Sensemaking in a changing world

Psychology of change

Change management is in need of a transformation through an improved understanding of how humans interpret their environment and choose to act. The Inconvenient Truth About Change Management

Ever made this resolution: “I’m going to keep my email inbox empty.”

Were you successful?

I wasn’t.

Why is change so hard? Because we’re not Econs, a term the authors of Nudge coined to portray the flawed thinking behind how people think. Econs are people who can think like Einstein, store as much memory as IBM’s BigBlue, and exercise the willpower of Gandhi. Unlike Econs, humans err. We’re more like Homer Simpson than Spock.

Whether we’re trying to change our own habits, the habits of a team, or the habits of an organization, to succeed in effecting change we need to tap into the power of the mind. And much of that power resides in understanding and connecting with people’s feelings, emotions, and cognitive biases.

Here are the slides from OpenText’s April Adoption webinar where I look at six things about the brain to be aware of when designing a change or adoption strategy.

1: Our minds are storytelling machines

We don’t just take in the world as is. Like Sherlock Holmes ”we all perceive the present world around us, pull personal clues from the welter of ambiguity, and build our  explanatory stories – no matter how improbable the chain of events as we reason backward from effect to cause.”

What did you see in the video? Odds are, like most people, you created a story. About a couple and a bully.  A mother, a child, and a bad guy. A father and a couple.

Our brain takes two animated triangles, an animated circle and a box moving around and spins an elaborate story.

If we get a D, fail to get a hoped for promotion, receive an email about a new corporate initiative, or are introduced to a new technology we automatically spin a story about it. And we base our subsequent decisions that story.  This is why story editing is such an interesting change technique.

2: Frames shape our attitudes and behavior

A frame is a metaphor for a photo frame. A photo frame focuses our attention on a specific aspect of the photo, ignoring everything outside the frame. Ask a three people to take a photo of a garden. Each photo will be different, each will focus in on a different aspect of the garden. One may capture a close up of an interesting flower. Another may catch a bird in flight. Yet another may focus in on a mischievous garden gnome peeking out from a leafy frame. What does each photo tell about photographer?

Politicians (the war on terror), the media (fall of the Saddam’s statue), and advertisers (Diamond Shreddies) are masters at using frames to shape public opinion and behavior. Yet when it comes to organizational change we seldom recognize or leverage this powerful tool.

3: We take mental shortcuts when making decisions

Faced with a cognitively demanding question involving uncertainty such as “Will this person do the job well if hired?” we unconsciously substitute an easier question and answer the easier question instead: “Did this person impress me in the interview?”  Daniel Kahneman calls this tendency to jump to conclusions based on limited evidence WYSIATI (what you see is all there is).

And the measure of success our brain uses to determine whether its a good answer?

Whether it make a good story.

Accuracy entirely optional.

4: We’re not good at knowing what we want and why we do things

Why not? Because we make inaccurate predictions (spin elaborate stories) of the future and rationalize (make up stories about) the past.

We can’t really articulate why we prefer the picture on the left. As a result, because it’s easier to come up with reasons why we might prefer the one on the right, that’s the one we choose when we have to explain ourselves.

We value immediate rewards (and dislike immediate costs) much more than we value future rewards (and dislike future costs). David Laibson says it well “There’s a fundamental tension, in humans and other animals, between seizing available rewards in the present, and being patient for rewards in the future. It’s radically important. People very robustly want instant gratification right now, and want to be patient in the future. If you ask people, ‘Which do you want right now, fruit or chocolate?’ they say, ‘Chocolate!’ But if you ask, ‘Which one a week from now?’ they will say, ‘Fruit.’ Now we want chocolate, cigarettes, and a trashy movie. In the future, we want to eat fruit, to quit smoking, and to watch Bergman films.”

This has a significant implications how we approach requirements gathering, focus groups, and ethnographic research.

5: We stick with what we know

We have a tendency to stick with the status quo. Even though my kids had been bugging me for a couple of years to switch from Internet Explorer, I happily continued to use it. I figured it did what I needed it to do. And the mental effort of switching was greater than the cost of sticking with what I was already comfortable with. Until finally I was prevented from upgrading to IE9 unless I first upgraded to Windows 7. At that point it was easier for me to switch browsers than to upgrade my operating system. Now I use Google Chrome with no issues.

We also attach stories to objects we already own, which increases how much value we attach to those objects. Consider the hottest ticket in the history of Canadian sport.  People who owned tickets to the Olympic gold medal match between Canada and the United States had already attached a story to their ticket… “an experience I will always remember” or “something to tell kids about.”

6: We’re shaped by social ties and our environment 

David Rock suggests that “the brain experiences the workplace first and foremost as a social system.” Why? The human brain has mirror neuron systems that allow us to understand actions, intentions, and social meaning of other people’s behaviors and emotions.  We tend to do what those around us are already doing.  To the extent that, according to Daniel Kahneman, “Many of us spontaneously anticipate how friends and colleagues will evaluate our choices; the quality and content of these anticipated judgments therefor matters. Expectation of intelligent gossip is a powerful motive for serious self-criticism, more powerful than New Year resolutions to improve one’s decision making at work and at home.”

