Change consultants can damage culture

Most companies know they have to adapt to survive in a rapidly changing world. So they hire expensive strategy consultants who design new operating systems, suggest enterprise technologies, propose an endless round of change initiatives to increase productivity and efficiency. But do they change things for the better? 

The way change is communicated to an organisation is crucial. Understanding the neuroscience behind how the brain responds to stories offers an important key to successful change communication.

Companies are not machines They are fragile organisms resting on a complex fabric of change-resistant people. And every new top-down process-driven change initiative leaves employees feeling just a little more stressed and a little less engaged.

According to a recent Gallup report 80% of employees are not engaged with their jobs.

Engaged employees are 57% more effective and 87% less likely to resign. Engaged employees result in a 240% increase in business outcomes.

Every company is on the quest for customer centricity yet as Aman Bhutani, SVP of Expedia, said in a recent talk: “How can a company inspire loyalty from customers if it does not inspire loyalty from employees?

So does this mean that the constant battering of consultant-initiated, top-down, process-driven change initiatives, designed to drive productivity and efficiency, is counter-productive?

Why Do People Resist Change?

A colleague who works at a senior level at one of the big four consulting firms recounted a fairly typical story the last time we met. The company has invested in an enterprise time-management software platform license, A year after deployment, however, more than half the senior leadership still refuse to adopt the technology. If senior leadership won’t comply, what hope is there for the rest of the organisation? They have been given all the information they need to explain the benefits of using the new software, and how it will drive efficiencies - but still they stick to the old ways of doing things. But why?

Because information does not drive adoption. Training is important, but on its own it’s not enough. Mandating is easy, but in large complex organisations it doesn’t work. You can try to force adoption by removing the alternatives, but this just causes frustration and resistance. Powerful, effective communications is the key to successful adoption.

Internal communication has always relied on top-down information-driven communication but after years of unsuccessfully battering our heads against that same unyielding wall of resistance, surely it’s time to look at new more effective ways of supporting change.

Maybe communications experts have to change thier ways of working to motivate employees change theirs.

Human Brains Are Wired For Storytelling
Stories are an essential and underused part of the new change communications toolbox. Ever since the first cave paintings messages have been communicated through stories.

Stories helped early man to understand the world, share knowledge, drive action and hold communities together. Stories are core of the evolution of human society. Stories are the means by which we navigate the world. Every action we perform, every decision we make, is accompanied by a personal internal narrative. Sharing stories is core to the human psyche. Our brains are wired to recognise patterns that help us predict probable outcomes. Narrative structures have been developed over thousands of years as the best way to learn, understand and absorb information.

So do we harness the power of storytelling in our change communications? Often not.

I supported a large pharmaceutical company recently. The IT department had been tasked with developing and deploying a centralised digital asset management system to cut costs and drive efficiencies. Getting the best ROI from the technology investment meant considerable changes to the way people worked.

All the necessary information available to support the change had been made available by the comms team: videos of C-level leaders explaining the direction, decks and documents explaining new processes, private forms to pose questions.

Did the department know how many people had actually accessed the well-organised files of content, or whether the information had the desired impact? No. But they had done their job. Information was available and people had been informed where to find it.

We interviewed employees across the organisation. Did they know what was happening? No. Did they understand the implications? No. Did they really understand the vision for the future? No. Did they understand the roadmap towards this distant unfamiliar vision? No. Were they excited about the change? No. Were they exhausted and demotivated by the endless change initiatives? God yes.

No-One Receiving
Why was the communications so ineffective? Because to grab customer attention, we need to deliver the right message in the right way at the right time. They were delivering the right information in the least effective way possible.

Informational text only stimulates two very small areas of the brain: the parts that process language i.e. the bits where words are decoded into meaning. Informational messaging does not engage and, worse still, when presented with hard data and information, the analytic brain is triggered. It automatically explores logical analysis and counter analysis to the presented data. Who says so? How did they find that out? Can they prove it? Not the response you want to provoke when trying to persuade people to join you on a journey to change.

Stories Drive Engagement
What happens to the brain when we are reading, listening or watching a carefully crafted story is totally different. Carefully selected words can provoke stimulation across a myriad areas: memories of texture and sensation, taste, emotion, physical movement, smells, colours, shapes, sounds. The brain ties the stimuli together to create a 3D image that evokes an emotional response. All of this makes it more likely the person receiving the message will stay fully engaged and retain the information.

We know all this and yet most companies continue to deliver corporate communications in the same tired ineffectual way: bullet points, stats and clipart in dry corporate powerpoint decks. Facts and stats are of course important, but much more powerful when embedded in powerful strategic narratives: written and spoken stories that follow basic narrative structures of the before, the now and the future, stories with a compelling plot, characters, a climax, and a conclusion, stories that allow each employee to see how they play an important role in shaping the future of the organisation.

Effective Change Communication
Evolution is crucial for survival in the fast changing world and effective change communications is crucial for successful evolution.

Your challenge as a change communicator is to develop a raft of stories based on a deep understanding of those affected by the change. The organisational narrative should be the overriding strategy that guides, drives, charts and channels the stories as they evolve and navigate the complexity of the organisational structure.

And don’t imagine one story can be cascaded unchanged throughout the organisation. Stories have to evolve and to be relevant to each stakeholder group. The most successful stories are co-created and evolved with internal influencers (we’ll look more closely at co- creation and participatory design next month).

You have access to the social, analytics and personalisation software platforms to help you deliver precisely targeted messages to potential customers. The challenge is to use them to deliver powerful, story-driven strategic campaigns to support your employees through the pain of change and into an engaged empowered future.