We’ve got so much of our conversation about ‘change’ backwards
Don’t read this as an article, read this as me chatting to you…
I’ve been working in the behaviour change space for nearly 20 years now (on both sides of the fence, as a consultant, and as an entrepreneur and executive), and I think many of us might have been getting it all backwards.
This week, I spent almost all my time with senior managers, executive leaders, CEOs and owners talking about various aspects of leadership and the change journey. This spanned conversations about AI readiness, managing technological change, team culture, leadership impact, responding to regulatory changes, virtual and remote work, and many other domains. A question that recurred repeatedly was: “How do we get people to change behaviour?”.
This is not surprising. Almost all the things we aspire to accomplish as leaders will require some form of behavioural change – meaning it will need people to stop doing things one way and start doing them another way… Stop using these old tools and start using those new-fangled AI ones. Stop writing emails this way and start writing them that way. Stop talking to clients like this and start talking to them like that. Stop managing your team like this and start managing them like that. And so on.
Almost all things we aspire to accomplish as leaders will require some form of behavioural change
Obviously, this tracks in our personal lives as well (because we’re biochemically and evolutionarily the same animals at work as at home, even though we like to pretend we’re not), insofar accomplishing most of what we want to accomplish personally also requires behavioural change. How do I stop eating this and start eating that? Stop doing this (sitting on the couch) and start doing that (running). Stop putting the dirty clothes here and start putting them there. Stop smoking this and start not smoking that. And so on.
But here is where I think we’ve got it backwards.
We almost always frame the question as “How do I get them to start doing this new thing?”. Perhaps it would be more powerful to ask: “Why aren’t they doing this thing in the first place?”.
The better the question, the better the answer…
As many readers will know I spent five years as a Partner at EY. Aside from the absolutely world-class people I worked with, I think my favourite thing about EY was the tagline they had adopted as their motto: “The better the question, the better the answer, the better the world works”.
Whilst I acknowledge that, in its phraseology, it does have the faint ring of a (probably American) self-help cliché, I believe there is a deep and important truth to this sentence. In my experience doing strategy work, I have certainly found that the quality of an answer will never exceed the quality of a question, and sometimes finding better solutions to a problem really is about finding a better question.
The quality of an answer will never exceed the quality of a question
This is what was in my head as I kicked around the implications of changing the question I was working through with leaders from “How do we get people to do this?” to “Why are people not doing this anyway?”.
I interrogated this question a bit more deeply with my AlchemyLabs business partner, long-time collaborator, and even longer-time wife, Dr Emily Heath, who has the benefit of being a behavioural neuroscientist and therefore an actual authority on this subject. I put to her that, as we reflected on our work, the reasons people failed to change almost always fell into three simple categories.
As you might expect from a proper scientist and subject-matter expert, she thought my model was ‘a bit too simplistic’ but also ‘probably extremely useful’ … which is good enough for me.
Okay… so… ‘why aren’t they doing it in the first place?’.
The proposition I put to Dr Emily was simple – that in all my experience I had only ever really seen three reasons why people were not doing something.
1 – It was too hard. Whether it was too many steps, took too much time, took too much physical energy, was poorly explained or unclear, or seemed like too much of a departure from the status quo, they weren’t doing the thing anyway because it was too hard.
2 – It was too unsafe. Whether they feared negative feedback, embarrassment or material consequences (like losing their job or getting punished), there was a lack of either psychological or physical safety attached to the behaviour, and they weren’t doing the thing anyway because it was scary.
3 – It was too unrewarding. Whether there was a lack of monetary, social or emotional reward, there simply wasn’t a compelling enough answer to the question ‘What’s in it for me?’ and therefore too little motivation to be bothered with it.
I have a strong working hypothesis that the master answer to all change questions is “if we can make the target behaviour easier, safer and more rewarding than the status quo, everyone will do it – because it’s the thing they’ll want to do, anyway”.
Whilst I understand that is easy to say in the abstract and harder to design in practice, that doesn’t make it either wrong nor the wrong approach. And companies get this wrong ALL. THE. TIME.
I once worked with a massive organisation that reportedly (no one I was working with there knew the real numbers for sure) spent close to $1bn on a new global financial management tool that was meant to replace a patchwork quilt of legacy systems. When the new system launched (many years late), tasks that had previously been largely self-service and taken only a few clicks and a few seconds now required the involvement of multiple parties and could take upwards of 20 minutes. Unsurprisingly, compliance with the processes within the new tool was low, and there was significant blowback from managers who now had to spend a whole bunch more time doing things that used to be easier.
Whilst the technical side of the business was happy that the new system was more secure, was cheaper to run because of the consolidation of tools, and might ultimately be leaner to manage, the fact that it was too hard and the opposite of rewarding to use meant that, at the human level, the rollout was disastrous.
And the impact of this? No joke, in the end, the company wound up hiring a team of offshore people to do the processes that used to be self-service. That was how unsuccessful they were in getting people to adopt the new desired behaviours.
So… what you’re saying is…
Yes, so my argument is that if you want to ‘make change happen’, there are three golden rules that will take you a long way towards success. I don’t represent that this will be 100% successful, 100% of the time, but I have been exposed to no cases I can think of where this wouldn’t be an extremely good start.
Once you have a clear picture of the behaviour you’re trying to get people to engage in, ask yourself three simple questions:
- How can I make it easy? The aim should be to make it easier than the thing they’re already doing.
- How can I make it safe? The aim should be to make it easier than the thing they’re already doing.
- How can I make it rewarding? … You know the sentence that goes here!
