Change or Die
Article by Alan Ward
In the last few weeks I have begun to appreciate how creatively our minds will begin to work if we just give ourselves enough clear space and time! For the past month I have been busy keeping a New Year's Resolution that I made to walk for an hour a day or alternatively have a round of golf and it has been during my morning walks that I have discovered this "clear space and time" that I just referred to. For the last couple of weeks during my morning walks around Neutral Bay, Mosman and Cremorne I have been pondering the question:
"Why does it take us so long to put in place urgently required changes in our activities, behaviours and attitudes, whether that is in our personal lives or our businesses, in spite of the fact that we have been provided with, and accepted incontrovertible evidence that our activities are fundamentally damaging to our health?"
Those of you who know me will be aware that for the last ten years and more I have been easily tempted to over-indulge in good red wine, particularly from South Australia, usually accompanied by a medium-rare eye fillet steak. Those of you who know me will also have heard me profess from time to time that I am unable to see any virtue in "exercise and sweating" ever since I stopped doing physical work for a living, and that like C.W. Fields, every time I have been tempted to exercise I have tended to go and lie down until the aberrant notion has passed. This in turn has meant that each year for the last ten or fifteen years I have slowly but steadily added around 1.5 kgs to a frame that in my early forties was already "well set-up". Now at the age of fifty seven I find myself to be the perfect weight for a six foot two second row forward playing for the Wallabies (you work it out!).
So given the above, let me introduce you to the pain and pleasure process of change. Simply stated, this concept proposes that we will continue to do something that may be personally damaging and painful in the long-term for as long as we continue to derive pleasure from the activity in the short-term. In the middle of last year I reached my tipping point. My doctor was able to incontrovertibly demonstrate the long-term damage I was doing to my health based upon my short-term pleasure in over-indulging.
For reasons too mundane to even relay, in June last year I had to visit my doctor. Once he had unblocked my clogged ear, I told you it was too mundane to relay, he said to me. "The last time I saw you your blood pressure was a bit high, I think we should have a look at how you are going now."
So he attached me to the machine, pumped up the cuff and took a first reading, didn't say anything about the result, and proceeded to take a second reading. The next words out of his mouth were a bit disconcerting; they were along the lines of. "Bloody hell, I'm not too sure what to do here! Don't sneeze, my insurance won't cover me!"
Of course my response was, "What's the problem, Geoff?" His reply was "Your blood pressure is two thirty five over one forty." My response, without being a smart-arse was, "Is that high?" to which he replied "Well let's put it this way, I would be a lot happier if the bottom result (i.e. 140) was the top measure (i.e. 235)!"
Needless to say he got my attention! I could go on at this point about the fact that I was feeling fine, didn't feel stressed, have a history of high blood-pressure and that it is a family trait. Then my doctor shifted into over-drive and prescribed a cocktail of pills that have successfully reduced my blood-pressure and virtually dropped my cholesterol results to all time lows, but none of that really matters for the story I want to get across.
As I said, all of this happened in the middle of last year, but it has really taken me six months to do anything about it and that is why I have been thinking about the question I posed at the head of this article.
Those of you who have worked with changedrivers will probably have heard us refer to "The Nine Essentials of Change". This is a model that Malcolm Anderson, one of our founding Directors introduced to changedrivers in the early days of our being. Essentially the model explains how nine discrete but interdependent elements of change are important to the delivery of effective change management programmes. In my morning walks I have been pondering how important these have been to my personal change journey.
I have decided to share this information with you because I think that it is too easy to look at organisational change dispassionately and think about it as something that goes on at an enterprise level, forgetting that the human side of change is the thing that makes the systems side of change "stick". If our people don't adopt the change, accept the reasons for the change and then modify their behaviours and attitudes it doesn't matter how good our technical solution has been, at best we will get an implementation that fails to deliver the expected returns on our investment, at worst we will simply have yet another failed change management intervention.
Essential #1 - Someone "important" has to decide things have to change
In our model, we have come to recognise that the first critical trigger for any change initiative is that someone of importance (rank, position, influence, "clout", access to budget, whatever) must be dissatisfied with the current situation and has decided that they want things to change for the better. So let's address that issue within the context of my personal position.
I have come to recognise that the tipping point was that I came to be dissatisfied with my overall state of health. It didn't matter that Rosemary, my wife was frustrated that my life-style and sedentary job weren't doing me any good. Nor was it persuasive that my business partners were worried that I was going to drop off the perch with a heart attack and leave a hole in our company. The fact that on a monthly basis my doctor was verbally beating me up and making me get on his scales of shame didn't get to me either. After all he was supplying me with the chemical solution to my problem and as far as I was concerned my blood-pressure was under control and I didn't have a self-perception of being obese!
