Write your own lottery ticket

 I've been spending some time reading and writing about a really great series of articles published in the McKinsey Quarterly a few years ago.  Emily Lawson and Colin Price ("The psychology of change management") introduced the concept that there are four conditions that are critical to the success of any organizational change initiative: (1) A compelling story, (2) Reinforcing mechanisms, (3) Role modeling, and (4) Capability building.  Scott Keller and Carolyn Aiken ("The irrational side of change management") offered some additional insights, as well as discussing some of the more common traps that cause organization-wide change efforts to fail.  

In my previous post ("Give me something to believe in"), we talked about the need for a compelling "change story" and discussed why change leaders need to tell the change story in five different ways.  Just as important, individuals need to feel that they "own the change" in some way.  Keller and Aiken recommend that the story needs to be told in five ways, but the individuals (and not the leader) need to write the change story.

The Nobel Prize winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman conducted a now famous experiment several years ago (it's reported in Chapter 16, "The Illusion of Control" in Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases) that involved a lottery with a twist.  Half the participants were handed their lottery tickets (randomly assigned, just like a real lottery), while the other half selected their own number (again, just like some individuals who play a real lottery).  Before revealing number, Kahneman and his team of researchers offered to buy back the lottery tickets from the study participants.  No matter how many times that they've run the experiment, Kahneman found that they had to pay at least five times as much to the participants who selected their own number compared to those whose number was assigned by random!  Of course, this makes absolutely no sense.  The participants who selected their own number weren't more likely to win the lottery than those whose numbers were assigned at random.  According to the simplest rules of economics, both groups should have sold their tickets for a similar price.

As Keller and Aiken write, "When we choose for ourselves, we are far more committed to the outcome (almost by a factor of five to one)."  Leaders can leverage this feature of human psychology to increase the likelihood of a successful change.  Having front-line employees write their own "change story" is incredibly powerful.  Even if the leader needs to provide some direction, employees will still "own the change" when they have a say in how the "change story" is written.  

Next time we will finish up our discussion about developing a compelling "change story".