Leading Exponential Change

by Erich R Bühler

  Finally, you’ll have to make sure that changes in the company structures are not made solely by management, but that employees also have explicit permission (Agency) to take over and improve them. When trying out new ideas or ways of working to achieve that ideal day, employees should feel safe, even if they fail.

  As you can see, ELSA works in a way that is contrary to other change frameworks: it starts by envisioning an ideal day, leading us to employ adequate language to provoke a change instead of first modifying processes or rules.

  The language used must inspire and open the path for change. You may also need to make small changes in the office layout to encourage informal conversations. Keep in mind that ELSA is not only useful for applying small alterations in your company. It’s also a powerful tool that enables any future states to be achieved progressively, little by little.

  To this end, ELSA makes change plans collaborative and uses informal communication channels. ELSA positively stimulates minds, makes people take ownership of the change, allows for greater collective intelligence, and enables people to reach different conclusions and solutions.

  Following are ten initial recommendations for using the ELSA change framework. You and those around you should expand this list:

  Always start by imagining that ideal event, and use your five senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste).

  Use words that are meaningful (and inspire) from the point of view of those who must change, and include powerful stories that involve the five senses. Also use phrases or words that encourage learning.

  Prime your audience during the message. If positive events took place and people associate certain words with those events, include them.

  Deliver the same message in at least ten different ways, through stories and phrases, using different variations every day. Repeat the message as often as you can.

  Make discreet changes to the physical environment so that it supports the informal exchange of messages.

  Maintain consistency between what you say and what you do.

  Ensure high Enterprise Social Density so that the message can reach all corners of the company, or wherever you want it to.

  Spread the message among people who are trusted by those who are willing to change.

  Ensure that everyone involved feels safe about experimenting with the new concepts, and that the company supports them at all times (even if they fail).

  Once ELSA is used, get feedback, improve, and repeat.

  The DeLTA Change Framework

  You can’t always count on the support of the company’s leaders or have a sponsor for the change initiative from the beginning. In my experience, this is often the case in more-traditional companies, where the simple decision loop is normally used, or in places where there is little experience in running a business transformation.

  If you face this type of situation, you could wait for the ideal moment, but your company could end up missing out on market opportunities. The DeLTA change framework offers a viable alternative to accelerate the adoption of change.

  DeLTA’s Eight Habits

  More-traditional companies have many habits, structures, and processes in their DNA. These are meant to align people with clear objectives and to standardize actions.

  Using these mechanisms in its favor, DeLTA focuses on gradually improving preexisting habits that help to make the change contagious.

  The idea is to achieve a small improvement as quickly as possible in one of the eight DeLTA habits, and then move on to the next one. The progress in each area reaffirms the change, increasing its traction and impact.

  FIGURE 8.2: The DeLTA framework and the eight habits to improve

  Keep in mind that DeLTA indicates only WHAT will have to be perfected, but not HOW to do it. Therefore, you and the others involved must choose how to improve the company using already-existing processes and forms of work.

  DeLTA is not a prescriptive change framework, and it doesn’t recommend a set of practices or processes for change. However, you can use many of the techniques you’ve learned in this book to achieve improvements, little by little, in each of the eight habits that DeLTA seeks to improve.

  Habit

  Expected improvement

  Alignment

  People ask more questions about problems they are experiencing and to reinforce habits that help them relate problems to those others are having.

  Envisioning the ideal day

  Individuals feel comfortable envisioning an ideal day. They can routinely use techniques to visualize that perfect day using their five senses.

  Creating a shared understanding

  People provide feedback to others in the company using the outputs from envisioning an ideal day, so they can easily share fears, barriers, or doubts.

  Building a collective purpose

  Collective behaviors help people feel they are part of a common good or initiative. This can include a collaborative creation of a vision of change, work agreements, or common goals.

  Alignment (II)

  People self-organize to create the conditions for the ideal day to become a reality. They should feel at ease with the new forms of work, new roles, necessary learning (decreasing the permission-to-learn pattern). They should feel comfortable making changes in the organization and establishing a start date for a change initiative.

  Prototype (plan)

  Employees develop habits that allow them to execute a plan without having to wait for others.

  Validation

  People improve behaviors that help collectively understand the outcomes from a prototype. This can include positive conversations about what was meant to be achieved and what was finally achieved.

  Reflection

  People can share and reflect on what has been achieved and feel comfortable proposing changes in personal interactions, processes, the company, or anything else necessary for the success of the plan.

  And . . . start over again.

  Table 8.1: The eight habits to improve with DeLTA

  Imagine you want to make it easier for twenty-five people to use three new practices and to automate a process to replace a skill that is scarce in your company. The desired outcome is that the organization improves the quality of its products and number of releases to the market.

  In a more-traditional company, management might set the date to start using new techniques or processes. While this is a quick and straightforward solution, it might result in people not feeling part of the initiative, showing little interest in improving the processes, lacking motivation to seek solutions, or pursuing habits that are not sustainable.

  The DeLTA change framework suggests progressively improving eight specific habits and starting with better alignment habits.

  Traditional companies already have structures and behaviors to support alignment (meetings and other activities). You can use these to your advantage. As a result, people will be exposed to situations they already know, and they will feel more comfortable and offer less resistance to change.