It was only when I decided that I was not happy with the way things were and that something had to be done about my situation that anything changed. It was only after I had really decided to move beyond intellectualising, planning and prevaricating about what needed to be done that the change to my attitude occurred.
Essential #2 - There needs to be a vision for the future.
From an organisational perspective we have also come to understand that the important person's desire for things to be "better" needs to be clearly articulated and expressed as a Vision for the Future.
In my case, I think this lack of a personal vision of how my future could be different was all part of the reason that it took me so long to get to Stage One.
Once I had got over the initial "Oh My God this is serious" episode I really did just settle back into life. OK, I was dissatisfied with the fact that I was overweight and had blood pressure problems but didn't really have a mental image of how I wanted the future to be and I didn't believe this stuff was going to kill me anyway. I come from strong blood lines and although my mother was only in her mid-seventies when she died it was cancer, not high blood pressure that got her (she had been taking medication for high blood pressure from her late forties). I have also been fortunate enough to have inherited the genes of both of my maternal grand parents who were fond of a drink and good food and as some of you know I have got a cellar full of good South Australian red to get through before I flee this mortal coil!
In spite of all of these artificial excuses though I did eventually work it through and wake up to myself and now have a relatively clear picture of how I want my life to look. I have goals about my weight, my blood-pressure without medication, and the work-life balance outcomes that are going to be required for me to obtain my objectives around what I want to achieve inside changedrivers and those things that I want to achieve in my out-of-the-office hours. Again those of you who know me will have no problems understanding that a major focus is to get back into playing regular golf and getting my handicap back closer to ten than twenty!
Essential #3 - Project Coordination & Progress Control
In an organisational setting, once we have gotten beyond finding that important someone who is sufficiently dissatisfied with the current status that they have demanded improvement, and have developed our vision for the future, the complex question we then have to answer is how do we move from vision into action? We have observed that the senior management team have got to go beyond simply approving or even advocating the change if they are looking for a truly sustainable result. We believe they must own and lead the change initiative, becoming the change drivers themselves. Additionally, the change project must be well planned, documented and managed.
So from a personal perspective I have accepted that I am the one that is responsible for the changes in attitude, behaviour and activity and that I am the one that has to be held accountable for the results of the initiative. Here is how we are tackling the planning, documentation and management of this personal change journey.
Rosemary and I are the management team on this project and we have decided that we need a twelve month time-line to achieve our objectives. Taking advice from my G.P. the vast majority of the health issues that I need to bring under control are related to weight, therefore our primary focus is to achieve a position whereby I am putting less fuel into the body than is required for effective function. Simply put, if I burn more calories than I consume then I will lose weight. From a planning perspective our first step was to find a menu plan and an exercise regime that I could stick to. Enter the CSIRO Well-Being Diet and my one-hour walk or game of golf each day.
The documentation is pretty straight-forward. I weigh myself every Monday morning and record the result in an Excel Spreadsheet, and in the same spreadsheet monitor my blood-pressure which I try to do on a daily basis. From a management perspective, I have to visit my G.P. every time I need more drugs and he makes me get on his "scales of shame", he takes my blood-pressure and I provide him with print-outs of blood-pressure readings for him to review.
Essential #4 - Systems & Processes
OK, so now we have our plan in place it's all a case of making it happen on a day-by-day basis. Again, in an organisational context this means making sure that our corporate knowledge, that is the processes, policy and organisational learning has ensured that we have developed systems that are cognisant of the socio-technical requirements for change. It is important that these processes have been translated into an accessible operating environment that delivers consistent process and output; ensures adequate and appropriate training; is supported by an effective compliance regime and that all of this organisational effort is focused upon releasing the creative and innovative energy of your staff. My God that was a mouthful, no wonder people get pissed off with consultants and their jargon!
Let me try to explain the above in the context of my change programme. As I said previously, the two critical elements of my change programme are the menu plan and the exercise regime. Now for those of you who have diet and exercise under control and who are sitting there wondering what all of the fuss is about you may just want to skim read this section.
For you others, I don't know if you are like me but I doubt there is a diet that I haven't tried. Let me refresh your memory, remember Jenny Craig? Well the calorie counting, boring menu plan, and support meetings just didn't work for me. I was never tempted to experience the Weight Watchers programme, the notion of being sent to the pig pen because you have put on some weight might work for some but not for this little black duck. The Israeli grapefruit and the Vegetable Soup diets might give instant results, but I just knew that they could only be short-term at best and were not sustainable alternatives. SureSlim offered promise with its proven scientific process, a lot of people wearing white coats who worked out of slick offices in commercial centres, but again the food was so bloody boring! And let's not forget the Atkins no/low carbohydrate diet, I was really comfortable with eggs and bacon in the morning and plenty of red meat for dinner, but damn I missed the chips and mashed potatoes with my steaks and getting and staying in a state of lipolysis required dedication.
