Champions as catalysts
Addressing change barriers in organisations
While patch-protecting staff, cut-throat co-workers, and interpersonal conflicts all make for good HBO drama, the barriers to change in organisations are often far more mundane.
Even where staff have good will to an organisation and motives are aligned, changes will fail (or simply not commence) if they require short-term effort and coordination, or an individual acceptance of risks that exceeds the perceived benefits.
For example, a streamlined organisational approval process might objectively save days of effort while reducing staff frustration and duplication. However if the costs of undertaking redesign, negotiation, retraining, and reinforcement are high, it is very likely that the optimisation will simply not occur.
The best proven lever in these circumstances is to find and endorse champions: highly motivated individuals that can absorb switching costs, disrupt routines, and engineer transitions.
To understand their necessity, we need to consider four common barriers to change:
team satisficing
path dependence
internal optimisation
collective action concerns
Satisficing is the phenomenon identified by Herbert A Simon where humans, faced with cognitive and time limits in decision-making, are strongly incentivised to settle for solutions that are “good enough”, rather than “most efficient and effective”.
This can be a particular trap for change efforts where current costs are spread amongst many individuals or teams. A single team would be strongly incentivised to reduce the effort of a process from 80% to 40% of their time, whereas 8 teams who are each contributing 10% of their time will perceive much less benefit from cutting their individual efforts to 5% – despite the total benefits to the organisation being exactly the same.
Path dependence refers to organisational resistance encountered in winding back earlier decisions. The causes of path dependence range from the psychological (chasing a return on investment from sunk costs), intellectual (people are disinclined to change after cognitive ease is established), and technical (once system interdependencies are established, they can be complex to disentangle without disruption). Teams naturally make choices which create path dependence in search of greater local fitness – but where divergent paths are taken, it can be costly to restore coordination. Understanding, designing and clearly communicating architectural preferences at the organisational level can help to mitigate incompatible choices with path dependencies, but rarely perfectly.
Internal optimisation occurs where team boundaries are sufficiently impermeable in ways that make organisational goals invisible or subordinate to team goals. Having some abstraction around visibility of team activities is essential to process coherence, but can also obscure duplication and burden-shifting. It is a particular vulnerability when teams are mandated to be robust; that is, designed to reliably achieve a limited set of tasks in all circumstances. This robustness inevitably prioritises stability over change and introduces resistance to taking on any tasks that are not fully aligned to the core mission.
Finally, collective action concerns arise from a lack of belief in the ability of affected groups to work together cohesively to achieve the desired outcome. This can be particularly problematic in situations where there are a large number of dependencies, since it only takes one significant trust gap to torpedo people’s belief in the likelihood of success for the overall change. Worse still, any past failures will reinforce these concerns, creating a negative spiral where teams are more likely to hedge their efforts in the future, further increasing the chance of collective failures.
Even where an organisational assessment makes the benefits of change indisputable, the presence of any or all of these factors can lead to situations where change is still resisted at the team level.
This is where champions step in to play a critical role by:
Overcoming satisficing bias through clear communication of the importance of the current costs and the greater organisational benefit
Engineering routes out of path dependence through recognition and allocation of additional or compensatory resources, and progressively acting to reduce system and process interdependencies
Penetrating team boundaries and either achieving voluntary recognition of the broader goals through alliance-building, or incentivising alignment of effort through organisationally valid performance metrics
Acting as a trust broker that can recognise and work with stakeholders to address critical trust deficits, ringfence initiatives to avoid less-trusted areas, or lower the risk and effort involved in change through less daunting change options such as pilots, parallel or progressive transition, and having documented fallback plans.
In practice, this means three key tasks:
Articulating a vision of the future
Developing a tangible, acceptable proposal for action
Motivating sustained action until a new equilibrium is reached following change
The best champions are respected individuals with influence, credibility, and persistence. They can be found at all levels of an organisation and indeed, are often more effective where they are directly involved in operations rather than “just” leadership.
Champions must demonstrate initiative, the ability to build cross-boundary relationships, and show tolerance for ambiguity. It helps if they already understand the psychological and systemic aspects of implementing change, but this can be taught.
Bringing in external consultants as change champions can help in articulating the current problems and providing fresh eyes on path-dependent processes, but they will struggle to build trust, and create risks of knowledge loss upon exit.
In fact, the evidence suggests that a hybrid approach is most likely to produce the best of both worlds. External experts bring in new context and additional resources to accelerate early phases, while internal champions that get involved from day 1 can create buy-in, prepare for necessary knowledge transfer, and provide the sustained effort and capacity necessary to embed changes in perpetuity.