The Toolkit – Step 2

Towards Commitment

Questions

  • What are the benefits to be gained if we make this change?
  • How valuable would these benefits be for us?
  • How urgently do we need these benefits?
  • What are the risks of not doing anything?
  • What is the risk of change for service‐delivery?
  • What are our greatest fears about this change?
  • Have we ever tried anything like this before?
  • How difficult could this change be?
  • What are some of the challenges we could face?
  • How long would this change take?
  • Do we have what it takes to succeed?
  • What strengths/limitations do we have to work with?
  • What support would we need?
  • Are we likely to get the support we would need?
  • Are we willing to support this change?

Tasks

Identify the Benefits and Value of Change

This exercise can be completed for different levels within the organisation. For example, you could identify the benefits and value of change for the whole organisation, for a division within the organisation, for a team within the division, or for an individual within the team. Going from the macro to the micro helps everyone get a big picture of why change is needed. You might need to make multiple copies of this table.

The benefits of change captures how the change would improve outcomes for the organisation, division, team, or individual. How does it help the organisation achieve its purposes? How does it increase efficiency? How does it make people more productive?

The value of change captures how important these benefits are. For example, a change that makes a team more productive by improving how information flows might have the value of increasing employee engagement and building greater levels of trust and empowerment amongst team members.

Get people to brainstorm and come up with specific benefits and values of the change. Share these within the team(s) so all members recognise why the change is important. You could also use focus groups, discussions, interviews or surveys to collect ideas.

NOTE: The benefits and value of change may look different to different people within the organisation. For example, what may seem a benefit to one division may appear to be a liability to another. Remember to maintain a systems focus – a change that is a liability to one division may create other positive opportunities down the track.

Benefits

Align the Change with the Vision

You should help people think about how this change aligns with the vision of the organisation, division, team, and/or individual. It is easier to be committed to a change if you can clearly see how it can help you get where you want to go or what you want to be.

You may want to brainstorm ideas to achieve this alignment, conduct interviews, or simply present information about how the alignment works. What would work best in your situation?

Create a Sense of Urgency

It is important to create a sense of urgency around the benefits and value of change. This will be easier to do if you have done a good job identifying the benefits and value of change and aligned the change with the vision. If there are so many benefits and the value of them is high, it is logical to want them sooner rather than later. This is a positive driver of urgency.

There may be other factors at play. There may be some deadlines to achieve that limit the time frame, or some external threats that must be handled now. These are negative drivers of urgency.

You need to get people to think about these drivers in terms of consequences. To help with this, you might find it helpful to get people to add an ending to this sentence: “We need to get this change done ASAP so ….” Some exemplar endings could be:

“We need to get this change done ASAP so we can reduce our stress levels because the new computer program will make our jobs easier”.

“We need to get this change done ASAP so we don’t lose our loyal customers to the new business that’s opening soon”.

“We need to get this change done ASAP so we meet our regulatory requirements on time”.

These are consequential statements that link the driver with its consequence. This will help create a sense of urgency around the change.

Use the table below to make a list of the positive and negative drivers of change. The positive drivers will be in the benefits and values table you created earlier.

Drivers

Now, take those positive and negative drivers you have identified and create consequential statements from them. You don’t have to use the exact words given earlier, but the pattern should be the same – we need to do this now so that this happens/doesn’t happen soon.

These consequential statements can be repeated regularly throughout the change process to keep them in people’s minds.

Identify Potential Risks and Anxieties

The talk about benefits and values should not hide the fact that change has risks and often causes anxiety. You should try to get these perceptions out into the open. Create a safe space for people to voice their concerns about the change and its implications. Allow this to happen on the level of the organisation, the division, the team, the individual.

To achieve this goal, you could use one‐on‐one interviews, team discussions, surveys, focus groups, staff meetings, or invite written feedback. You could use the table below to collect data or create one of your own. Data Group(s) refers to where data is collected – from whole organisation, division, team, individuals. Use for different data groups.

Risks

It is important to collect data about the perceived risks and concerns about the change because you need to address each one and demonstrate that they can and will be handled carefully. Once you have accumulated enough data to reveal the main risks and concerns held by stakeholders, decide how you will address each risk/concern.

