Sometimes I feel like Sisyphus, compelled for eternity to push a huge rock uphill only to watch it roll back down again.

“A couple of Power Point overviews, some manager talking points, and a few audience-focused launch messages and we should have what we need to complete this project,” the project director informed me.  ”We need to be really focused to get this project completed on time and within budget.  There’s no time or budget for stakeholder assessment or feedback, and besides, the technology is fairly intuitive.”

And the rock rolls back down . . .

I had been asked to join the implementation at the eleventh hour, one week before the kickoff meeting, and was listening to the project director clarify the scope of my assignment.  He had not planned to include a change resource until an executive wondered out loud during the previous week’s steering committee meeting whether someone was in charge of the “change management” for the implementation of the new travel and expense system.

A week later I was sitting with the project director wondering the best way to roll the rock back up the hill.

The project team was composed of highly skilled IT implementers who were effective people managers and driven to work Herculean hours to bring the project home under budget and in record time.  They had a laser sharp focus and the ability to ignore anything and everything that would prevent them from getting the job done.  Despite those factors, the warning signs were there:

• The budget and timeframe had no room for error,
• Change management was an afterthought for the project manager, but on the mind of an executive,
• Change management activities were added at the last minute to “check the box.”

Whenever a project leader minimizes the value of change management—especially when an executive expresses concern—there will be problems lurking.  It’s a variation of Murphy’s Law.

Initially, the problems may surface as technical glitches or insufficient system capabilities.  But the longer the problems persist, the more it becomes apparent the issues are something beyond the technical.  The requirements are incomplete or inaccurate.  The end-users are concerned about functionality or required changes to their work flow.  The tool doesn’t integrate with other technologies that support related work processes.  Managers or administrators feel threatened that the new tool will negatively impact their authority, expertise or job duties.

Even if there are no problems during the implementation, once a change is ready to “go live,” the organization usually needs more than superficial information about the changes they are about to experience.

Checking the box of change management means that the tail is wagging the dog.  Organizations initiate change to improve the business, not simply to complete a task.  This means that change always has a purpose.  But if the purpose is ignored in favor of the details of the task, then the risk—the likelihood—is that the purpose will not be achieved.

Change initiatives are understandably run as project management exercises.  It ensures that implementations are on time and within scope and budget.  The tools of project management provide a mechanism to manage the technical components of an initiative with comprehensive attention to detail.  But projects are about so much more than the technical.  Whether the project is a technology implementation, reorganization or merger, a new program or process, a change of strategy or a change of policy, change initiatives are by definition designed to change the way the business performs.

The discipline of change management provides the mechanism required to complete the business transformation.  Change management enables project leaders to identify how job roles will be impacted.   It defines the future skills and competencies required of employees.  It provides coaching, mentoring and communication strategies to support front-line supervisors.   It engages employees in the design process and it gathers feedback to make sure technicians create solutions that will work in reality.  And it also helps project leaders understand how to adapt the initial plans to increase the chance of delivering on time and within the budget.

Do project leaders need change management?  No.  Darwin was right.  People adapt.  But if you need to accelerate the pace of evolution and reduce the amount of turmoil along the way, then you must go beyond checking the change management box.

Every time I hear Tom Chaplin’s delicate and vulnerable delivery of Tim Rice-Oxley’s lyrics, I imagine an executive choosing this song as the script for their change announcement.   The balance between an urgent necessity and a confusing transition strikes a note of truth that if only spoken more frequently would show an incredible regard for the feelings of employees.  An understanding of that depth creates the trust and emotional connection needed to get others engaged, collaboratively, in building the future.

So little time
Try to understand that I’m
Trying to make a move just to stay in the game
I try to stay awake and remember my name
But everybody’s changing
And I don’t feel the same.

Change is a lot like going from Oz to Kansas.

On one hand, it’s as uncomplicated as closing your eyes, clicking the heels of your ruby slippers and willing yourself from one place to another.  Individuals and organizations have the ability to make change that simple—an uncomplicated choice, a straightforward decision, a path taken with no looking back.  And like Dorothy learns at the end of the movie, we always have the potential to instantly go home.

