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TOM DEVANE
Sustainability of Results
Well you know you got it if it makes you feel good.
—Janis Joplin
All too often when a large-scale change effort is nearing its end, some bright-eyed change agent asks, “What shall we do about sustainability of this effort?” It’s great to ask the question, but it’s the absolutely wrong place to ask it. Dead wrong. We need to stop thinking about sustainability at the end of a change effort, and move it to its rightful place for full, formal consideration—at the start of a change effort.
As uncomfortable as it may be to consider, many well-intentioned people often contribute to setting up their organizations and communities for failure. For example, we may consciously ignore things that down deep we know we should pay attention to (oh, those people in the engineering department won’t try to block this change…). Or we may inadvertently miss things that later become important. The good news is that by paying attention to a few key elements at the start, we can dramatically impact sustainability. In this chapter, we hope to move sustainability from “back of mind” to “front of mind.” I have included some pragmatic insights into that elusive concept of sustainability and provided some practical tips on how to create conditions that will increase its likelihood. The chapter is organized into the following sections:
• Evidence of Sustainable Change
• Why Sustainability Can Be So Elusive
• Designing Conditions for Sustainability
Evidence of Sustainable Change
How do you know you’ve got a sustainable change occurring? It’s difficult to come up with one sentence that defines sustainability as it relates to large-scale change efforts. Below is a handy checklist of characteristics you can use to assess if a change is sustainable. This can be useful in planning your change effort, in evaluating it midstream, or analyzing what worked and what didn’t in a postproject, lessons-learned session. It would be great to have a short, concise, three–bullet point list, but since this is a complicated topic, it calls for a comprehensive approach to defining what we’re interested in. When you see the following—hopefully items in all four categories—it’s highly likely you have a sustainable change occurring. The four categories of evidence are:
• Direction
• Energy
• Distributed Leadership
• Appropriate Mobilization of Resources
DIRECTION
Direction is the general path forward, with appropriate boundaries that guide what actions people can and can’t take. Evidence of direction includes:
• Belief that the change effort has legitimacy. For people to commit to a new change and continue to do so, they must believe that it has some legitimacy in the eyes of the organization or community.
• Cross-functional/cross-group/multistakeholder interests are acknowledged and addressed for the good of the whole moving forward in a common direction. In an organization or community that has a sustainable change going, even though there are various, often-conflicting interests, people feel they are heard and that they can impact what’s happening. This helps them collectively understand, and move forward in the desired direction.
• Not tightly clinging to a previously designed and implemented solution. The ultimate “sustainability” of a particular change would be that once it’s implemented, nothing about it could be changed. That’s obviously not what we’re looking for. A sustainable change needs to be adaptive to changing external and internal trends and patterns. The initially articulated direction may need to shift, and that’s okay. It is not poured concrete that no one can change, but rather a moving target that continually advances the capabilities of the system to adapt to and influence the external environment. True sustainability needs to be viewed from the context of the greater “big picture” and not viewed narrowly as the sacrosanct recent change that was implemented and cannot now be touched.
ENERGY
Energy is the drive that people have to advance the change initiative. It manifests itself in such ways as people organizing themselves to do continuous improvement, staying/working late, and collaborating across functional boundaries, even though it has no direct benefit to them. Evidence that there is energy in your change effort includes:
• Gut-level as well as head-level engagement. To have energy to continuously improve, the affected group of people needs to feel emotionally attached to a particular issue or action plan to improve the current situation. Having a logical understanding is necessary, but not sufficient for ongoing sustainability.
• Good ideas come from anywhere. Rather than having good ideas only originate at the top, there need to be mechanisms for good ideas to bubble up from anywhere in the organization or community. Otherwise, widespread enthusiasm and support for the change will dissipate over time, undermining sustainability.
• People experience genuine opportunities for new, big things to happen. There are real chances for people to change the status quo, not just window dressing large-group get-togethers. People believe that their voices can be heard without interruption as others suspend judgment, and they can make a difference. However, they understand that having a voice doesn’t always mean their idea will be accepted, only that they will have a forum for introducing it and having it get a fair discussion.
