Adaptive Change: Stay CALM and Carry On
Organizations feel pressure to adapt and change as they scale and operationalize advanced analytics solutions, but they often don’t have a formal process to help sustain the change over time. This problem grows as the number of advanced analytics projects proliferates, magnifying the impact of change by introducing new ways of communicating, working, and making decisions.
Leaders need to understand the conditions under which change is likely to occur and implement a clear methodology for helping people plan for and adapt to the change necessary to transform into a data-driven culture.
Why and How People Change
In their bestselling book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, authors and academics Chip and Dan Heath tapped into decades of research from psychology, sociology, and other disciplines to uncover the keys to effective change. What they found is that successful change efforts share a common pattern requiring change leaders to address three realities at once:
If you want people to change, you must provide clear direction. What might look like employee resistance to change is often a lack of clarity; ambiguity and confusion can cause people to revert to the status quo. Therefore, leaders must establish a clear and compelling reason for the change, the essential “why,” and provide explicit direction for what is expected. Without clear direction, those charged with implementing change are wracked by decision paralysis, which “can be deadly for change — because the most familiar path is always the status quo.”
Change is hard because people wear themselves out. Deep in the throes of a change effort, what looks like laziness or indifference is often exhaustion. This is because change requires tapping into your reservoir of self-control which, unsurprisingly, is a finite resource. Similar to what humans experience with physical endurance, there are limits to the mental load that one can bear during times of continual change. The more significant the change, the more it will sap people’s energy and motivation. Clear direction and a formal process for change help minimize the grind that bogs down change efforts.
To change someone’s behavior, you have to change their situation or environment. What looks like a people problem in organizational change is often a situation problem. In other words, look at what changes can be made to the work environment to make it easier for people to make the right decisions. Furthermore, try to understand how someone’s situation (including culture, incentives, and social pressure) will likely influence their “bad” behavior, knowing that that behavior does not necessarily indicate who they are now or what they can become.
Considerations for Data-driven Cultural Change
Using the Heath's framework as a baseline for change, what are the implications in a business context? How should leaders approach change? They recommend three core strategies to enable change in any organizational context. But first, leaders need to recognize a simple truth drawn from the research: "…ultimately, all change efforts boil down to the same mission: Can you get people to start behaving in a new way?"
The Key Strategies for Change:
Point to the destination, bright spots, and critical moves. You need to be clear as to the ultimate destination. Strategic clarity and a compelling “why” are essential to engaging and motivating stakeholders. To hold their interest, you must highlight what the Heaths refer to as “bright spots.” This means highlighting what’s working and replicating it wherever possible. Finally, the “critical moves” refer to setting clear direction and expectations for the desired behaviors and actions. Clear, consistent communication is essential to this process.
Motivate, Shrink the change, and grow people. You are not starting from scratch. There have been successes, and you want to build on them. The Heaths remind us, "rather than focusing solely on what's new and different about the change to come, make an effort to remind people what's already been conquered." This is part of making the change more manageable, "shrinking the change" in ways that maintain motivation. When employees see change as hard but doable, they become more motivated and more likely to change themselves, seeking personal and professional development opportunities.
Tweak the environment and build habits. We often witness someone’s behavior and automatically assume that is who they are. Research has shown, however, that the environment in which someone operates can affect their behavior. Many incentives, motivations, cultural norms, or social pressures in a work environment can influence how people respond to change, adversity, or uncertainty. You need to look at the environment where people work to determine whether it is change-ready and where there are impediments to change. In other words, what work environment changes should you consider that would allow the new behaviors to stick? How do you make them habits?
The C.A.L.M. Method for Analytics Transformation
Talking about change is one thing; making it happen is quite a different story. Simply put, it’s hard. Therefore, like any difficult problem or challenge, you must approach the task with an understanding of underlying core principles that help frame your thinking about the issue and adopt a systematic approach that ensures consistent execution over time.
Let’s start with some core principles derived from our experience and the research discussed above:
Change is hard. There is no quick fix or easy tactics.
People are complicated, and motivations and behaviors can be difficult to unpack, including factors relating to the work environment.
Lasting behavioral change is synonymous with habit formation, turning desired behaviors into daily actions. As historian Will Durant observed, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Finally, since change is not short-term, you need a way to sustain effort while applying the principles just outlined. The CALM method is a straightforward approach to consider. C.A.L.M. stands for communications, alignment, learning, and measurement.