Social proof trumps information about harm or consequences. For the teenage boys the game Dead Space 2 is targeted at, the best way to persuade them a video game is cool is to tell them their mom hates it.

Advertisers have been leveraging the power of psychology for years to change minds, build new habits, and encourage new behaviors.  How much more effective could our efforts to effect change and encourage user adoption be if we experimented with insights from behavioral economics, neuroscience, and social psychology and add them to our organizational change toolkit?

Anyone running any experiments?

No scene that doesn’t turn

Look closely at each scene and ask: what value is at stake in my character’s life at this moment? Love? Trust? What? How is that value charged at the top of the scene? Positive? Negative? Some of both? Then at close of scene, ask: where is this value now? Compare. If answer at end is same as opening, ask why is this scene in the script? Robert McKee

Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem and it must culminate with the hero finding him or herself either thwarted or educated that another way exists. David Mamet

Moments of truth are turning points in your customer’s experience.

Like a great movie scene, to elevate an experience from the daily stream of ordinariness to one that delights you need to deliver an experience unified around desire, action, conflict, and change. One with a clearly articulated beginning, middle and end.

And yet most experiences lack structure. They lack closure. Without closure, you’ve missed an opportunity to elevate an ordinary interaction into a moment of truth that changes minds, delights customers, and compels them onto the next stage of their journey.

Let’s take something [seemingly] simple, like a presentation. How important is story and structure when it comes to crafting presentations that change minds?

As it turns out story structure is critical. See for example Nancy Duarte’s structural analysis of Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream Speech. Most presentations lack structure. Which is why most presentations don’t end up being a turning point for the audience.

When a customer visits your website, attends your presentation, buys your product, uses your service, or calls your service desk have you thought through how it needs to be designed to become a turning point in their journey?

What does a successful turning point look like from your customer’s perspective?

What does a successful turning point look like from your perspective?

In other words, how does the scene end? Is there a change? Is there closure? What memory is your customer left with? What action will they take as a result of the experience?

Does the customer leave the moment of truth changed?

When designing a moment of truth, consider what the experience is like for a customer when they enter the scene, throughout the interaction, and at the close.

What makes it a scene that turns? What makes it a successful moment of truth? A forward shift of emotion, perception, values. For example:

• anxiety -> certainty (anxious as to whether private information would be secure with a new service  -> reassurance based on demonstrated backing by independent third parties)
• frustration -> relief (unable to figure out how to use a product -> simple visual aid results in success)
• indifference -> delight (show up for meeting expecting same old boring thing -> gamestorming session that leads to action)
• doubt -> trust (doubt marketing claims -> search web and read reviews by others which back the claims)

What makes it a failed moment of truth or a moment of misery? Either a failure to shift or a negative shift in emotion, perception, values. For example:

• anxiety -> anxiety (call into customer service with an issue  -> told the issue is due to a third party so not the company’s problem)
• anticipation -> disappointment (install new software -> can’t figure out how to use it)
• trust -> no trust (purchase based on marketing claims -> try and use it and doesn’t live up to claims)
• hope -> no-hope (new corporate vision and values program launched with much fanfare -> no change in how work gets done)

Perception is critical. Not the facts as you see them. Rather the story the customer tells themselves about the experience.

Unless the customer thinks or feels that something happened, it hasn’t.

Does the customer leave the moment of truth changed? Ready to take the next step along their journey towards their object of desire?

What story does your approach to change tell?

The approach you take to a change initiative such as the deployment of enterprise software tells a story to those affected. Consider what each of these comments reveals:

 “If we didn’t do it quick enough, the person in charge of the project would send email to their boss, bosses’ boss, up to the CEO… ‘Are you kidding us? You really cc’d that to the CEO?’”

“We were never told what it is for and why it is… Intuitively understand that the shared drive cannot be continued to be used. There was never a meeting or analysis or anything, product was just put out there… There has never been a stand down or designated day to migrate content. No organizational commitment to get this done.”

“They did just an amazing job. It was the real key to the whole thing working for me. Sat down with us, created great structure. Before it was really tough. I wasn’t certain how and where to keep things. Now I feel so much more comfortable. So the company did something right.”

Different approaches tell very different stories

The story told by the first approach was “Our way or the high way. Do what we say, when we say, or you’re in trouble.”

The story told by the second approach was “Here it is, you figure it out.”

The story told by the third approach was “We’re partners. Together, we’ll get there.”

Different approaches trigger different emotional responses which then manifest themselves through stories that spread through water cooler conversations and alter the emotional fabric of your organization.

Telling without asking

Telling without asking, a traditional command and control approach to change, is seldom effective.

