Burn your ships

History says that the Spanish conquistadore Hernán Cortés set sail with eleven ships and over 500 men on a voyage to the New World in the year 1519.  In July that year, he landed on the Yucatan coast at Veracruz.  He was eager to march inland to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, so he ordered his men to burn all but one of the ships.  His men thought he'd gone insane and naturally resisted.  When asked how they would get home if they burned all of the ships, Cortés reportedly replied, "If we are going home, we are going home in their ships!"

Just imagine how committed his troops were to the mission at hand now!  Cortés was certainly not the first to use this technique, nor was he the last.  As it turns out, leaders have been burning their ships - both literally and figuratively - throughout history!  The management professor John Kotter created a very well-known 8-step change model, whose first step is to "create a sense of urgency."  The key to this first step is to convince the members of your team or organization that a change is necessary and that the team's success or organization's survival is dependent upon making that change.  In effect, Kotter is telling change leaders to "burn your ships."  

While metaphorically "burning your ships" can definitely "create a sense of urgency", Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller at McKinsey would suggest that this approach is not sufficient.  Their research suggests that only about 30% of all organizational change initiatives succeed.  A "change story" that focuses solely on what's wrong at the organization invokes blame and creates change fatigue and resistance.  

So, maybe we should focus on positive motivation for change.  Researchers at the University of Wisconsin studied two bowling teams by recording their performance during a number of games and tournaments.  One team's video concentrated on all the things that the team was doing wrong, while the other team's video concentrated on what the members of the team were doing correctly.  Who do you think did better as the season progressed?  The team that studied its successful game performances improved their scores by twice as much as the other team (see the published research study here).  

Again, understanding human psychology is important to managing change in an organization.  We humans are more risk averse when it comes to losing something than when it comes to winning something.  The Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman and his colleague Amos Tversky (Tversky died before winning the Nobel Prize) developed their prospect theory based on the concept of what has come to be known as loss aversion.  For example, given a choice, would you choose between a "sure thing" bet that wins $100 or a 50/50 chance of winning $200?  Simple mathematics says that there is no difference, but in study after study, people would choose the former rather than the latter.  Conversely, would you rather choose a sure loss of $100 or a 50/50 risk of losing $200?  Studies show that most people would take the chance of losing either $200 or nothing.

Aiken and Keller suggest that "it takes a story with both + and - to create real energy".  By taking a "carrot and stick" approach (positive motivation = "the carrot" and burning the ships = "the stick"), change leaders can leverage human psychology to optimize the successful completion of a change initiative.

Let's go back to the original article by Emily Lawson and Colin Price ("The psychology of change management") and summarize the last few posts.  Lawson and Price suggest that the first step in any change initiative is to develop a compelling change story, because the members of the team or organization need to see the point of the change and agree with it before they will actually modify their behavior.  Carolyn Aiken and Scott Keller would add that the change story needs to (1) Be told in five different ways; (2) Developed by the members of the team (and not by the leader); and (3) leverage both positive motivation and the sense of urgency to take full advantage of human psychology.

We will talk about the next three steps described by Lawson and Price (with some additional considerations posed by Aiken and Keller) with our next three posts.