Talking It Out

I’ve talked a little bit about change management in previous posts, and I’ll continue on that theme here. This post is about talking it out, pure and simple — and in the process establishing important relationships that weren’t there before. I’ve also touched on how it is common to just throw things over the wall and not know what happens after that — it is really important to get in the habit of walking around to the other side of that wall and having regular conversations with the other people involved in a given process. This is an extension of that same idea.

Note: the best practices that I describe below usually come into play at a more mature process stage where we’re trying to jump-start some new initiatives or reinvigorate old ones, but it also applies to the beginning stages as well.

Overall, it is of the greatest importance that you first make sure that other people in the room or on the phone hear the larger story or narrative of the process, and understand where they fit into that bigger picture. This is always where we start. A lot of times when you give people this kind of perspective, the floodgates will open — as a result, colleagues start sharing their own experiences and other anecdotal pieces of information and ultimately this is how you get to reality. Perception is reality when you are working with process, and talking it out helps you to start putting some of that picture together. They say a picture is with a thousand words — from a process perspective it is usually worth another million once we start collecting information. Much of what we learn, in fact, can remain hidden, again, without the proper perspective as to why it does or does not matter. You’d be surprised what people bottle up because they feel it isn’t applicable to the project as a whole or they don’t think you’ll actually listen to what they have to say.

The next step is where I usually start looking at rules to govern how we move forward, to provide some structure around that bigger picture. This is a huge take-away for effective change management. Getting all of the information is crucial, but structuring that information thereafter is even more important — if you don’t move swiftly from one to the other, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

Types of structure might include nailing down the critical success factors, the must-haves, or the must-do things that absolutely positively have to happen with the project, the process, or whatever the case may be within your own organization.

After applying some structure, the third step is sharing that structure and direction back down with the people who gave you the raw data in the first place. In truth, this action alone warrants an entire blog post, but in short, communicating the priorities and objectives clearly, and how they link back to your colleagues’ own experiences, is the ideal way to facilitate change, especially with an audience that hasn’t necessarily felt that they are being heard to-date.  The more invested people feel, with a clearly defined structure, the better. It’s an important combination.

I once had three very adversarial groups that we was working with, and we could not get them to all come together in the same room for essentially this exact reason — specifically, each felt that the other’s interests were being more fully represented at the sponsorship level. The three groups were not fully invested, and there wasn’t a clearly defined structure. Each group was looking out for #1, anxiously guarding against failure. In this case the groups were HR, IT and Real Estate, and everyone thought that they were getting the short end of the stick in terms of visibility and buy-in. But from our perspective there was so much overlap and synergy that it was crucial that we get everyone on the same page and start to realize some of that potential.  We had seen a lot of success with BPM so far, but the team was at an impasse and unable to move forward with what we knew was a huge opportunity. Over time, each group had come to think that that they alone were right, and each had erected barriers that they weren’t willing to give up on. So, we started by putting them in the same room and encouraging them to just talk in a very unstructured way, trying not to worry about the end game too much. My team and I just focused on listening - and sometimes it really is all about just that — people want to be heard.

Then, we started distilling from that conversation the critical success factors and we began throwing it all up on the wall for them to look at, sort of taking it out of their hands and putting it into the world, which is a very powerful gesture.  All of a sudden now, the three groups weren’t pointing at each other — instead they were pointing at this list of items and priorities and they very quickly realized how many things were complimentary, and how many things were directly impacting each other and it was pretty amazing to see those walls break down.

Of course, some of what we discussed in the example above was out of scope, but it was more important to make people feel as though they were being heard and that their concerns and ambitions were being accounted for.  The priorities find a way of sorting themselves out once information has been openly shared and written down and given the proper respect.

So get out there and just start talking!  Begin by laying out the narrative of the process. That will help facilitate an open sharing of information, and here all you need to do is listen. Then, start to put some structure around that information, but do it in a way that takes the emotional aspect out of the equation. Finally, share those goals and the plan moving forward back downstream, making sure that everyone feels like they are now part of the story, and have a sense of the role they are going to play.

Honestly, it’s easy in the process world to get caught up in rhetoric, and. . .process! If you’re looking to jumpstart a new project or really put some new life into an old one, sometimes its as simple as just getting people talking. Dialogue can break down walls and enact an important cultural change to the point that the conversation never ends — in my mind, that’s process excellence, and that’s continuous improvement.