Telling without asking ignores the fact that there might be other truths and possibilities. Telling kicks in the confirmation bias, hardening people’s existing views. While you’re telling them how things are and must be, they’re arguing back with you (silently) using their own set facts, statistics and authorities that confirm why their view is right and yours is wrong.

Facts are always interpreted within the context of a story. And the story in their head is different than the story you’re trying to tell with your change effort.

Telling by asking

Telling by asking, on the other hand, leads both interviewer and interviewee to move beyond the selective facts that confirm each view to explore the stories, patterns, and frames within which the meaning of those facts may be reinterpreted. This opens up the possibility for a new story to form.

The way we talk and listen expresses our relationship with the world. When we fall into the trap of telling and of not listening we close ourselves off from being changed by the world and we limit ourselves to being able to change the world only by force. But when we talk and listen with an open mind and an open heart and an open spirit, we bring forth our better selves and a better world. -  solving tough problems: an open way of talking, listening, and creating new realities.  Adam Kahane

Interviewing those affected by a change tells the story that you care, that their experience is important, and that you are open to changing your approach based on what you hear. Each question you ask also tells its own story.

Each question prompts the interviewee to ask themselves: “Why that question?” “What would that mean?” “What are they going to do with the information?”

The answers they tell themselves become the story told by your question. And these stories will also spread through the water coolers of your organization.

Telling by asking is an adaptive approach to change.

Be agile and adapt

I don’t know if they’re committed to making it better. I’ve been crabbing about it for years. Now we’re getting a survey. Having this phone call. Will anything happen? I don’t know. Time will tell. The proof is in the pudding. Will they make any changes?

For this person, a survey and the interview from which this quote was taken were signs that change may be on the horizon.

Emotional due diligence isn’t a one-time activity. It’s an ongoing practice that enables you to be agile and adapt along with the shifting emotional landscape of your organization. And shift happens constantly with changes in people, products, teams, customers, policies, suppliers, regulations, priorities and technologies.

So think of yourself as an explorer charting the emotional landscape of your organization. Continue to update and refine the map as territories change, dragons are tamed, new dragons emerge… for the map, like your organization, is constantly shifting.

Whether threat or opportunity, the sooner you identify each dragon and adapt accordingly,  the more successful your change effort will be.

Why most organizations fail at delivering great customer experiences

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are. Talmud

Think back to the different organizations you interacted with today. Directly or indirectly.

Drinking your morning coffee. Commuting to work. Shopping for groceries. Using your computer. Watching a show on cable. Having a beer. Watching your favorite sports team. Attending a yoga class. Writing a report. Doing your banking.

As you think back to them, think about the store you visited, the manufacturer who made the product, or the provider of the service.

Odds are, they think they did a pretty good job of delivering a superior experience.

What about you, how do you think they did?

Here lies the experience gap

Most organizations think they deliver a superior experience.

Only 8% of their customers agree.

Because experience is in the eyes of the beholder (your customer), most organizations receive a failing grade when it comes to customer experience.

Why the experience gap?

Odds are the different organizations you interacted with today, either directly or indirectly, are taking a purely rational approach to their customer experience efforts. Segmenting. Quantifying. Analyzing. Planning. Taking an inside-out approach.

But loyalty isn’t rational.

Loyalty is emotional.

 … the most important aspects of e-loyalty is trust and personality. It’s not low prices, usability or a coupon. No, it’s a brands that they can count on, that helps them feel secure and informed. That goes out of its way to offer extra service. And it’s a brand with an identifiable and unique personality one can relate to. Helge Tenno

 

Most organizations shy away from purpose and emotion

Organizations fail at customer experience because they shy away from purpose and emotion.

Think of purpose as the why.

Why are you in business? Why should customers care? Why do customers do business with you?

Think of emotions in term of feelings.

What feelings are evoked by your customers’ interactions (direct and indirect) with your organization?  Why are those feelings evoked?

Most organizations shy away from both purpose and emotion. They’re too touchy feely. They’re hard to talk about. They aren’t easily quantified. They’re not taught at business schools. They don’t fit the image of the hard driving business executive. We can’t six sigma them into existence. We can’t scope them neatly into narrowly defined projects.

Numbers are much easier to talk about than feelings. And yet feelings drive decisions and action, not numbers.

As a result, you need extend beyond who, what, where, when, and how questions managed by traditional CRM to ask:

• Do our customers feel valued?
• Do our customers feel respected?
• Do our customers feel safe?
• Do our customers feel informed?
• Do our customers feel loved?

Notice that all of these questions use the word feel. Understanding and designing for feeling is the soft stuff that business and IT traditionally shrug off as unimportant or too hard.

Customers don’t want to hear that they’re important. They want to actually feel important. They want to feel valued. They want their needs taken care of in a way that makes them feel respected.

Emotion drives engagement. Emotion drives loyalty. Without emotion, there’s no experience. Nothing memorable. No stories to spread. Simply a transaction quickly forgotten.

This brings to mind the show don’t tell mantra embraced by great writers and screenwriters.

