Jack Welch: Mountains Do Move

In his book titled Winning, Jack Welch dedicates a chapter to Change, subtitling it Mountains Do Move. Welch distills his wisdom for bringing about change into four practises:

1. Attach every change to a clear purpose or goal. Change for change's sake is stupid and enervating. People need to understand in their heads and hearts the need for change. This is easiest when the reason for change is obvious, for example bad media headlines. When it is not obvious, it becomes necessary to collect data and relentlessly communicate the rationale for change.

2. Hire and promote only true believers and get-on-with-it types. To find these change agents, Welch points out to look for their characteristics: being brash, high-energy and more than a little paranoid about the future. They tend to be curious and forward looking, asking questions that start with the phrase "Why don't we...". They often invent their own change initiatives or ask to lead them.

3. Ferret out and get rid of resisters, even if their performance is satisfactory. Welch believes it is necessary to get the right people by your side and to get rid of those resisting change. These resistors usually lower the morale of those who support change and foster an underground resistance. They waste their own time in a company where they don't share in the vision - they should be encouraged to find one where they do. Even if they have a specific skill-set, they should not be held on to: they only get more die hard and their followers more entrenched over time.

4. Look at car wrecks.
Make the most of opportunities, even capitalising on other people's unpredictable disasters. It is possible to acquire resources cheaply from bankruptcies, for example.

These practises, though they may seem simplistic, do make sense. As well as point 1, behavioural change in the team should be the priority. From point 2, the person in my team who is embracing change the most is of the type Jack describes - always asking questions about improvements. Point 3 confirms a suspicion I have that if the person who is the biggest resister to change stays on my team, I am not likely to accomplish the change I need. Point 4 is definitely something that I will bear in mind.

Cultural Change as Behavioural Change

In a previous post I discussed the need for cultural change as the necessary underpinning of any implementation of "best practise" and how I have tried thus far to overcome the resistance to change. Without some level of cultural change, the team or organisation becomes stuck in "current practise", not "best practise" and the implementation will not succeed.

In researching this area, I've come across Dr Leandro Herrero's Chalfont Project. Dr Herrero's perspectives on the area of cultural change are a contrast to other thinking, for example challenging the view that cultural change has to be slow and painful.

Dr Herrero's site has a video and a number of articles, but the highlights are:

• Cultural change programmes concentrate on creating new mindsets and attitudes. A lot of time and effort is spent in rolling out new processes and tools. There is also a lot of communication and training, rationalising the logical need for change. In all this, an assumption is made that the new behaviours will follow to support these changes.
• In reality, behavioural changes have to come before "cultural change". People need to be performing behaviours that are specifically "collaborating", for example, and this behaviour encouraged and spread. Once the behaviour becomes widespread, it can be considered that cultural change has taken place.
  
• In this form of change programme, it is necessary to identify the key behaviours that will produce the required change. These behaviours must be reinforced and encouraged.
• To make cultural change happen across an organisation, it is necessary to take advantage of the few people in the organisation who are connected to many people. These people need to be demonstrating and spreading the behavioural change. Dr Herrero compares this to the spread of an infectious disease, virally through a network.
• The best thing that can happen in this kind of programme is dropping the terms "culture" and "change". People have preconceptions about these labels. Instead, people's natural tendencies to copy well regarded behaviours is used.
  

The content of Dr Herrero's ideas, which he calls Viral Change, make more sense to me than anything else I have come across in the area of cultural change. Perhaps what is more impressive is that I have previously seen a team undergo dramatic changes in working practises and the observations from just seeing that at a distance fit quite well with Dr Herrero's thoughts.

Cultural Change: The most fundamental task. The most difficult task?

It is one thing to talk about "best practises". It is quite another to have them implemented and working effectively within a team or organisation. Since the end of June, when I took a team on to shape and mould into an Operations team, perhaps the most striking problem has been some members' shear resistance to adopting new working practises. This has to be a problem in any organisation attempting to improve.

In particular, I want the team to make notes on their incident investigations. There are a multitude of reasons for this, such as allowing other engineers to review and continue the work if necessary and allowing the notes to be reviewed retrospectively if similar incidents occur in future.

My first and default method for getting the engineers to follow this practise was to tell the team quite simply what my expectations were and that we should be doing with respect to taking notes. This was enough for one of the team of 5 to take it all on board and start working as expected.

I then worked through some problems and showed how this could be of benefit. No further engineers were swayed to this new way of working.

The next step was to organise a "training". In this, I invited the users of the Operations teams - project manager, developers and others who would be using the services of the Operations team. I asked them to tell me what they thought would make a great Operations team. They came up with suggestions like "knowledge sharing in the team", "clear idea of where an investigation is and the process". I then went through how I would investigate a problem using this note taking working practise and how this satisfied their requirements. Almost all the users liked what they saw and approved.

The training had an interesting affect - one of the engineers requested to change teams soon afterwards, leaving a team of 4. The others became more convinced of the usefulness, but after an initial stab at trying the new method, soon reverted to their old ways.

After a major incident, a retrospective was held and some of the same themes re-emerged: the need to knowledge share, the need for more logging/notes on the investigation. These themes came from the team members themselves, yet still behaviours have not changed and the working practises have not been adopted.

During and after other incidents, users have sent emails relating to these same points and themes. The team members have seen these mails, yet still continue to work in the same way.

Changing working practises and creating a working environment where this is possible has now become the major and most fundamental issue. Everything else, such as what kind of things are "best practise" or IT Service processes, is a secondary issue.