Remember to regularly reinforce the 5 key change readiness messages:

  • This is a real problem/opportunity that we must do something about because ……
  • The strategies we have/will have will work because …….
  • It will be worth the effort because …….
  • We can do it if we work together because ……
  • You will be fully supported in this change because ……. 

Sometimes the risks/concerns surround these 5 areas. For example, employees may think:

  • This issue doesn’t look like a problem or an opportunity to me. Things seem to be working okay as they are.
  • We tried something like that before and it didn’t work.
  • This is a waste of time. Everything’s okay, we should leave it alone.
  • This is too hard for us. We can’t do that.
  • This is another one of management’s flash‐in‐the‐pan ideas. They’ll probably forget about it.

Unless you deal with these objections in Step 2 of the change process, they could become bigger issues that block desired behaviours when you begin to implement change (Step 4/5).

Use the following table to plan and record how each risk/concern will be addressed.

Concerns

Be Realistic

If you want to lead stakeholders towards commitment for change you must be realistic about the challenges ahead, your current capacities, how long change will take, what the main issues are, how much change is required, what competing interests exist, what the business impact will be, and how much can be achieved. No single stakeholder group is likely to have a complete knowledge of all these areas, so you should target different stakeholder groups.

The goal is to achieve a realistic set of expectations that all stakeholders can commit to with confidence. Stakeholders need to feel they have been heard and their perspectives taken into consideration by key decision‐makers.

Use the table below to collect data.

Br Realistic

Build Confidence

People often fear what change might mean for them and whether they will meet performance expectations. Therefore, it is important to send frequent and specific messages about the group’s current or future capacity for success. This involves highlighting specific strengths found within team members and ideas for how current limitations will be overcome.

Think about the stakeholder strengths you already have. These could be strong trust within teams, prior experiences with successful change, high‐agency language and stories, a willingness and openness to learn and grow, a tolerance for and acceptance of risk, a valuing of innovation, etc. Many of these are cultural artefacts, so find as many as you can and highlight them to stakeholders.

If there are serious limitations to overcome (horror stories around change, mistrust of managers, in‐fighting amongst stakeholders, fear of punishment, etc) these should be acknowledged as problems and strategies developed and communicated showing how they will be handled. These limitations and strengths can vary between stakeholder groups.

Make a list of the strengths and limitations you should work on to build confidence among stakeholders.

Confidence

Ensure Support

To build commitment for change, stakeholders must know they will be fully supported at all steps of the change process. This means that:

  • Management will not lose interest in the project before it is completed. Stress that management fully supports the project
  • Adequate and timely training and enough resources will be provided
  • All stakeholders will receive all the information they need at the right time and in an accessible form
  • The reality of the change process is acknowledged – it is a learning process, people make mistakes as they learn, and regression happens. Let people know they will not be left to flounder as they navigate this process

How will you convey these 4 messages to stakeholders? Remember, you must follow‐ through on your assurances. Write down some ideas.

Seek a Firm Decision

The goal of Step 2 of the change process is to achieve commitment for the change. To that end, it is a good idea to ask stakeholders to make a firm decision for change. Be aware that stakeholders can decide to support the change, or they can decide to not support it. If many stakeholders do not support the change, you should work harder at understanding what the main objections are and address them.

Find a way of expressing the decision for change in a tangible form. It may be a symbol, an object, a picture, a song, a slogan – something that signifies that as a group of stakeholders, we understood why the change was important and we support it. This can be called upon at later stages when challenges arise, and commitments are questioned. List some ideas.

Use Metrics

Do not move into Step 3 until you have achieved a critical mass of supporters for the change. There are no absolute numbers regarding critical mass. Some change management practitioners claim that 30% is the critical mass, but it really depends on different individuals and what is being measured.

An idea behind critical mass is that some people are early adopters and some people are late adopters, or never adopt at all. The idea is that early adopters (perhaps people with more change fitness?) will model behaviours that make it easier for others to learn and follow. You need to make some joint decisions about when to move on to the next step, but it is important to remember that different stakeholders may be in different steps of the changer process as the same time. This increases complexity for managers who should be working with people where they’re at and helping them to move ahead.

What critical mass would be appropriate for this change?