On the other hand, most of us need to follow a Yellow Brick Road.  Yellow Brick Roads provide clear paths, somewhere to place our attention, and the constants during times of turmoil when monkeys are flying toward us in attack.  We may not always stay on the path, in fact it may not even be needed to get to our destination, but it is there to provide a unifying sense of direction and purpose.  Even if it is not exactly the way home, it prompts the action required for us to achieve our objective.

In any successful change campaign, change leaders must present a clear, straightforward step that employees can take to help them move toward the destination.  Even if more complex action is required at some point in the future, a well-defined first step or two provides welcome reassurance.

After landing in a strange land where nothing looked familiar, Dorothy was quickly comforted to know that the Yellow Brick Road would lead her to someone who could get her home.  She had no idea of the challenges that she would find on the road ahead, but the road itself provided the comfort needed to get moving.

Resistance to change, much like the flying monkeys, is always lurking somewhere in the shadows waiting to wreak havoc on your efforts.  Even when employees buy into your change vision, they quickly develop cynicism, or resistance, if they don’t know how you plan to achieve the vision.  By showing them the first few bricks, you start them down the path required to move forward.  More importantly, once you have them focused and moving, they start to define the subsequent steps and can help identify additional requirements needed to achieve the goal.

Those first few steps are critical to get employees engaged.

George, the director of a government agency’s maintenance and utilities function, was trying in earnest to improve the operational effectiveness of his organization knowing that many jobs were at risk to outside contractors.  The organization’s labor costs had increased, and the agency they served was less satisfied with the quality of work and the time it took to complete projects.

George and his deputies knew that they were going to have to change the managerial and employee culture from a “government mindset” to a “business mindset.”  So, they started peppering their daily conversations with this message.  They would say things like “We have to start thinking like business people,” or “What are you doing to become more efficient?”

The response of the organization was a universal, “Huh?!”  Employees understood the objective—and they wanted to save their jobs—but they had operated a certain way for so long that they didn’t know how to get from Point A to Point B.  George was communicating, “We want to go home,” but he wasn’t showing employees the Yellow Brick Road that would lead them there.

When he and his leadership team pointed out the first few bricks, however, his organization got fully engaged.  One brick was to start measuring aspects of their performance, such as the cost per job or the days to completion.  Another brick was to provide outside benchmarks of cost and quality.  And the final brick was to “give permission” for employees to work outside the guidelines of policies and procedures if they could show it would lead to higher quality and better service.

Once those steps were identified and taken, employees at all levels found their brains, hearts and courage and skipped happily down the Yellow Brick Road toward Oz.

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Randy Nelson knows something about how to build collaborative, innovative cultures.  Although currently the Head of Artistic Development and Training at DreamWorks Animation, two years ago when he did this piece, he was the Dean of Pixar University.  For twelve years, Randy was responsible designing curriculum and delivering classes and programs to continuously increase the skill and collaborative ability of Pixar’s mixed technical, artistic and management staff.

Pixar’s business model differs significantly from the standard Hollywood model in which there is a production organization that is set up in an ad hoc way for each film.  Pixar is an organization with regular, full-time employees that has sought to shift the center of focus from the ideas to the people who create the ideas.  Central to this strategy is Pixar University, a cross between an art and film academy that seeks to develop the skills of the employees, the learning curve of the organization and the collaborative spirit of the culture.

So, for those of you interested in improving the collaboration environment of your organizations or project teams, here are a few takeaways:

• Like a good improvisational actor, accept every offer to collaborate.
• Make your partners look good.  It’s not about judgment or saying “This is pretty good. How can I make it better?”  It’s about saying “Here’s where I’m starting. What can I do with this?”
• Focus on error recovery, not failure avoidance.  It’s about resiliency, adaptability and the ability to make something from failure.
• Be interested, not interesting.  Be a great listener who amplifies the person talking.  Seek to know what others want to know.
• Use communication as an opportunity for translation. If you just emit “techie speak,” nobody really hears you. The responsibility for translation gets pushed to the receiving end of the conversation, and as a result, gets garbled. Do the translation at the sending end so that it doesn’t have to be done at the receiving end and the listener can say, “I understand.”
• See collaboration as amplification.  This means connecting a group of individuals that are interested in each other, that bring separate depth to the problem and that bring a breadth that gives them interest in the entire solution.  This combination it allows them to communicate in ways that promote understanding and add to overall solutions.

