- Guest Author - Tyler Craig, CEO of Conarc
4 Keys to Managing Change Effectively
The landscape of business is changing rapidly. Surviving in this environment demands relentless adaptation.
There’s just one problem: most people are conflicted when it comes to change.
Crowds line up to get the latest smartphone. Foodies can’t wait to try a new restaurant. But these same enthusiasts resist embarking on a new diet or altering trivial parts of their daily routines - even when the benefits of change are obvious.
At Conarc, we encounter this ambivalence daily. Our clients sometimes hesitate to abandon familiarity and invest in a new and different way of doing things.
From our experience, we’ve discovered some important insights about change. Keep them in mind, and you’ll make it easier for those around you to accept transition. Neglect them, and you might discover how tenaciously people cling to habit.
1. Change can’t be avoided.
Most institutions tend to approach change as disruption - something that alters the rhythms of business as usual. It’s an unpredictable part of life that must be confronted. There’s even a burgeoning subdiscipline of change management to help corporate leaders navigate new realities.
In fact, business as usual involves constant change. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Nor is there a need for unique strategies to deal with it, if a business is healthy. “All management,” points out consulting guru Robert Schaffer, “is the management of change.”
On this view, change isn’t an interruption requiring special techniques to address; it’s part of daily operations. The more innovation, adaptation, and growth routines become fixtures in organizational culture, the easier it is to adjust to new developments.
2. There are limits to how much change people can accept.
So, if the terrain around you is constantly shifting, you should just become a cheerleader for change, right?
Not so fast. There’s a reason change has the reputation for being hard: altering behaviors that have become second nature takes effort. Lots of it. There’s only so much people can handle at once.
If you’re trying to get people to move in a different direction, it’s best to break their journey into manageable stages. Start on familiar ground, highlighting the values and capacities for change your audience may already possess. Provide them with a clear path to follow. Celebrate any landmarks of progress along the way. Above all, keep them focused on the destination.
By doing this, you’ll help those around you gradually adjust to even the most sweeping changes without pushing them beyond their capacities.
By doing this, you’ll help those around you gradually adjust to even the most sweeping changes without pushing them beyond their capacities.
3. Embracing change requires both hearts and minds.
In their invaluable study Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath chalk up ambivalence about change to the divided mind. Each individual operates partly by reason, partly by feeling. To adopt new behaviors, reason needs to be aligned with feeling.
Think about convincing someone to quit smoking. Simply ticking off the health risks associated with this behavior and listing the benefits of giving it up are rarely enough to overturn a long-standing habit. At the same time, playing to the emotions without discussing the advantages of a healthier lifestyle can come across as manipulative and browbeating.
A divided mind will rarely change. If you want to give people the best chance at doing things differently, help them reconcile their motives with their logic.
4. Environment shapes acceptance.
Cognitive scientists have discovered that, in addition to the role habits and their perceived rewards create, environmental cues play a powerful role in conditioning behavior.
Business journalist Charles Duhigg uses the difference between being at home and being on vacation to illustrate how context promotes habit. At home, you get used to performing the same task the same way with little variation. You operate automatically because familiar surroundings nurture stability. But go on vacation, and you just might find yourself doing things differently, “because once the cues change, the patterns are broken up.”
Remember: focusing on patterns of behavior and the incentives they create won’t always be enough. Changing deeply-ingrained habits often requires changing the surrounding environment as well so the spell routine casts can be broken.
None of this makes change easy. But seeing change as normal, recognizing the limits of altering habit, aligning motivations with reasoning, and paying attention to how surroundings structure behavior will make it easier for you and your team to adapt. In today’s business environment, that could mean the difference between struggle and success.
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Tyler Craig is CEO of Conarc, a provider that designs and develops the iChannel solution for businesses’ document, data, relationship, and workflow management. A passionate advocate of innovation, Tyler spent time in both the aerospace and IT industries before taking the helm of Conarc in 2016.