• People have some key personal concerns satisfied. At least one or two critical personal “What’s-in-it-for-me?” concerns about the change have been satisfactorily addressed for most people.
• Appreciation of others’ uniqueness as manifested by authenticity and respect toward others. Unique ideas and capabilities are respected. People are capable of stepping into each other’s shoes, even though they may choose not to walk in them for very far. Person A may take an idea from Person B, even though he or she has not typically thought highly of Person B in the past. Such understanding and appreciation where there was none can often unleash incredible amounts of energy for the desired change.
• There is a thirst for learning. Research has shown that organizations that learn quickly and have learning-supportive environments have an easier time of implementing large-scale changes rapidly. When people have an opportunity to slake this thirst for learning, everyone wins.
DISTRIBUTED LEADERSHIP
True sustainability requires that people at all levels, in all locations, are authorized to own their own problems and solutions. It also implies that they have the information, skills, and the reward systems to support the new desired goals. Evidence that this is in effect includes:
• Genuine internal commitment to advancing the change. Once people are emotionally engaged in the issues around the change, they need to internally have a strong desire to implement the change. Internal motivators (such as a desire to learn or to have an impact) are typically more powerful than external motivators (such as a bonus). When used together, the combination is more powerful than either alone.
• Better results AND changed behaviors. To move from the current situation to a dramatically more favorable one, there should be some measurable results as well as changes in the way that people think and behave. However, as Einstein once observed, “All that is important can not be measured, and all that is measured is not important.” Key performance variables should be measured in the before and after states to gauge improvement, as well as to designate that the measurement is of a high enough priority to use it. In addition, be on the lookout for formal observations of behavior changes and associated discussions, even though these changes are not quite so objectively measurable.
• Upward pushback and mutual accountability. In a well-functioning organization or community, people who do not have formal authority have the ability to confront those in formal authority, particularly if they have a better idea or data to support the challenge. Flowing from this upward pushback principle, mutual accountability is required between those in formal authority and those who do not have formal authority for actions that support the change effort. The combination of great leaders and great followers—and the constant shifting of these roles among people—is the hallmark of effective distributed leadership.
• The group is not wholly dependent on the top leader for vision or solutions. Consistent with emerging thoughts on leadership, good leaders don’t just articulate a vision and solutions and disseminate them, but actually help people confront the real issues they are facing and help mobilize resources to address them.
APPROPRIATE MOBILIZATION OF RESOURCES
Where sustainability is high, resources—time, people, money, and technology—are mobilized and deployed to places they most benefit the organization or community. Evidence that this is happening includes:
• The change draws on resources at a rate that matches the availability of resources to support the change. If critical resources become unavailable, people burn out, or there are too few skilled people to continue the change (e.g., too few people trained in Black Belt skills to carry out a Six Sigma implementation), then the change will falter. It’s important to match the demand for the change with its supply for support.
• When an external or internal consultant leaves, things don’t backslide. People own their own local problems, and solutions to those problems. For this to happen, resources need to be mobilized from the start to conduct a rapid knowledge and skill transfer from external people to internal people. When people outside the group, such as external organization development consultants or internal Six Sigma Black Belts move to other parts of the organization, the local people own the solution and have energy for execution and improvement.
• People are anxious to move forward based on common ground. Rather than debate philosophical issues that slow progress, people seek out and expand common ground to move forward (often making initial disagreements irrelevant). They apply effort where there is highest leverage for change (where a small amount of effort yields a disproportionately high benefit).
• Distributed leadership actions and local initiative taking. Continuous improvement and effective change implementation occupies a space in most people’s heads and hearts after the initial change has been implemented, not just in the heads of organization or community leaders.
• Communication of important facts, issues, and beliefs. People know what’s happening. In some places, this is done through formal communication plans, while in many high-energy organizations, the word of mouth and the social network are so powerful that formal communication plans are not necessary.