Ethan Zuckerman is the senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and he studies how the world uses new media to share information and moods across cultures, languages and platforms.  In this talk he identifies a troubling challenge:  While the internet connects the globe, most of us only listen to people just like ourselves.

“The world is, in fact, getting more global.  It’s getting more connected.  More of our problems are global in scale.  More of our economics is global in scale.  And our media is less global by the day.”

Our technological connectivity isn’t helping us understand the world.  It’s helping us become more myopic.  And at a time when the real problems of the world are global in scale and scope, we need to broaden our perspective and our sources of information.

That’s an effective practice even if our “world” is our own smaller workplace and community.  Our ability to solve problems, to innovate and to build sustainable businesses, ecosystems and societies, is entirely dependent upon recognizing our interconnectedness.

Just as there are parts of the world are dark spots in terms of attention, there are parts of our smaller world that are blind spots for us. Our ability to learn and understand these dark spots and to discover how they are vital to us, depends not only on the recommendations of guides, but on our desire to seek to understand the full “width and wonder of the world.”

Listening to global voices requires rewiring our own data gathering systems and taking the time to translate, understand and embrace the richness outside our perspective.

The fastest way to learn is to discover a person or group which reaches totally different conclusions to your own when looking at the same reality. Robert Theobald

All too often, we suffer from an acceptance of ignorance.  Whether we are talking about organizations, nations, political parties, religions, communities or individuals, the tension and conflict present in so many of our interactions does not represent differences between values and beliefs, cultures and civilizations.  Instead, it is the result of the acceptance of ignorance and the unwillingness to learn and understand.

When understanding is not present, the ability to predict, anticipate, comprehend, empathize, and ultimately, connect becomes much more difficult.  But then again, connection is a dirty word.

• “I don’t want to waste time talking with end-users about this technology.  We understand what they need better than they do.”
• “I’m tired of listening to these damn employee complaints.  We’ve given them too much already.  What more do they want?”
• “If we include ‘them’ in our decision-making process, they will want something we might not be able to deliver.”
• “I know it’s better to include your employees to help them develop, but it just takes too much time.  It’s more expedient to just tell them what to do.”

Companies treat suppliers like criminals who are determined to find holes in their contracts that help them steal us blind.  Managers distance themselves from employees, so it is easier to fire them should there be a RIF.  The company president lives in a town far removed from the community of his or her executive assistant . . . intentionally.  Their kids don’t go to the same school, nor play on the same ball team.

Politicians refuse to walk across the party isle to create compromise, let alone improve a bill through dialog.  Countries refuse to engage in talks.  Diplomacy, and the ability to reach across ideological divides to solve pressing problems, has been replaced with a celebration of intractable ideology.

All this posturing.  All this noise.  All these opinions.  All this desire to stand apart.

And nobody listens.

As John Mayer sings in his hit song, sometimes we have let people say what they need to say.  We have to make sure they know that they can take out their wasted honor, their past frustrations, their so called problems and put them in quotations.  Even if their hands are shakin’ and their faith is broken, we’ll let them say what they need to say.

As much as this song is about the power of sharing your true feelings, it’s also about giving the gift of listening as someone unloads.  When we listen, we help others feel understood.  We show them our heart’s wide open and give them space to communicate their needs, interests, and ideas – both what they know and what they may not yet understand.

The real gift, however, isn’t to them.  It’s to us.  We learn.  We understand.  Our own ignorance is replaced with the ability to connect.

Throw out all your change management books and methodologies and theories.  Burn every PowerPoint presentation filled with diagrams and flow charts and tools and templates.  Delete your change project plans.  Forget agonizing over deliverables that your change work team must produce.  Fire every project manager or internal auditor or procurement specialist who minimizes your change effort to a mind-numbing checklist of activities to be completed for a contract to be in compliance.

Change can’t be managed.  It can only be led.

In the real world, neither logic, nor project management certification, nor executive authority, nor flashy communication will convince employees to embrace a new program with enthusiasm if it doesn’t feel right to them.  And if it doesn’t feel right to them, it isn’t.  You’ve lost them before you’ve started.

