Selected change propositions

Not all change is good.
Whether a change is good or bad is both a moral and a practical judgment.
Not all good change overcomes resistance.
Successful change requires more than a good idea.

Reflections related to these propositions are offered below as a catalyst for your own reflection on how change decisions are taken and implemented.

Change narratives

When nonprofit leaders consider the evolving needs of their stakeholders and adjust their strategies and operations to address those needs, a change narrative is developed. The ‘story algorithm’ for this is summarised in the chart below.

The why, what, how, who, when, and where questions are all addressed in the telling of the story justifying and promoting the changes. While this narrative structure is outlined above, it is unpacked with a few more details in the larger chart that follows.

Change Readiness or Resistance

There may be good reasons to resist certain kinds of change, especially if you believe they will cause harm. See the header image above.

On the other hand, some painful changes are necessitated by the changing circumstances faced by the organisation. Witness the grief caused by shrinking memberships and revenues for previously large organisations, forced to downsize and sell off property and other assets to keep the lights on for the remnant body that remains.

Of course, a simple 9-box matrix fails to account for all of the subtle factors and dynamics that influence our change dispositions. For example, it doesn’t highlight situations where we oppose changes, either good or bad, for the wrong reasons – such as dislike for the proponent. It doesn’t recognise power relationships, differential capacity to understand complex ideas, resource constraints, or political alignments and commitments. Nevertheless, it offers a starting point for reflection on the role of a leader in advocating for change with their team, constituency, and stakeholders.

Assuming the change is one you are responsible for implementing, the success of that implementation is going to be heavily dependent on the readiness for change amongst those affected by it, either as agents of the change or its intended beneficiaries. To the extent that you have team members or stakeholders who are resistant to the change, your role will necessarily include engagement with their concerns and transforming their disposition from skepticism to acceptance.

Key characteristics of these two states are featured in the following chart.

Overcoming Resistance

A widely praised framework for overcoming resistance to change is the one proposed by Rick Maurer in his book Beyond the Wall of Resistance, sub-titled ‘Why 70% of All Changes Still Fail– and What You Can Do About It’. Maurer’s approach is highly regarded because it offers a systemic and coherent approach to a range of key success factors, with its 10 main elements illustrated in the chart below.

It starts at the foundational level by recognising which level of resistance is at play so that you can address it effectively. Diagnosing which of the intellectual, emotional, and/or political levels underpins the resistance is an important step in analysing the current ‘state of play’, and responding in a way that is both relevant and sufficient.

Hidden change dimensions

Robert J Marshak‘s book Covert Processes at Work: Managing the Five Hidden Dimensions of Organisational Change (2006) highlights similar sources of resistance by staff and/or stakeholders. Each of these is shown in the chart below as having a seat at the table when change is being contemplated or implemented.

Lencioni’s team dysfunctions (coherence framework)

Patrick Lencioni‘s Five Dysfunctions of a Team has helped managers the world over to address team cohesion issues constructively. As with the diagnostic measures offered by Maurer, when you have pinned down which aspects of team coherence are not working well, you can zero in on the steps required to remedy that situation. While the Lencioni Model helps deal with any situation where team cohesion is sub-optimal, it has particularly high relevance to situations where teams are asked to accommodate significant structural or procedural changes

Organisational justice

Beyond the five dysfunctions highlighted in the Lencioni Model, I suggest that the ways we build and maintain trust in our organisations all involve aspects of ‘organisational justice‘.

The quadrant chart below outlines four major aspects of organisational justice, with two of them, ‘interpersonal justice’ and ‘informational justice’, being grouped in the broad category of ‘interactional justice’. ‘Distributive justice’ and ‘procedural justice’ are the more visible forms of organisational justice, and these are the areas most often associated with organisational values. Consistency, for example, relates to evenhandedness in the way different people are treated, but also to the way leaders ‘walk the talk’. Are their actions consistent with the organisation’s espoused values – such as respect, fairness, and equality?

If any of these four major types of organisational justice are found wanting, this will erode the trust your staff, volunteers, and members/clients have in the organisation. Organisational justice could, therefore, potentially be seen as a sixth layer of the Lencioni pyramid, beneath the Trust layer – as suggested below.

Leader integrity and team perceptions of the state of organisational justice are key contextual elements when seeking to implement strategic, structural, or procedural changes.

Good or Bad, Who Can Say?

While each nonprofit leader will form their own view of whether a change is good or bad, they will also need to assess how each of the affected parties views the change if they are to have any prospect of successfully implementing it.

Effective stakeholder engagement with change initiatives involves much more than telling a neat story. Having an appreciation of the many other factors influencing the change disposition of staff, volunteers, and other stakeholders is crucial for alignment with their motivational drivers and promoting their readiness for change.

See also:

Various themes explored in this post have been touched on in previous posts:
Change Resistance and Response
Strategic Causality Part 2
Actors, Factors, and Vectors of Change
Stakeholder Engagement and Empowerment Options
Moral Governance Part 1
Moral Governance Part 2
The Choice between Insightful and Inciteful Words
Social Capital and the Thickness of Trust
Empathy and Mindfulness in Leadership and Life
Golden Means or Ends
Diplomacy in the Boardroom and Beyond
Was it something I said?: Dialogue Style Choices
Being Present: Listening with Your Eyes