  Going back to the previous example, with DeLTA you will provide twenty-five people from different teams with the time to align themselves with respect to the problem they are experiencing (everyone should understand the issue and any similarity it has with the difficulties experienced by others).

  The expectation is that they will collectively discover the root cause of the problem. To achieve this improvement in alignment, you may need to organize one or several meetings, dynamics, and activities that are already common practice
in your company.

  As mentioned, your objective is to obtain a small improvement in this behavior and then move quickly to the next behavior of the change framework.

  Once you’ve made progress in alignment habits, DeLTA suggests that you move to the next one, which is to encourage people to imagine what an ideal day would look like—you might have to remind the team that this means a day without the problem in question, and not a day of vacation.

  Participants must let their imaginations fly so they can visualize how their team would work in an ideal situation, free of all obstacles. Imagining that perfect day makes it possible to use the senses, provide new ideas and points of view, and begin to feel its benefits. But it isn’t yet time to present the final solution.

  People should begin feeling comfortable incorporating habits of imagining that perfect day, and they should spontaneously provide their coworkers with feedback and points of view that weren’t initially evaluated. As before, how you integrate this depends on the mechanisms that already exist in your company.

  Next, DeLTA suggests that we focus on those habits related to creating a shared understanding, which is crucial to the success of the change initiative. The primary focus is on participants improving their habits when they provide feedback related to the company’s ideal day. The goal is that they feel comfortable asking the organization to include their ideas in the initial plan, and that they can raise any doubts about barriers, their fears, uncertainty, or anything that will help them feel more comfortable.

  As before, use tools and processes that are already present in your company to push this forward.

  Once everyone is comfortable offering ideas on how to reach that ideal day, it’s time to encourage habits to build a collective purpose, such as creating a vision of change, constructing explicit working agreements, defining common goals, and any other mechanism that helps set a shared goal.

  At this point, people often start talking about specific metrics and common goals, as well as about removing initial obstacles.

  The DeLTA loops back around to the center, Alignment (II). This time, the objective is for participants to improve habits that allow them to quickly establish conditions for successfully executing a plan. Participants should usually be able to self-organize around the implementation of the change, deciding, for example, what learning is needed and the start date of the experiment or prototype.

  Remember that every plan is only a hypothesis until it meets reality. The main premise here has been that the three new practices and the automation of a scarce resource will help improve the quality and speed of delivery of a product to the market.

  Certainly, the initial plan could have been altered with employee feedback, but for simplicity, we’ll consider that the plan remains unchanged.

  You may have noticed that the upper half of the DeLTA loop focuses on improving habits or behaviors that prepare minds to maximize collaboration in preparation for a change. The lower half focuses on improving the habits needed for its execution.

  The first step of the lower loop, prototype, focuses on improving interactions or habits so that teams can comfortably start a short plan to test a hypothesis. The goal is for people to feel safe and at ease during the execution stage. To accomplish this, people need to implement the three practices and automate a process for a few days to examine the positive effects in the company.

  I recommend that the execution of the pilot test last for a short, fixed timeframe, and that simple metrics be used to validate results.

  At the end of the set time, those habits that help people validate and collectively understand the results of the plan’s execution should be improved.

  “It’s so much easier to suggest solutions when you don’t know too much about the problem.”

  Malcolm Forbes, Businessman

  Finally, teams should focus on improving behaviors that help them reflect on their current ways of work. They should be able to progressively propose changes in their interactions, habits, processes, company structures, or anything else needed for the success of the plan.

  The loop starts over again, at alignment. This means that you either continue in the direction initially intended, change course, or expand the solution to the rest of the company.

  As you can see, DeLTA repeats itself over and over again and tries, with each complete cycle, to continuously make small improvements in habits, processes, and company structures to progress positively toward a better organization. DeLTA’s main advantage is that it allows you to use preexisting forms of work and structures and to progressively modify areas so that the change becomes contagious.

  What You Have Learned

  How language affects the way people reason.

  The effects of priming.

  How to imagine a perfect day can help you look for new solutions.

  The ELSA change framework.

  Ten recommendations for using ELSA.

  The DeLTA change framework and the eight habits to be improved.

  What techniques of the ELSA change framework could you use in your organization?

  Is there any phrase or word that can positively alter the behaviors of those around you?

  Is there any habit that DeLTA suggests and that needs to be improved in your organization?

  Have you answered “Denmark” and “Elephant”?

  I’ve always believed that leaders make themselves, and that they deliberately decide to become agents of change. We can all develop the skills to help others find the best solutions and offer clarity in times of turbulence. I hope you now have a better understanding of how human beings react to exponential change in companies. I also hope you feel that you have new tools to help individuals on their journey of self-improvement. I sincerely expect that you will begin to take the steps that give shape and meaning to your world, and that these steps lead you to new, positive experiences.

  I invite you to share your experiences and success stories. Write me about the techniques you have learned by reading this book and how they have helped you and your company improve. I also welcome any suggestions on how to make this book better.

  If you have enjoyed and found value in reading Leading Exponential Change, please send me a photo of yourself holding your copy of the book and tell me what you found most interesting and most helpful in your day-to-day work.

  I wish you the best in the forthcoming exponential months!

  Erich R. Bühler

  CEO Innova1st Consulting

  Erichbuhler@innova1st.com

  Twitter: @Erichbuhler