Delivering great customer experiences is about showing customers through your actions that you value, love, and respect them.

What do your customers feel about your organization?

What do your customers feel about your organization?

Find out by asking them this simple question:

What do you think of <organization name>? Why? Can you share a recent example of why you feel that way?

Analyze the stories this question evokes.

What do they reveal about what your customers are feeling?

Is there a gap between how your customers actually perceive your organization versus how you thought they perceived it?

Not every interaction is a moment of truth

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. Robert McKee

I’ve been wrestling with the concept of moments of truth lately. One of the objectives when visualizing experiences using customer experience journey maps is to identify and redesign the moments of truth most critical in the journey. At first glance moments of truth feel like a simple concept, but when you start having conversations about how to identify, design, or innovate moments of truth I find the complexity of the concept grows.

Definitions of moment of truth

Here are a few definitions revealed by a quick web search:

• 1. A critical or decisive time on which much depends; a crucial moment. 2. Sports The point in a bullfight at which the matador makes the kill. Free Online Dictionary
• A moment of truth is when an interaction occurs between a customer and the service provider that can leave a lasting positive or negative impression on a customer. Change Factory
• Anytime a customer comes into contact with any aspect of a business, however remote, is an opportunity to form an impression. Jan Carlzon, Moments of Truth
• In customer service, instance of contact or interaction between a customer and a firm (through a product, sales force, or visit) that gives the customer an opportunity to form (or change) an impression about the firm. Business Dictionary

While Jan Carlzon wrote Moments of Truth based on his turnaround of Scandinavian Airlines, his widely quoted definition doesn’t quite work for me when I think about designing for moments of truth. Taken too literally, you could run yourself in circles scripting, measuring, and optimizing every possible interaction.

If over the past year or two you’ve started to feel bombarded by surveys, you can blame it on this approach. Immersed in the weeds of each and every interaction you risk losing sight of the bigger picture of what people really value, of their overall experience with your organization or brand, and of your own vision for the experience based on your organizational goals and purpose.

I just ran across this presentation on measuring the patient experience. While it doesn’t talk explicitly about moments of truth or the patient journey, it does compare the clinical versus patient perspectives of health and the hospital experience. “Patient perception of care is a whole lot more than making sure nurses and doctors are friendly and smiling. It’s about saving lives and delivering safe healthcare. It’s about quality in a very real, concrete way.”

Moments of truth through the lens of story

An experience is in the eyes of the beholder. It doesn’t matter what you, the designer of the experience, planned for. It’s what the individual takes away. The story they tell themselves. The story they remember. The story they share based on the experience.

The story they tell themselves, remember, and share is important because many of the interactions people have with your organization or brand won’t be direct. Instead, they’ll be interacting with stories that result from the experiences of others with your brand.

Since a remembered experience is a story, I’m going to look at what Robert McKee, an infamous storytelling educator, has to say about story.

A good story has a protagonist (user, customer, employee, citizen, student, tribe, organization) who wants something (object of desire) and sets out on a quest to achieve their object of desire. But there’s always a gap between where they are today (their current reality) and their object of desire (their future reality). In this gap is conflict. To achieve their object of desire, they need to cross the gap.

Think of this gap as the distance between what is and what could be. The dragon gap. Each gap that needs to be crossed is fraught with risk. Risk could be internal (emotional or physical), personal (family, lovers, friends, team), or extra-personal (organization, social institutions, physical environment, people in society at large).

Achieving the object desire, the new reality, isn’t as simple as a one-time action. It’s a serious of actions, conflicts, and feedback loops. That’s why achieving the object of desire is quest or journey.

Moments of truth live in the dragon gaps

Every interaction isn’t a moment of truth.

Moments of truth live in the dragon gaps that loom between current reality and achieving the object of desire.

Moments of truth form the possibility space for an experience.

Moments of truth are revealed in the stories shared about an experience.

In a future post I’ll explore moments of truth in the context of possibility spaces for the emergence of stories. In the meantime, I’d love to hear your stories – good, bad, and ugly – about recent customer experiences you’ve had that you think reveal a moment of truth.

What motivates people at work

Would your organization be more successful if your employees were more obedient? Or, would you be more successful if your employees were more artistic, motivated, connected, aware, passionate, and genuine? Seth Godin, Linchpin

Try asking people in your organization: “Why does this organization exist… why do you come to work each day?” or “Why does this change initiative matter?”

If you get a diverse set of answers such as “to make money” “because I need the paycheck” “increase efficiency” “comply with regulations” odds are you lack a compelling purpose or change story.

Most organizations tell change stories related to the company: “become the industry leader” “double in size” “survive in tough economic conditions” “comply with government regulations.” Most of these are financial. Yet people are seldom motivated by a numbers based story. Numbers fail to engage the elephant, the part of our brain that controls behavior.

Occasionally (but not nearly often enough) organizations tell a change story related to the individual (WIIFM). 