Why Sustainability Can Be So Elusive
There are six factors we’ve seen that tend to work against having a sustainable solution. Hopefully, you don’t see many of these in your organization or community past large-scale change efforts, but they’re at least worth thinking about as you proceed through a change effort. The factors we’ve found are:
• Lack of time
• Lack of money
• Ties to the status quo
• Perceived value of sustainability activities
• The occasional sustainability afterthought
• Change management ignorance, change management bliss
The best way to address all of these is to head off sustainability problems before they occur, and design conditions for sustainability from the start of an improvement effort. However, as a senior vice president of manufacturing for a health-care institution once said to me, “Tom, I live in the real world where those preventive conditions just aren’t always possible. What can I do once these problems manifest themselves if I haven’t set up sustainability questions at the start?” There are some remedial actions that can jump-start the process. Such perturbations to the system, or management shake-up tactics follow each of the factors below.
LACK OF TIME
Not having enough time is one of the most frequently mentioned reasons for not designing for sustainability. Managers or community leaders want a project implemented by year-end, or competitors are launching their new strategy next quarter, so we have to have ours launched before then. To further complicate matters, many organizations have been reengineered and downsized to very lean staffs, who work hard on completing their technical work tasks, leaving little time for continuous improvement or sustainability. Management shake-up tactic: Shut down “regular work” for three to four hours each week and provide space for employees to get together and work on change (which, incidentally, should be an aspect of their “real job”).
LACK OF MONEY
Money is another often-cited reason for ignoring sustainability. If change management activities like large group methods are added to the project work plan, then the timeline will no doubt be extended. This means spending more money to get the project done since the resources will be extended out over a longer duration of time. Money can be especially visible if expensive outside consultants are used. For example, on one recent enterprise-wide implementation of SAP software in Colorado, external consultants were charging $4 million per month. When the internal organization development consultant told top management that a design for a sustainable solution would increase the project length by two months, she received a resounding No from the steering committee. However, the issue of “We don’t have time to do it right, but we have time to do it over” of course reared its persistent head, and the design team ended up battling change resistance for four months after the implementation. Management shake-up tactic: Each year, dedicate some part of the budget to improvement or change activities, and let teams develop budgets to effectively use that money.
TIES TO THE STATUS QUO
Many top and middle managers and community leaders have a vested interest in keeping the power base they have built. After years of hard work to get the people, information systems, personal connections, and budgets that they want, they are highly resistant to suggestions reached via a large group method that the organizational structure needs to be flattened and people moved around. Management shake-up tactic: Move capable people to different parts of the organization to head up areas they are not initially entirely familiar with.
PERCEIVED VALUE OF SUSTAINABILITY ACTIVITIES
Others still question the perceived value that change activities supporting sustainability might have. Some, who get past the initial hurdle of whether or not it’s worthwhile, end up discarding plans because it’s thought that the costs outweigh the benefits. Management shake-up tactic: Publicly reward new behaviors and risk taking that support sustainability.
THE OCCASIONAL SUSTAINABILITY AFTERTHOUGHT
Numerous times we have come in late in the project life cycle, and as the project nears it completion date, we hear some prescient, anguished soul cry out, “Hey, what are we doing about sustainability?” Unfortunately, thinking about sustainability in the last four weeks of a two-year project isn’t likely to produce very fruitful results. Management shake-up tactic: If you haven’t planned up front for sustainability, at least get all the stakeholder groups involved in developing a sustainability strategy near the end of the project.
CHANGE MANAGEMENT IGNORANCE, CHANGE MANAGEMENT BLISS
Unfortunately, change management ignorance often translates into change management bliss. In many cases of implementing technical large-scale change efforts like enterprise-wide computing or a community-wide initiative, managers or community leaders simply don’t know that change management needs to be a component of an overall successful implementation strategy. They see the technical components of their improvement solution (like new computer programs, or new laws) and believe the solution to be so obvious and self-explanatory that absolutely no adjustments of human psyches or behaviors are necessary.
Change-management biases by organizational level or community sector also frequently occur. Many top managers of very large organizations believe that change management just needs to be done for the top two layers of the organization, and the remaining four layers below can just be told what to do and everything will be fine. In a community, the equivalent is assuming that only officials need to be involved, leaving citizen engagement out of issues that affect their lives. Such faulty change foundations cause large improvement projects to fail miserably within about three months of implementation. Management shake-up tactic: In cases where you can’t provide up-front education about the topic, convene discussion forums about change management with internal organization development professionals, external consultants, and other top leaders from similar corporations or communities.
