or retire from a long held position (e.g. in business or sports). All too often within the space of 12-18 months their successor can be fighting previously invisible issues, struggling with the transition and need to institute  changes.

A common problem

What’s more this resistance to making changes happens in all walks of life…

In economics: It has a name – over-commitment. The relatively slow growth of the UK economy in the late Victorian period and beyond is often badged as a problem of over-commitment to traditional slow growth (and low skill) industries. There was an unwillingness to change horses to newer higher growth industries even when the returns from doing so were much better.

In business: I was working with Nokia in 2007 at the time that Apple launched its new smartphone and despite the obvious challenge of this change, few people in Nokia saw the need to change their strategy urgently. As a result they took too long to make any serious response to what became an organisation destroying innovation. Clayton Christensen’s landmark book ‘The Innovators Dilemma” captures the scale and significance of this phenomenon in organisations facing newdisruptive technologies.

In war: The rapid destruction of the allied defences in Western Europe in 1940 in the face of the innovative ‘Blitzkrieg’ tactics of armoured units was the result of a commitment to tactics that fitted the previous war when armour and communications were in their infancy.

In ourselves: We recognise it sometimes ourselves when we realise we have stayed in a role, place or organisation for too long.

If a change is not made soon enough then often it can become too late to make it at all.

However, our challenge is that this often means we should switch horses when we feel we are in the middle of things.

Four markers for switching horses now

So when should you decide to make this risky midstream change? What are the best signs that now is the time to move? When does ‘things are not going well’ translate into ‘now is the time’ to change?

Here are four markers that indicate now is the time to change for an organisation, group or even individual.

Any one on its own provides a good reason to change now but the presence of more than one is a strong imperative to do so and regular reflection on them might help to avoid the inevitable drowning that will take place if the horse you are using cannot make it across the stream.

 

  1. A significant gap in user experience

This is the first and in my mind most important sign.

A shortfall in the customers’ experience of you, your service or your organisation can often provide an important indicator of a need to change. It is a certainly a good time to question if  things are still okay. The shortfall might be in comparison with alternatives (Nokia vs Apple smartphone) or against expectations (Sinclair C5, chocolate teapot) but where there is an evident and persistent gap of the sort that the average person notices then it is time to make a major change to address the challenge.

If users often come away with an underwhelming experience of me in a role, my organisation, or even if significant segments find a gap against competitive offerings, then this a sure sign that a change is needed now.

A good ‘outside-in’ perspective in the best test for change. Even after many years in consulting, it still amazes me how tough it can be in larger organisations for ‘outside-in’ insight to prompt real change. It is why it is vital to have in place ways that always keep leaders across the organisation involved and engaging with the ‘voice of the customer’.

As a person it is a great reason to pay attention and listen carefully to friends, colleagues and contacts. Wisdom so often comes from the outside.

2. A clear and present danger – a negative end game

This is not about the film but rather the principle. In the USA in 1919, the Supreme Court agreed to limits to the First Amendment freedoms based on this principle. In this case I suggest that it is a good test for change. When looking forward with your current strategy, approach, product, service etc  if the game clearly does not end positively for you or the organisation then a change is needed.

In organisations this might be in terms of projections for revenues, margins, market share, staffing costs or the use of time (e.g. to manage downtime or close budgets) or again it might be external trends that are visible despite a current good performance. The growth of the online and mobile channels in retail is a case in point. The growth and impact of these were clear 10-15 years ago but it has taken many retailers until this decade to even begin to think about the impact on their own channels, property, methods, policies and range. The results can now be seen in their own performance – perhaps most strikingly in the way that this week the market value of Asos exceeded that of M&S for the first time.

3. No improvement options

Lets be clear -there are always improvement options. But sometimes when facing a performance challenge it can seem that you have run out of them. Everything that is suggested or tried seems impossible or does not seem to make a real impact or has major downsides and the only apparent decision is to ‘muddle through’ or hope for the best (which almost always means that everyone expects bad news!). This is time to make the jump to something radically different.

I have seen this where businesses are working with an operating or sales model that is no longer appropriate for their industry or competitive position and the pressure goes on staff in all manner of ways to improve performance but the reality is that trying harder is not really improving the position (and yet is burning people out at the same time!).

A default of just carrying on is not a real decision. This stuck-ness is a great indicator that a major change is needed.

4. Persistent negative trend

A consistent trend decline over months or years on key measures (e.g. revenue, market shares, productivity indices, profit, users, user sat, air quality etc) is another sign of the need to change. The challenge is, of course, what is ‘persistent’? How long does something need to be negative for it to qualify?

The answer definitely depends on context but much depends on what sort of a horizon you would normally take for a decision. For the insurance industry it might be a long time (ten years?), for a tech company it might be remarkably short (12 months?) but if the trend is an external one to the organisation and has not been reversed by repeated management action over a reasonable planning horizon then it is a good sign that a more fundamental change is needed now.

This also challenges leaders to identify good ‘leading’ indicators. Picking lagging measures will end up with you being too late to act. Yet surprisingly few organisations have good markers in place to enable this – especially in situations when markets are highly fragmented and data tough to come by.

Even when markers are in place, the dislike of unfavourable performance data is amazingly strong – witness the effort that goes into making figures look good in most corporates every quarter. One previous client of mine brazenly redefined their market to ensure that their share looked okay.  Resistance to good feedback needs to be expected.  This is why independent people and bodies (e.g. Office of Budget Responsibility) are a great help to make this work well and overcome the psychological obstacles.

Conclusion

The four markers for switching horses are useful. They help to build a case for change but I am also conscious that major decisions never solely depend on rational argument. Whether we like it or not there is a strong bias for the status quo and substance needs spin to land successfully.

So remember this and stretch to more creative tactics as well. I often sleep on analysis and then come back to it. This frequently brings a significant new insight or way to present it. Co-opting a black-hatted analyst or contrarian in the organisation or creating face-to-face discussions with negatively affected users also helps to unseat overly stubborn riders.