Before diving into the CALM method, let's start with a definition of change management. Change management is a systematic process helping individuals, teams, and organizations plan for and adapt to change. An important point to note is that change is continuous and accelerating. Therefore, leaders should think of change management as continuous learning or improvement. This reframing of change management is critical for organizations working to create more adaptive organizations as the practices outlined below become the foundation for a new way of working.
How does CALM Work?
Communications
The first job for leaders is to establish a clear and compelling rationale for the change--the “why.” This requires paying close attention to the context for the change and explicitly defining the problem using clear communication. Leaders often gloss over this and assume broader stakeholders have the same understanding of the problem. A good rule of thumb: spend at least 50% of your initial communications defining the problem using a written narrative rather than a slide deck. For communication to stick, it must be clear, concise, consistent, and continuous.
It’s not about launching and moving on; it’s about constantly communicating, getting feedback, learning, and adjusting. Communication assets like executive summaries, FAQs, and case studies are some ways to reinforce the message. Roadshows, town halls, and workshops are effective vehicles for delivering the message. Leaders must be forthright in sharing that uncertainty is inherent in everything they discuss and clear about the assumptions underlying the strategy. This level of openness helps build trust, an essential precondition for getting people moving in the same direction. Effective communications build the foundation for better alignment, the next step in the process.
Alignment
Alignment activities keep stakeholders on the same page, gauging where there is a misunderstanding, lack of support, or resistance. It happens at three levels: 1. aligning analytics strategy and people, 2. people and processes, and 3. processes and behaviors. Alignment, or engagement, is about conversations, listening to concerns, and processing feedback.
Unlike communications, which tend to be one-to-many, gaining alignment is more of a one-to-one approach that typically includes coaching, workshops, roadshows, and counseling. However, just as with communications, transparency is essential to building trust. Alignment creates the conditions for effective learning by providing the context for behavioral change -- aligning the work people do with the required behaviors.
Learning
Learning is the critical enabler for transforming change into continuous improvement. It combines traditional instructor-led and self-directed learning, with three clear distinctions related to the approach to learning and the curriculum: 1. It combines mindset training and technical skill sets, and 2. It is highly contextual, tied to specific processes and the requisite behaviors supporting those processes, and 3. It is continuously reinforced with the intent of turning practices into habits.
In addition, continuous learning leads to mastery, a crucial element of human motivation. As employees learn and grow, mastering the essential skills and concepts, they experience positive reinforcement that triggers a flywheel effect, driving more of the desired behaviors of data-driven organizations, which at their core are committed to learning and adapting.
Measurement
The primary goal of measurement is to track the degree to which the change effort impacts predetermined success criteria. In other words, is what you’re doing concerning change activities having the desired impact? While setting and measuring goals related to company performance is important, they are not sufficient for driving change. Instead, organizations need to make assumptions about the activities and behavioral changes that will drive the change and measure those.
These activities serve as the “leading indicators,” or inputs of change, with the goals (performance metrics) serving as the lagging indicators or outputs. Tools like a Change Scorecard track change activities, employee sentiment, and behavior change metrics that leaders review to gauge progress and determine where they may need to intervene and modify activities or communications.
Conclusion
As you read through the description above regarding the CALM method, it's tempting to convince yourself you are already doing these things. For example, you communicate effectively, have all-hands meetings, provide training, and track employee sentiment. These are all necessary preconditions for a change-ready organization. Still, they are insufficient in today's competitive environment. Data-driven, people-centered organizations that learn and adapt will experience a significant competitive advantage.
Leaders must start by reframing the problem and focusing more on preparing the workforce for change. This requires continuous effort, adapting with smaller course corrections, rather than rewarding people for surviving disruptive change through heroic efforts when it does arrive. Leaders must also embrace the idea of change as synonymous with continuous improvement and embed it in the culture. Organizations must treat change management like other mature processes to accomplish this they must applying greater rigor by clearly defining, integrating, measuring, and constantly improving the change process.
Another way to think about this is how Agile is to software development; the CALM method is to the continuous improvement of knowledge worker productivity. They are both designed to improve the speed and quality of a specific output. In the case of Agile, it is a functioning software solution. The CALM method improves the speed and quality of organizational processes and decision-making by enabling faster and higher quality decisions throughout the organization -- the essence of a data-driven enterprise.