The content in this section provides some insights into common sustainability problems, and some quick-hit actions that managers can take to try to jolt the organizational system out of complacency and address change issues head-on. However, far better than these knee-jerk, “after the horse is out of the barn” actions is the discipline of designing sustainability conditions into your project from the start.
Designing Conditions for Sustainability Checklist
I had hoped I could boil down all the best global practices for sustainability into eight or so pithy points that would fit on a small laminated card that could be kept in your wallet, purse, or European carryall. However, after extensive research, input from the 95 contributing authors, and personal experiences, I was not able to do so. Not too surprisingly, I found that complex challenges such as large-scale change sustainability require a bit lengthier explanation than might be listed on a one-page laminated card. Below is a checklist, organized by change stage (start-middle-end) to include in your sustainability design process. While many method chapters in part II provide varying tips, this list contains fairly universal principles that are applicable across countries, industries, communities, and nonprofits. The first list in this chapter contained some descriptive indicators of sustainability; the following list provides conditions that you, as a leader at any level in your community or organization, can design for from the start to ensure you’ll get sustainability at the end.
Though up-front conditions are important, conditions for sustainability are constantly being designed throughout a change effort.
At the start of a change effort, the key high-leverage elements include:
1. Have a plan and strategy-structure combination to achieve it. It’s important to know where you’re headed, so it’s essential to have a plan. Ideally, this plan is codeveloped with representatives from the entire system that’s affected. Then, there needs to be a structure that’s congruent with the plan.
2. Design early for sustainability. Don’t wait until the end of the project because many buy-in and energizing events need to happen at the start.
3. Go slow early to go fast later. It takes a bit more time to get early meaningful involvement, but this helps in terms of shared assumptions, a common understanding, and commitment to joint actions going forward. While it may seem to delay a project at the start, it saves time later because people won’t be doing things two and three times, and resisting change, which slows the project down.
4. Conduct a risk analysis with key leaders, and discuss best- and worst-case scenarios. Look at potential risks such as budget changes or leadership rotation, and then formulate mitigating strategies for them from the start.
5. Design to get consultants (external or internal) out as soon as possible, so people can confront their own issues and own the “solution.” Groups need to develop internal capabilities to deal with their own problems, and own them.
6. Make appropriate investments in long-term improvement. Those with formal budgetary authority need to commit time, money, and other resources to the sustainability of key organization or community initiatives.
7. Evaluate systemic issues in the diagnosis and action planning stages. An organization or community needs to consider structures of key variables, feedback loops, and leverage points for both improvement and breakdown. For example, a newly launched organizational structure of self-managing, high-performing teams needs existing performance evaluation forms and rewards and recognition schemes modified to favor team behavior over individual grandstanding.
In the middle of a change effort, the key high-leverage elements include:
1. Design “clearings.” The German philosopher Heidegger articulated the concept of a “clearing” as it relates to people and groups. Just as in a dense forest, in a dense organization, cutting out a clearing makes room for something entirely different to happen. We may not know exactly what will happen, but as with a large group method, we know that we have created the potential for something new.
2. Meaningfully engage people and increase the circle of participation. When people can make truly significant contributions (not just recommending the color of their lockers or developing entrees for the cafeteria menu), they start taking ownership and gain commitment. Once an initial group develops a core strategy, continuing to increase that circle of consequential participation creates an organizational energy groundswell.
3. Clearing people’s plates for follow-up. Leaders need to help mobilize resources to accomplish the desired sustainable change. This often means taking previously assigned tasks off an individual’s plate or engaging citizens who are not normally part of the process. This not only is good for the individual’s capability to perform what is needed, but also sends a powerful message (by example) to the organization or community of what is important.
4. Transparent reporting of progress. It’s important to track and report progress of key initiatives and activities to ensure that they are being performed, and get back on track if they are not. Transparency enables a broad view into progress so that people can support each other in accomplishing the work to be done.
5. Leadership systems with many leaders and role models. Early adopting formal leaders set the new norms and model them, as well as provide specific expectations and consequences. As more people take responsibility, leadership capacity within the organization or community grows.