So with all of this experience of diets and dieting without success, losing weight only to put more on when I stopped the diet than I had lost by being on the diet, I really didn't need to further intellectualise the issue. What I needed was a well thought through menu plan that I could stick to for the next twelve months!
We spent Christmas in Adelaide with our family and at one of the gatherings I chatted with my nephew who is a doctor. He was telling me about the CSIRO Well-Being Diet and told me that he had managed to lose almost 10 kgs over a three month period and that in his opinion it all made good medical sense. So now I was faced with a testimonial from someone I respected, tangible evidence of the results and that was enough for me.
The exercise plan was a snip. I hate swimming it has to be one of the most boring activities even though I know how good it is for you. Riding static exercise bikes is almost as boring as swimming and you have to be a real thrill-seeker to ride a push bike for exercise on Sydney roads. My G.P. had been telling me that a one-hour walk five days a week was perhaps the best thing I could do so it was an easy decision to adopt a target of one-hour a day walking or a round of golf. So far I have only missed a couple of days and I find that I am getting noticeably quicker and therefore covering greater distances in my hour pounding the pavement day-by-day. I have also noticed an increased endurance on the golf course and now don't fade quite so badly from the twelfth hole onwards.
Essential #5 - Structure & Resources
Once again, let's start from an organisational context, based upon our vision for the future and our understanding of the systems and processes that we have decided to either follow or implement as a project team we need to articulate the future operating model and systematically work through the necessary changes that will be required in structure, roles and responsibilities of the organisation if we are going to achieve our objectives. The resources that will be required in terms of systems, equipment and consumables will need to be determined and made available. The governance arrangements that will provide guidance for the operating managers will need to be put in place and we must be confident that they actually support the required changes. Finally, the initiative has to be backed up with a rigorous performance measurement and benefits realisation system that will allow all concerned to track their progress against goals.
In the context of my change journey the first four elements have been established, the important individual has decided a change has to take place and I have built a picture of the future that I can envisage. Rosemary and I have formed the project team and we have worked out a menu and exercise plan that we are going to follow.
Considering the roles that we are playing in this initiative, Rosemary continues to be the domestic engineer and has taken on the responsibility for making sure that the food that we need to meet the menu plan is available as required. She didn't need to clear the cupboards of cakes, biscuits, chocolate and ice cream simply because she never bought that stuff anyway. It has never been the food in the home that has been the problem it has always been the stuff that they would sell me in restaurants! My role in this department is another matter. I now have to take responsibility for eating to the menu plan even when I am away from my home support team and whilst this may be difficult we are finding that all it really takes is knowledge about what it is that I am supposed to be eating and then the discipline to actually order something that approximates the meal if I dine at a restaurant.
As far as exercise resources are concerned we have retrieved a treadmill and a Total Gym System 1000 from the Millers Long Term Storage facility. I have to confess that both of these machines were bought at times of weakness! Unable to sleep and watching the shopping channel at three o'clock in the morning they both seemed like a good idea at the time and because I was able to "get in early" I saved myself hundreds of dollars even though I didn't really want or need them and in all honesty had no intention of using them! But I knew they would be good for me!! Be honest, how many of you have the George Foreman Healthy BBQ Grill at the back of one of your kitchen cupboards?
The governance arrangements are being provided by monthly visits to my G.P. and the CSIRO Well-Being Diet. The rigorous measurements system are "the scales of shame", blood-pressure monitor and the heart-rate monitor that I wear whilst I am walking and benefits realisation will be dependent upon me meeting the key performance indicator milestones that I have established for myself in consultation with Rosemary and my doctor.
Essential #6 - Competency and Culture
As you would expect, by the time we have got to the sixth essential we are beginning to get into the detail of how this is all going to come together. In an organisational context, we need to determine and define the skills, knowledge and attitudes that will be required to sustain the change in such a way that the HR systems, namely recruitment, performance management, training & development and succession planning can be focused on building new core competencies.
Through a process of engagement with staff, we need to have mapped and understood the organisational values, culture and behaviours so that we can ensure that we will be able to detect potential conflict and gaps between the organisation's objectives and individual WIIFMs (what's in it for me?).
And now we are getting into the really difficult area as far as the personal change journey is concerned. Despite lots of evidence to the contrary I am actually a reasonably intelligent individual, and as I said earlier, the last thing I needed was more information about diet and exercise. What I needed was a change of attitude and behaviour based upon a shift of values. I am sure you will have detected some of my conflicting values from observations I have made throughout this paper. So my first job has been a shift of attitude, I still see no virtue in sweat and exercise, but I now accept it as part of a process and have been prepared to modify my behaviours in such a way that some of my activities now make me sweat. Whether or not this will ever be an accepted aspect of my new life is something I am still coming to terms with. But the thing that I have done is to work out how my behaviours need to change in terms of alcohol-free days, amounts of food consumed, time and place of eating, regular exercise from either walking or golf and I figure if I can embed these changes in behaviour and activity then eventually my attitudes will become similarly aligned.