Seldom do they tell a change story related to impact on society, the customer, or the team.

In the absence of a why story that resonates, people create their own. Odds are, when they create their own it won’t be a story that motivates them to act in a way that aligns with your goals.

A common story I’ve heard people tell themselves when document management is being introduced in the absence of a change story that resonates is “So that if I get laid off, the company is protected.” Why type of behavior do you think this leads to?

Lead with why

People at work are thirsting for context, yearning to know that their efforts contribute to a larger whole. And a powerful way to provide that context is to spend a little less time monitoring who, what, where, when and how—and little more time considering why. Daniel Pink 

Daniel Pink shares a study by Adam Grant from the Wharton School. In a call center for a large American university, Grant randomly divided employees who call alumni to raise scholarship funds into three groups.

• First group read brief stories from previous employees about the personal benefits of working in the job. How they developed communication skills and sales know-how that later helped them in their careers.
• Second group read stories from people who had received scholarships from the funds raised and who described how the money had improved their lives.  The aim of these stories was to remind workers of the purpose of their efforts.
• Third group read nothing.

A month later, Grant measured the performance of the three groups:

• First group did no better than the control group, earning about the same number of weekly pledges and raising the same amount of money as previously.
• Second group raised more than twice as much money, in twice as many pledges, as they had in previous weeks and significantly more than their counterparts in the other two groups. Reminding employees about the why doubled their performance.

In another study by Grant described by Pink, employees who spent five minutes talking to the recipients of the funds they were raising, spent twice as much time on the phone with prospective donors and raised nearly three times as much money.

In a similar vein, simply by having her team of claims analysts interview the people filing claims to learn more about them, Leslie McMillan of Industrial Alliance effected an 80% drop in spending on independent medical evaluations, claim settlement time fell from 8 weeks to 4, boosted revenue by marketing higher-value disability management products, claims ending in litigation dropped from 12% to 7%, employee satisfaction shot up, and lawsuits dropped from 12% of all claims to 7%.

Meaning motivates

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him. Viktor Frankl

According to Wikipedia, The Purpose Driven Life has been on the New York Times Best Seller list for advice books for one of the longest periods in history, topping the Wall Street Journal best seller charts as well as Publishers Weekly charts with over 30 million copies sold by 2007. This hunger for a book on purpose illustrates our fundamental drive to feel that our lives have a deeper meaning.

We yearn for meaning.

This fundamental need for meaning runs counter to the assumptions captured in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow argued that meaning  is only important once our base needs are met. And yet Viktor Frankl, who survived several concentration camps, credits his survival to meaning. In Man’s Search for Meaning he observed that survivors were those who believed their lives had meaning and purpose.

Survival was linked to meaning. Meaning wasn’t a follow-on nice-to-have.

At work, as in life, we’re motivated by meaning and purpose. So let’s rethink Maslow’s hierarchy. Let’s assume meaning is a fundamental human need.

Align with purpose

 Recent research into happiness demonstrates that the happiest people aren’t those with the most money but those with a sense of purpose—a sense that they are contributing to something bigger than themselves. At least some of this has to derive from work. The purpose of a business, then, must be explicit and go beyond boosting the share price or fulfilling some bland mission statement. People want to believe that they’re part of something meaningful. Margaret Heffernan, Another Day, Another Mountain to Climb

Ideally your organization has a clear purpose. But even in the absence of a strong organizational purpose story you can define a purpose story for your project or change initiative that inspires and taps into people’s instrinsic motivation.

In It’s not what you sell, it’s what you stand for Roy Spence outlines 9 purpose principles (in the context of a change initiative, simply substitute the name of your change initiative for the word organization):

1. Purpose drives everything. It will drive all major decision making and become the determining factor in how you allocate resources, hire employees, plan for the future, and judge your success.
2. Purpose is a path to high performance. It fulfills a deep-seated need that people have and will drive preference for your company.
3. Purpose fosters visionary ideas and meaningful innovation. It provides the motivation and direction necessary to create meaningful innovation.
4. Purpose moves mountains. It can rally the troops to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds.
5. Purpose will hold you steady in a turbulent marketplace. It will see you through when times get tough and the road seems unclear.
6. Purpose injects your brand with a healthy dose of reality. It is not something you can fake. It’s genuine. It’s real. And it’s something that your customers honestly appreciate about you.
7. Purpose recruits passionate people. It will make your organization more attractive to value-based, passionate people.
8. Purpose brings energy and vitality to the work at hand. It provides meaningful and sustainable motivation for employees.
9. Purpose contributes to a life well lived. Work is no longer a 9-to-5 job to be endured but a meaningful source of fulfillment and satisfaction.

If you haven’t yet seen them, I’d recommend watching Simon Sinek’s TED talk How great leaders inspire action and Daniel Pink’s Drive: the surprising truth about what motivates us.

Can you discover a why that motivates in your change initiative?