6. Conditions and training for, as well as modeling of, straight talk and harnessing productive conflict. Straight talk helps cut through the political verbal dances that often occur in organizations or communities. The truth, even difficult news, can be more quickly dealt with than cover-ups and alibis. Managing conflict is an important part of the overall straight-talk equation. All too often, people fear conflict and consequently avoid it. The truth is that conflict can be useful in moving an organization or community to a better place. Strive to make conflict productive and harness its power.
7. Design for multiple stakeholders’ needs to be adequately addressed, even if they seem to compete. Large group methods that convene people with various interests and viewpoints are essential to a sustainable solution. Two important contributions of large group methods are: (1) their remarkable ability to uncover breakthrough solutions to the most intractable situations, and (2) their ability to energize people with initially very different stated needs toward a single, shared solution.
8. Strike the appropriate balance between energy creation (e.g., commitment from a large group event like an Open Space or Search Conference) and tool-enhanced improvement (e.g., Six Sigma or Lean). The combination of “hard” and “soft” aspects of a change effort can provide both the desire to improve and the capability to improve.
9. Use more than large group methods to facilitate sustainability. A solid plan for sustainability requires a combination of large group methods and traditional organization development actions, such as: one-on-ones, one-on-small-group training, one-to-many-with-feedback, and changes to policies and practices.
In the wind-down, ending stage of a change effort, the key high-leverage elements include:
1. Mechanism for follow-up. A good plan needs great follow-up. Many a large-scale initiative fails because of poor execution, even with a good plan. Powerful implementations of this concept include self-managed teams and active citizen groups. Other strategies include reviews by multidisciplinary steering committees, internal champions with considerable organizational power, CEO attention, and public engagement in a community setting.
2. Establish clear responsibilities. Minimizing duplicate activities and ensuring that the unexpected is covered comes through knowing who is responsible for what. This is often done through RACI matrices (a 2´2 matrix of specific responsibilities mapped to each person, with each responsibility stating if the person has primary Responsibility, has Approval rights, needs to be Consulted, or needs to be Informed).
3. Public commitment to responsibility areas. As Kurt Lewin researched and demonstrated many years ago, people are more likely to keep a commitment if they make it in a public forum, versus just committing one-on-one to someone, or silently writing personal goals on an piece of paper and not sharing them with anyone. Where practical, in large group methods, strive to include some time for public commitments to continue the work of the group once the session ends.
4. Track both newly articulated results and behaviors, as well as appropriate follow-up. A tool developed during the Jack Welch reign at General Electric clearly made a distinction between good and poor results, and good and poor behaviors. Welch was looking to eliminate bullies who intimidated their direct reports into performing at high levels. Welch realized he would need to change behaviors to get the sustainable results he wanted. A critical linchpin to Welch’s strategy was to embed the notion of results and behaviors into the formal evaluation system, and modify the reward system to encourage behavior changes.
5. Reinforcement. Wherever possible, those in formal authority need to reinforce desired new behaviors with monetary means as well as intrinsically motivating means that they have at their disposal. Those people who do not have formal authority or control budgets can use verbal encouragement and support their peers for new behaviors.
6. Continual external and internal scanning to remain current. In today’s turbulent environment, external and internal situations change so rapidly it’s important to establish sensors for monitoring what’s happening so plans and structures can be adjusted accordingly.
7. Learning processes and practices to sustain momentum. To keep a positive momentum going, it is helpful to institute learning processes (like periodic lessons learned analyses that critically examine what went well versus what might be done differently next time). Organizations and communities that learn quickly will change swiftly and effectively.
In closing, it’s important to note that sustainability across the globe still remains elusive for many. The good news is that for those wishing to exert strong change leadership, apply proven principles for sustainability, and develop conditions for sustainability, success is within their grasp. To do this, however, we need to abandon old notions of achieving sustainability. It is less like cramming for an exam the night before, and more like an ongoing building process where new designs are continually added to a strong foundation. What we do up front in a change effort indeed matters a great deal. Winston Churchill once noted, “We shape our buildings, then our buildings shape us.” It’s the same with our designs for sustainability.