Let’s face it.  Most organization initiatives are conceived and implemented by a small group trying to impose their preferences on all or a part of the larger organization.  One department or manager makes a decision that will benefit themselves and then hopes to sell the idea to everyone else who was happy with the status quo.

They ask others to commit themselves to a new direction—spiritually, emotionally, physically, and even financially—without giving them a choice, without involving them and after the decision has already been made.

Fait accompli.

The problem isn’t the idea.  The problem isn’t even in the planning.  The problem is that no matter how “right” or well-planned an idea may be, it must be implemented well to be successful.

Implementation isn’t about a detailed project plan.  Implementation is about knowing how to connect with people and gain their support.  It’s about connecting emotionally and getting an emotional commitment.

And that’s why change can’t be managed.  Because connecting and engaging and inspiring and listening and involving are the adaptive activities of leadership.  So, instead of getting blinded by the details of the project plan, get focused on providing the leadership required for change success.

Sometimes the best solutions are the most obvious, and unfortunately, the ones least considered.

Organization change is hard because leaders and project teams forget to do the simple, but important things, while spending extraordinary amounts of effort in the glitzy and complex.  Technology projects focus on the technology.  Outsourcing focuses on cost analysis.  Mergers focus on the synergies or the marketing, sales and finance strategy.  Process reengineering projects focus on, well, the process models.

Yet, somehow, amidst all this great thinking, projects struggle . . . because we don’t do the obvious things that would help us be more successful.

In a recent workshop, a technology project team was discussing how they could test the technical design specifications for their tool.  Should they survey what other companies have done?  Should they complete a study of best practices (which they hoped the vendor would provide)?  Should they build an online survey that contained screen shots and multiple choice questions?

After almost 30 minutes of this discussion, one of the less experienced members of the team finally asked, “Why don’t we just show the tool to some end-users and ask their opinions?” (Out of the mouths of babes!)

“That’s great,” said an experienced participant.  “We could organize focus groups and build a questionnaire . . .”

“Does it have to be that formal?” asked the newbie.  “Couldn’t we learn a lot just by talking with some people and listening to what they say?”

Simple, straightforward, and effective.

The best techniques to ensure project success are not fancy, but they are amazingly effective.  Here are five that should be part of every project:

1. Involve stakeholders.  Successful projects involve stakeholders—end-users/customers, executives/steering committee members, functional experts and others—from the outset and throughout the initiative.  Whether involved formally or informally, stakeholders shape the criteria for solutions, evaluate decisions along the way and help communicate to the organization.  They will help create success and be champions for the project . . . if we let them.
2. Listen to stakeholders.  Listen to what they say and what they don’t say.  Listen to their ideas and their emotions.  See the world through their eyes and learn how your project impacts them.  Understand their fears, concerns, needs, and desires, and let that understanding be part of the criteria for the decisions you make during your project.
3. Include your vendors.  Make vendors a part of your project team.  Leverage their experience.  Show them the real organization, warts and all, and so they will understand how to adapt their solutions and offer suggestions for navigating the challenges.
4. Learn from past projects.  Gather the project managers from the last few organization change efforts in a room and have them compare notes.  Or spend time with them one-on-one and have them share their “inside secrets.”  Learn what went wrong and make sure not to do it.  Learn what went right and make sure to put that in your plan.
5. Be transparent.  Transparency helps get all the information out on the table for consideration.  It makes the challenges, and our decisions about how to manage challenges, easier for others to understand and accept.  All projects have trade-offs.  When we increase our openness, it engages others, compels them to become our collaborators and enables us to create greater buy-in along the way.

As Ed Roland and Collective Soul express so well, great results happen when you begin to listen.

In the late 1980’s, the economy in Japan was strong, and everyone was making money, trading stocks, investing in real estate, and busy buying assets throughout the world.  Behind all the luxury and pleasures, however, lay the realities of a grueling corporate life that had employees constantly working and constantly stressed.  Physicians in corporations started to worry about stress related disorders in the work force as their schedules became overrun with employees suffering from anxiety attacks, ulcers, headaches, insomnia, and depression.