Redirecting personal and organizational narratives

People don’t believe what you tell them. They rarely believe what you show them. They often believe what their friends tell them. They always believe what they tell themselves. What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change. Seth Godin

As I mentioned in story editing techniques for behavior change, story editing is a set of techniques for redirecting people’s narratives about themselves, others, and the social world in a positive way that leads to lasting behavioral change. How does this apply in an organizational context?

“I don’t take time to play with it because I don’t figure it will be here that long.”

“This company has a history of jumping into something like this with new technology and at the beginning really being cheerleaders. But then there seems to be a fallout after the train leaves the station. Some passengers still standing there wondering if there’s another train. A culture problem the company has to deal with.”

“No one wants to spend a lot of time on effort on something that’s ‘oh, now we’re doing this.’ Until you find out it’s staying.”

Reflect on these stories for a minute. What do they illustrate about the organizational mindset?

The narrative these people had formed about technology change initiatives was that they always fail. There may very well have been successful initiatives, but the stories remembered and spread were of failure. And based on the remembered stories of failure, they act. Or in this case, fail to act.

Like individuals, organizations can suffer from a fixed mindset.

How can we edit these personal or shared narratives? In Redirect, Timothy Wilson discusses three story editing techniques .

Story editing techniques

Pennebaker’s writing technique

Pennebaker’s writing technique helps people make a story out of a problem or a difficult experience. You step back from the experience and watch it unfold from the perspective of neutral observer. Instead of reliving the experience and feelings, you focus on why you feel the way you do. Focusing on the why allows you to find meaning, which makes the experience more manageable.

Story prompting  for best possible selves

Imagine you’re struggling to eat healthy and lose weight. One day, you really blow it. What story do you tell yourself? Possibly something along the lines of “I blew it. I’m never going to be able to stick with this. I might as well just keep eating…” Then you avoid the scale for weeks. It turns out, people who are successful in keeping weight off have learned to tell themselves a different story, something along the lines of “I overindulged yesterday, but today I’ll get back to my regular healthy eating habits.”

Story prompting uses subtle prompts to change how people interpret events in ways that make it easier for them to act in beneficial ways. Wilson shares two methods for story prompting:

• Give people information that allows them to reframe their experiences. For example, talking to first year university students to let them know that many people struggle first year, but end up doing well.
• Assign a writing exercise. “Think about your life in the future. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals. Think of this as the realization of all of your life dreams. Now, write about what you imagined. Do this for 20 minutes per day three days in a row. Don’t just think about what you have achieved, but also how you got there.”  Through the process of imagining how well things turn out in future, we focus on ways of achieving those goals and think about what we need to do to get there.

Do good, be good: changing behavior first

[People acquire virtues] by first having them put into action.. we become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlling by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage. Aristotle

Our behavior shapes the personal narratives we develop. If we act kind, we see ourselves as being a kind person. If we see ourselves as a kind person, we’re more likely to help others. And once we help others, we strengthen this new narrative of ourselves as a kind person.

This is the technique I used to learn how to present. I was terrified the first time but I did it anyway. Once I made it through my first presentation, I was able to start seeing myself as a presenter. “Hey, that went pretty well. I can do presentations after all.” Each presentation I’ve done since then has helped build and reinforce my perception of myself as a presenter.

To use the do good, be good technique, think about who you want to be. A kind person. Presenter. Adventurer. Collaborator. Healthy eater. Then identify the behaviors practiced by that type of person. Choose one of the behaviors and start practicing it, repeating regularly until it becomes a habit. Then choose another behavior.

Implications for organizational change

The stories circulating in your organization will have a significant impact on the success (or failure) of your change effort. If your organization has a fixed mindset, filled with stories of all the reasons why it can’t possibly succeed, then your initiative will fail unless you can design interventions aimed at editing these stories. And traditional communications and training approaches to change usually fail to do this. Ask yourself:

• What stories are people telling themselves about the change you’re trying to introduce? What do stories reveal about the assumptions and mental models driving people’s current behavior? Have you listened, done your emotional due diligence to uncover these stories?
• Have you identified the specific behaviors that, if broken down to a micro level, could be used for the “do good, be good” technique?
• What stories are you telling yourself about the change, people’s reaction to the change, and how do these stories affect your approach to change? I’ll blog more about why this is important in a future post.

Once you’ve identified stories that reveal fixed mindsets or counterproductive mental models, you can intervene using story editing techniques that allow people to make sense of the change, create a strong understanding of why, edit existing stories counterproductive to the change, and develop new stories supportive of the change.

