Tom Breur
16 March 2014
Change is hard. At least
that seems corporate folklore. Personally, my take on this is that people don’t
necessarily mind change, but they do
very much dislike being changed.
So given that “change” can arouse all kinds of feelings of
resistance why not capitalize on that knowledge, and try something different?
How about introducing change by means of an experiment? As a champion/challenger
strategy?
The notion of “change”
appears to trigger much more resistance, than a suggestion to run an “experiment”
(Armstrong, 1978, p. 33). Instead of suggesting change, why not present this as an
attempt to see whether a new way of doing things leads to improvement? It paves
the way to reversal in case of unexpected negative outcomes.
As a side effect,
introducing change by virtue of experiments also points to the need to gather
empirical data that verify the (anticipated) improvement. This immediately gets
everybody focusing on facts, rather than opinions. Very effective to drive out
any “politics.”
Emphasis on empirical
results further underscores the notion that you drive change and improvement by
constantly measuring your
performance. This makes “changes” simply a challenger to your existing
(champion) strategy.
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