The word “karoshi” (Karo= overwork, Shi= Death: Death from overwork) became a regular topic on the evening news, in the morning papers and in the conversations of union leaders, business executives, attorneys, statesmen, clergy and families.

With the mounting social pressure, Japan’s health and safety law was amended and made business owners responsible for the health and safety of their workforce, including mental health. A subcommittee of the Ministry of Labor decided that managers in corporations should have some knowledge of stress and stress related disorders as well as relaxation methods and listening skills.  The government also gave out grants and other promotional measures so that businesses would implement a Total Health Promotion plan (THP).

During one of the promotional workshops Akira Ikemi, then a teacher and researcher at University of Occupational and Environmental Health, Japan (UOEH), met the health and safety staff form Daihatsu.  As a result of this encounter, he went on to create a remarkable listening workshop that he taught for the next twenty years at Daihatsu and to other major Japanese corporations including Mitsubishi Chemicals, Sumitomo Steel, Nippon Steel, and NTT.

The real value the workshops came from the results of a study he conducted while teaching with his colleague Shinya Kubota.  Using pre-training and post-training surveys, they discovered a strong link between managerial listening and the mental health and satisfaction of employees.  Employees who perceived their supervisors as having strong person-centered attitudes—demonstrated significantly by active listening skills—exhibited less fatigue, depression and anxiety than those who did not.  They also found that this same group of employees had higher levels of motivation, better relationships with coworkers, and increased levels of productivity.

Ikemi also found that listening skills are teachable.  Managers who participated in listening training programs were able to develop the skills and techniques that create these positive effects.

So, listening isn’t just some touchy feely practice held up as an ideal by those trying to get managers to put away their iPhones.  It’s hard-core capability that is proven to produce profound physical, emotional and cognitive results.  It can take managers from “walking in the desert all alone” to having the capability to connect, engage and create higher levels of employee performance.

Hey you’re now thirsty
Walking in the desert all alone
Hey you’re now searching
Lost in isolation from your soul
The bullets you bite
From the pain you request
You’re finding harder to digest
And the answers you seek
Are the ones you destroy
Your anger’s well deployed

Hey why can’t you listen
Hey why can’t you hear
Hey why can’t you listen
As love screams everywhere

Hey you now hunger
Feeding your mind with selfishness
Hey you now wander
Aimlessly around your consciousness
Your prophecies fail
And your thoughts become weak
Silence creates necessity
You’re clothing yourself
In the shields of despair
Your courage now impaired

You crucify all honesty
No signs you see do you believe
And all your words just twist and turn
Reviving just to crash and burn
You’re fighting till the bitter end
If only your heart could open up
And listen

Context is everything.

It affects how we see.

As demonstrated by Beau Lotto, founder of the hybrid art studio and science lab, Lottolab, color lets us see the similarities and differences between surfaces.  But when you vary the parameters, when you change the context around which you see, you change the color that falls to your eye.  As a result, the light that falls onto your eye is meaningless because it could mean literally anything.

This explains both the problem of change management as well as the solution because what’s true for sensory information is true for information more generally.  There is no inherent meaning in information.  It’s the context around that information and what we do with it that matters.

If we want to create behavior change, we have to first understand what people see, and second, change the context around what they see.  This helps them see the same information differently.

After finishing the first day of a two-day change readiness workshop, the program manager for the project, a VP of human resources, came up to me and said, “I get it.  I get it.  I get it.  But I have to tell you, I feel terrible right now.”

“Yeah, why’s that?”  I asked.

“Every project I’ve ever done before just examined the project context only. That was the extent of our change readiness assessment.  And when you started asking about our business goals and organization politics and personalities of executives and how our department operated, I thought you were headed into dangerous territory.  It was stuff we couldn’t control.

“But now I see that by understanding the entire context–the project and how the project fits into the overall organization–we are better prepared to manage the unknown.  It broadens our perspective.”

“So why do you feel terrible?”

“Because now that I can see this clearly, I can’t hide behind excuses.  I have to do this additional work if we want the results we say we do.  That’s a much tougher job because it’s about managing relationships, not producing PowerPoints.”

And that’s about navigating uncertainty because only through uncertainty do we listen closely enough to develop a deeper understanding of the perceptions of others.