Successful large-scale change is a complex affair that happens in eight stages. The flow is this: push urgency up, put together a guiding team, create the vision and strategies, effectively communicate the vision and strategies, remove barriers to action, accomplish short-term wins, keep pushing for wave after wave of change until the work is done, and, finally, create a new culture to make new behaviour stick.
The central challenge in all eight stages is changing people's behaviour. The central challenge is not strategy, not systems, not culture. These elements and many others can be very important, but the core problem without question is behaviour — what people do, and the need for significant shifts in what people do.
Changing behaviour is less a matter of giving people analysis to influence their thoughts than helping them to see a truth to influence their feelings. Both thinking and feeling are essential, and both are found in successful organisations, but the heart of change is in the emotions.
The flow of see-feelchange is more powerful than that of analysis-thinkchange. These distinctions between seeing and analysing, between feeling and thinking, are critical because, for the most part, we use the latter much more frequently, competently, and comfortably than the former.
When we are frustrated, we sometimes try to convince ourselves there is a decreasing need for large-scale change... Yet some handle large-scale change remarkably well.
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