ESSAY 6.2

Chapter 16 Implementation

WHEN I WROTE the first edition of this book, I devoted exactly two pages to implementation. I can't remember whether I was just rushing to finish the book or had little to say about it. Over the years, though, I have become increasingly aware of how many consulting efforts have been aimed at doing the right thing but have resulted in little change. It is frustrating, to say the least, to contract well, develop an accurate picture of the current reality, give feedback, and make a good decision and yet see few concrete results from the effort.

Implementation is, in theory, the point of the consultation, the fruit of our labor. Unfortunately, knowing what to do (the product of the discovery phase) and finding the right way to do it (the focus of implementation) are two different worlds. Consultants have traditionally given too much attention to analysis and recommendations and too little attention to the complexity of translating those answers into action.

Our mistake is treating implementation as a fundamentally rational process. We believe that logical, step-by-step problem solving can bring the fulfillment of our plans. Our love of lists, milestones, and electronic calendar living is an example of this. If we can keep a list of what we need to do in one place, these things will get done. Although

it is hard to argue against being organized, we tend to oversimplify what it takes to act on what we know to be true. At a personal level, it is the gap between having a vision and living it out. The more serious we are about being true to a vision, the more we realize it is our life work.

Choosing Engagement Over Installation

For an organization, shifting a way of thinking and a way of operating is even more difficult. Part of what makes implementation difficult is that we often treat change as if it can be installed, managed, and engineered. Installation plans rely heavily on having clear goals, a defined set of steps, and carefully specified objectives and measures—as if a blueprint can be developed for others to follow. This is the engineering mind at work, which works well for solving mechanical problems but is incomplete in trying to have an impact on living systems. Change cannot be installed and engineered, and so it always takes longer and is more difficult than we ever imagined. The positive deviance people mentioned earlier understand this, and it is why they have been so successful. The same is true with whole-system approaches, betting on communal gatherings and insights to make a difference.

The engineer in us needs to be complemented with the thinking of the social architect and the skills of a community organizer. Any implementation requires not only a shift in what is tangible, such as methods or structure, but also a shift in what is intangible, such as relationships and personal faith and commitment. This chapter and the next two are about ways to approach the intangibles. They focus on an essential aspect of implementation: bringing people together to create and plan how to make something work.

The art of bringing people together is termed engagement. The ideas here are really about the means of engagement as an alternative or enhancement to strategies of installation. The steps offered

are the elements of engagement. What I am proposing is that we become engaged. If you can find a better offer, take it.

There are two aspects of implementation for consultants. One is the technical work using the expertise you have spent years developing. If you are a financial analyst, you begin introducing a system of controls. If you are an IT specialist, you redesign the software. If you are a training manager, you start the training program.

The second aspect of implementation is how to build support for the business or technical change you are planning. This is no easy task. Implementation does not actually begin until the people who do the work decide whether they are going to make real changes or simply go through the motions. Real changes require real commitment, and part of your role is to help fire that spark. To get serious about building internal commitment among those who have to live in the system where you are simply a guest requires dispelling some conventional beliefs that actually get in the way.

Deciding Doesn't Get It Done

Too many consulting projects result in cosmetic change: the thinking and rhetoric about the change are perfect, but the experience of people does not match the promise. Much of the cynicism about consultants is that we collude with strategies that begin with great fanfare and end with a world where the promises of change have made no difference to people's day-to-day work lives. Much of our collusion with cosmetic change is our belief that new behavior can be defined, modeled, induced, driven, purchased, and measured into existence. Many of the ways consultants try to change institutions actually serve as a defense against change.

One of the obstacles to change (I use change and implementation to mean essentially the same thing) is rooted in our belief in executive decisiveness. In our adoration of leaders and stubborn belief in individualism, we think that when the boss's mind is made up, action will follow. This is rarely the case. No single person runs a business, no one person makes or delivers a product, and no one general ever fought a war.

It is interesting that managers understand their limitations better than consultants do. Managers know that the fact that they have made up their minds does not mean that decisions will be acted on. Every day they face the reality that many of their best intentions have little impact on the way work gets done. It is consultants who have a hard time accepting this. Any gathering of consultants will at some point complain that managers lack the courage, will, or persistence to follow through on their decisions and make sure that our recommendations are implemented.

We hold on to the magical belief that leadership and decisiveness are the point and what we need is more of both. Change in human systems, even in a monarchy, has much more to do with the consent of the governed than the will and ability of those who govern. Even in a monarchy.

The Limits of Installation

The blueprint for traditional installation-style implementation is to

· •Articulate a vision

· •Set standards for what is expected

· •Define measures for the change

Kept in perspective, all of these are legitimate elements of day-to-day life in every workplace. What interferes with implementation is that we misuse these tools. When we do, they become subtle forms of coercion rather than neutral ways of managing and defining a future. We think we have to sell and induce support for a new way of operating. When consultants and managers apply centrally created vision, standards, and measures as primary tools to maintain control and make the world predictable, they interfere with the implementation effort.