Of course the WIIFMs are vital and at the moment they are simply the pleasure of achieving the milestones on my project plan.
Essential #7 - Effective Communication must underpin all change activity
In our 9Es Model we stress the need for a clear communications plan that will build an understanding of the need for change amongst those that are affected by the change. From an organisational perspective our objective is to build buy-in and sustain commitment amongst the stakeholders. We recommend that the leaders of the change ensure that they sustain these communications for the duration of the change process with the objective of delivering stakeholder commitment.
From my perspective this paper has fallen into my communication plan. The benefit of sitting down and converting my thoughts into what I hope is proving to be an entertaining and informative read has been an enjoyable experience. I have found that friends and family enjoy chatting about the "change effort" that I am making and are tremendously supportive.
At a more rigorous level the reports that I provide my G.P. regarding blood-pressure and the weekly weigh-ins is all part of the communication plan. In addition, I suppose that by publicly exposing what I am trying to do I am forcing my accountability. No one likes to be asked about their failures and by talking about this project in such an open way I am putting myself under pressure to ensure that I don't "drop off the perch" as it were!
Essential #8 - Strategic Alignment
When we are working with an organisation we stress the importance of ensuring that the strategic demands of planned change are aligned to the operational demands on managers and staff. The cliché for this is "walking the talk". My observation after thirty odd years in this country is that the Australian workforce has a bullshit detection system that is only surpassed by the blue-collar workers of the North of England (I know, I are one!).
If they receive mixed messages from management and see them "saying Yes, but doing No" or are get instructions from managers that the workers are translating as "don't do as I do, do as I say" then you can only expect disinterest, cynicism, confusion and disaffection.
In my personal context, strategic alignment has been a process of getting my support systems in place. Rosemary is steadfastly following the menu plan in the CSIRO Well- Being Diet and I have added the menu plan to my PDA so that when I am traveling I can follow the eating plan as closely as possible.
The personal challenge is going to be maintaining the change focus "out of the home". As I said earlier at home I am not tempted with food that is not good for me because Rosemary simply doesn't buy that stuff. However, in my work I travel a lot, stay away from home and eat out in too many restaurants, get tempted to "have a drink" with mates in pubs that sell Pommie Beer and I get the munchies driving between Sydney and Canberra!
So under those conditions, the strategic alignment is for me to understand at a conceptual level what I need to do. The walking part is easy, what I should put into my mouth is a little more complex, but once again the CSIRO Well-Being Diet comes to my aid. It provides a really clear explanation of the fundamental make-up of the daily menu-plan in terms of "daily serves" of bread, protein, fruit and carbohydrate. All I have to do is make sure I follow the recipe.
Essential #9 - Managing Issues & Risks
The final element of our Nine Essentials, "Managing Issues & Risk" is the glue between the bricks that holds the whole change process together. In an organisational context we have come to understand that this is all about knowing how to use a range of engagement methodologies and tools so that one can develop, manage and maintain stakeholder commitment. My fellow Director Malcolm Anderson is our resident expert in this white man's magic. In complex change environments this is about sensory perception, sniffing the air and having a sense of how the change initiative is all coming together. I told you it was white man's magic.
In my personal context it is about mitigating the inevitable temptations to slide back into comfort zones. At the moment a looming challenge is the fact that I am a Waratahs Rugby Union season ticket holder. This means attendance at games at the Football Stadium with five mates who will want to feed me with plastic cups overflowing with VB, Vili's meat pies and hot dogs and who will inevitably suggest a few beers in the pub across from the stadium while we "wait for the traffic to clear". I am not so concerned about falling off the horse occasionally because I know it will happen. It is just the will to get back in the saddle and bring it all back under control again.
I hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as I have enjoyed writing it. There is a whole lot more I could have rabbited on about, but at the end of the day the message that I want to get across is that effective change is absolutely dependent upon individuals being prepared to modify their behaviour. It is a leader's job to help their followers to find their WIIFMs and to provide the role model by "walking the talk".
As Michael Kotter said, "Behaviour change happens mostly by speaking to people's feelings… This is true even in organisations that are very focused on analysis and quantitative measurement, even among people who think of themselves as smart in an MBA sense. In highly successful change efforts, people find ways to help others see the problems or solutions in ways that influence emotions, not just thought."
I welcome any feedback you would care to give me. alan-ward@changedrivers.com.au