Reflecting back on the stories I shared at the beginning of this post, how could story editing help shift the fixed organizational mindset they hint at? Here are a couple of possibilities:

• Use story prompting to highlight successful projects. Share the fact that people may have initially struggled early on to learn the new technology and incorporate it into the way they work, but that after an initial adjustment period they successfully made the change and it’s now the way things are done. I can also imagine using story prompting for specific behaviors. For example, converting negative stories sparked by having to tag content when uploading from “it’s too slow to add documents” or “it takes too many clicks” to “it take a couple of extra clicks to tag a document, but it sure saves a lot of time from that point on whenever anyone needs to find it.”
• Do good, be good. Using collaborative document repositories requires significant behavior change. Instead of keeping paper documents in file cabinets,  storing electronic documents on a personal computer where only they have access, or keeping copies of documents on a disorganized shared drive only accessible to a team, people are expected to use a shared corporate repository. Many may fit the persona of “keepers” or “hoarders” who see documents as “mine” versus “sharers” who see documents as “ours.” What behavior might start a shift in mindset from “mine” to “ours?” Perhaps getting them adding documents to the repository by sponsoring a competition for the biggest uploader or having a team upload party?
• Writing technique. At first I was going to dismiss this technique as problematic in an organizational context. But interactive workshops and gamestorming sessions could be used in a similar way as a platform for social sensemaking  similar to the writing technique for personal sensemaking. Interactive social sensemaking techniques  lead to shared stories, shared views, and shared mental models.

Story editing leads to behavior change

Not only do we need to view a problem through other people’s eyes, we can also change the way they view it with relatively simple interventions. Even if self-views are often embedded in years of family dynamics, personal relationships, and cultural forces.  Kurt Lewin

Though it was more than 20 years ago, I still recall when Claude Jutra, a well-known Quebec film director, drowned himself after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. This weekend I finally read Still Alice a powerful novel about a woman diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s.

My grandmother suffered from Alzheimer’s. Fortunately for future generations it wasn’t early onset, which I learned from the novel children have a 50% chance of inheriting. If it had been early onset, would I have wanted to be tested? Initially, I would have said no. But then in Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change I came across this reference: “People who were 100% sure that they would get [Huntington’s] disease and die prematurely were happier and less depressed than people who were 50% sure that they were healthy & disease free.”

Why? And what does this have to do with story editing and behaviour change?

People create meaning to overcome uncertainty

A possible answer is found in recent research on happiness. Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness suggests that regardless of whether something really good or really bad happens, we quickly adjust to our earlier level of happiness. He shares stories of people who, within a year of winning a lottery or suffering a spinal injury leading to paralysis, are just as happy as they were beforehand. People are remarkably adaptable.

The certainty of knowing you have the gene, that you will get Huntington’s or Alzheimer’s, allows you to adapt by making sense or meaning out of the diagnosis.

The uncertain person doesn’t know what to make sense of, whereas the certain one can begin the process of meaning-making and understanding and explanation for even the bleakest of outcomes. And by so doing, that person adapts and recovers – because once we reach an understanding of what something means and why it occurred, we dwell on it less and its impact wanes. Timothy Wilson

Although adaptation happens naturally, recent research on story editing suggests you can speed up the process, redirect a negative personal narrative, and change your behavior in order to increase your happiness.

People edit the scenes that make up their personal narrative

When we think back to our past or when daydream about our future we mold our memories or shape our dreams into an archplot to give them vivid shape.  Robert McKee

The job of a film editor is an art of storytelling. “A film editor must creatively work with the layers of images, story, dialogue, music, pacing, as well as the actors’ performances to effectively “re-imagine” and even rewrite the film to craft a cohesive whole.” From a huge pool of raw footage, they weave together scenes into a compelling story that connects emotionally. Powerful editing can make or break a movie.

Like film editors, we edit together snippets of experience (real, borrowed, and imagined) to form the scenes that make up our life stories. Most often, we do this unconsciously, not realizing we have editorial control over the remembered stories that help us make sense of who we are. And yet these stories are tremendously important as they influence our happiness and guide our current and future behavior.

Our experience of the world is shaped by our interpretations of it, the stories we tell ourselves, and these stories can often become so distorted and destructive that they completely hinder our ability to live balanced, purposeful, happy lives, so the key to personal transformation is story transformation. Timothy Wilson

Think you don’t edit your memories? That all of them conform directly to actual events? When you tell the story of where you were when you first heard about 9/11, the story you tell today may not match the story you told right after it occurred. What percent of people’s stories have been edited? Jonah Lehrer shares the results of an ongoing study of 9/11 memories in Wired.

Stories we tell ourselves can be positive or negative

Laid off? Didn’t get an expected promotion? Failed a test? Just heard about the latest and greatest corporate initiative? Met your daughter’s new boyfriend, decorated with a scorpion tattoo and a ring through his eyebrow? On encountering something new, our brain automatically weaves a story, fitting the experience into our worldview. The shape and tone of these stories (and resulting behavior they spark) is influenced our mindset.

Carol Dweck, author of the book Mindset,  distinguishes between people with growth versus fixed mindsets.

If you have a growth mindset, the stories you weave put you in the driver’s seat.  “I determine my world.  I am responsible for me. I can choose.” The focus is on your awareness and ability to choose. ” For example, let’s say you just failed a test. Maybe the story you tell yourself is something along the lines of “I failed the test. I didn’t do much studying. I just need to focus and apply myself, there’s no reason I shouldn’t be doing well in this subject.”

Only the other hand, if you have a fixed mindset, the stories you weave portray you as a helpless victim. “The world happens to me. They are responsible for…  They prevent me from…” They statements assume power is in them. The focus is outside yourself and they increase your dependence. People with a fixed mindset might tell themselves a story such as “I failed the test. I’m a girl. Girls are no good at math. There’s no point in applying myself any harder because no matter what I do, I’ll fail.”

Story editing is a set of techniques for redirecting people’s narratives about themselves, others, and the social world in a positive way that leads to lasting behavioral change.

In my next post, I’ll briefly describe three different story editing techniques and discuss possible applications to organizational change.

 

 

 

Technology is rational, predictable, controllable. People aren’t.

This situation reminds me of those old movies we’ve all seen of people trying to fly in machines before the airplane was invented: machines that had flapping wings; machines that had big, circular, umbrella-like contraptions that moved up and down; machines that had four sets of wings, none of which was large enough to generate sufficient life… It didn’t matter how hard the pilots tried. It didn’t matter how imaginative or clever they were. It didn’t matter how good they were as people or how noble their aspirations were. There was nothing these pilots were going to do to make these inventions fly – because they were structurally incapable of flight. – Peter Senge

You flip a switch or program a piece of technology to do something, and it does it.

Technology is rational, predictable, controllable.

Technology doesn’t argue back.

Technology doesn’t need to be motivated.

You hand people a piece of technology and tell them to use it to do something, and more often than not they argue back. Or they say “sure” and then quietly continue doing things the way they’ve always done them and hope if they ignore it long enough it’ll eventually go away. Or they complain that they have no time, that it’s too hard, that it’s stupid, that it’s too much work, that it’s too slow, that it’s too <infinite variety of complaints here>. 

People are irrational, unpredictable, not receptive to being controlled.

People argue back.

People need to be motivated.

When you flip the switch to deploy a new technology within your organization, you’ve only turned on the technology. You can’t flip a switch to turn on people. People are creatures of habit. They need to be motivated. They need to be seduced. They need to believe what you believe.

Achieving user adoption is the process of seducing people into discarding old behaviors and adopting new behaviors. Of nudging people away from their current way of feeling, thinking, and doing to a new way of feeling, thinking, and doing. Of converting them from an old system to a new one.

Deploying technology is a complex business change effort. And user adoption is the biggest challenge you’ll face in your change effort. Yet we’ve traditionally focused our efforts on the technology side of the deployment equation, spending 80% of our time and money on the technology.

Continuing to pour the bulk of our efforts into the technology is like continuing to look to for new ways to flap our wings faster. Instead, with 75-80% of the business value driven by invisible, so-called soft factors – use by people (Global CIO Report – Harnessing Information Value), isn’t it time to flip our focus from the technology to the people? After all, “the value of IT is not in ‘deploying it’ at all but in ‘using it’ and taking full advantage of it. IT brings value only when employees, clients and partners are able to use technology efficiently and improve their own performance. IT functions have the opportunity to create enhanced business value through improving the usage of these technologies, and most of all to get a strong return on their information assets.”

 Interested in learning more about approaches to flipping focus? Sign up for one of the full day workshops I’m facilitating at OpenText Content World:

• Seducing Users: The Psychology of Adoption
• Design Thinking for ECM Champions

 

Do you have an [enterprise] app for that?

Gartner predicts that by 2013, 40% of enterprise knowledge workers will have removed their desk phone, as illustrated in this great infographic on this history of the knowledge worker.

I’m one of those 40%. I participate in online meetings while soaking up the sun on my deck. I’m drafting this blog post from the Sleepless Goat, a funky little cooperative café in Kingston Ontario where I spend one morning each week writing. I participate in meetings and discussions using my smartphone.

We’ve finally reached the tipping point for mobile, crossing the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream. While this is happening faster in the consumer world than within the enterprise, the enterprise mobile revolution has begun. And that means we need to rethink how we enable knowledge workers to share information, learn, and connect with each other in their day-to-day work.

In The New Edge in Knowledge Carla O’Dell urges knowledge managers to ask the question “is there an app for that?” Although we’re creatures of habit, we’re more willing to embrace change when it helps us achieve our goals, fits the way we work, and helps us more effectively achieve the outcomes we’re responsible for.

Hey, I’m mobile! Meet Gary, road warrior

The evolution of the knowledge worker infographic got me thinking about Gary, a mobile road warrior persona I created earlier this year.

A persona is a tool for capturing insights and behaviors of a group of people. Instead of an abstract user, it allows you to design content, products, services, or experiences for a “real” person. It creates empathy, focus, and serves as a social object in a way that’s impossible with the elastic concept of user. While the job reflected in Gary’s persona is sales, his road warrior characteristics and behaviors apply equally to executives and consultants.

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