What could be an opportunity for people to choose accountability by designing their own answers to these questions is lost. Instead of confronting people with their freedom, we invite their compliance. It is the mandated institutionalization of useful practices that takes the life out of most implementation efforts. Here are some major ways that efforts at implementation stumble over themselves.

Leadership by Lamination

We interfere with real change and service when we think that progress grows out of the vision of the leader, regardless of whether the leader is “us,” as consultant or trainer, or “them,” as managers. The myth is that if we can just make the message sufficiently clear and compelling, if we can describe the burning platform with enough urgency and a bright tomorrow with enough zeal, change will occur. This leads to a great emphasis on communicating the vision and the business case for change.

I contributed to the problem when I wrote a chapter on vision in my book The Empowered Manager. It was about the power of vision and how transformation begins with imagining a different future. This became the most popular chapter in the book. I received hundreds of vision statements in the mail and in my travels. Most were compelling, and most were laminated in wallet-sized versions so we could carry them with us. Many vision statements hung on office walls and reception rooms, many signed by the management team. All had a common theme: building a lasting organization required the top to have a vision.

The problem here was twofold. First, we affirmed, at the moment of lamination, that top management's vision was the one that counted. We all wanted to know what top management was seeking. Once we knew this, we could all align ourselves and proceed to live it out. This gave rise to a cottage industry in vision articulation. We consultants

began each project helping the top define and express their vision. This could take days or months. Most often it was actually a support person or consultant who wrote the vision and brought it back to management for approval. But the product reflected management's thoughts, and they gave it their stamp. This was fine for the managers who created the vision—fine, that is, if they had created it primarily for themselves and sought guidance for their own actions through it.

Unfortunately, the visions were usually designed for others. We believed that the top should decide the culture that the middle and bottom would live by. This is the mind-set that takes the power out of vision, even though the middle and the bottom want to hear what the top has in mind. The fact that everyone wants to know the vision of the top does not make it meaningful.

Most frequently, when the organization hears the vision of the top, they are vaguely disappointed. The large meeting designed to mobilize energy actually drains it. It became clear to me after I started to read the four hundred or so vision statements I received: they all read the same. Every organization cares about customers, values teamwork, exists for shareholders or the community, believes in excellence in all they do. If we all threw our vision statements in a hat and then drew one out, we would think it was ours regardless of where it came from. I finally realized that it was the act of creating a vision that matters, not so much the content of what it was.

The second consequence of lamination was that management's vision could now withstand the ravages of wind, and rain, and dark of night. That is why we laminated it: so it would last forever. That management's vision should be permanent and enduring is the fallacy. Management vision is not only not the point, but it is not immortal. Everyone needs to struggle with the question of what kind of future we want to create, and that vision is something that is alive and open to change. Vision is more a dialogue than a declaration. It is an important conversation, a significant stretch of the imagination, and it needs to emerge as a collective work-in-progress from each unit. Once a vision is laminated, it loses its life.

In practical terms, if a group needs a clearer vision for themselves, by all means help them create one. But don't make any videos of leaders calling for transformation. Don't hold some large meeting for the purpose of clarifying the vision of top management. If implementation requires that people know the state of the union and where we are headed, don't have those in charge declare it. Bring people together to define the state of their own union and pool their knowledge of what the future might bring. But we are getting ahead of the story.

We Need Higher Standards, and This Time We Mean Business

There is a widespread belief that we have not set the standards high enough. This is most visible in education, where every state legislature thinks that it can improve public education by being tougher on performance standards, students, and teachers. They have been doing this for years, continue to be disappointed with its results, and keep on doing it.

Of course, the belief that low standards are the problem is not confined to education. It invades all of our institutions. It is born of the belief that people will not set high standards for themselves—that they need an outside agency to motivate and inspire them. At heart it is a fear-based strategy, where those who set the standards are the subject and those who must meet them are the object.

There is some validity to the idea that standards and performance are related. We do know that people will be responsive to the expectations others have for them. If a boss expects the team to perform well, it is more likely to happen. If a boss expects failure, that may happen also. There is a difference, though, between expectations between boss and subordinate or teacher and student, and standard setting.

To have high expectations of others is to have faith in them. It is an expression of optimism and hope in the capacities of another. It is an expression of the connection between people and is experienced as support. Standard setting, as it is most commonly used to trigger change, is born not of support but of disappointment and demand.

To judge others to be performing poorly because of low standards is to hold them in contempt. It is a belief that they need our standard-setting

intervention to wake them up and motivate them. It is an institutional act that depends on coercion. If we don't raise the bar, they will not jump higher. There is little care or connection in the strategy, and it therefore builds as much resistance as it was designed to overcome.

The myth is that setting standards will increase accountability. What it most often creates is compliance. People may be forced to find a way to meet those standards, but the institution suffers in other, less measurable ways. Instead of a more accountable culture, we find more bureaucracy, more people working to rule, more caution, and less flexibility.

Bosses, of course, have a legitimate role in defining a playing field and what outcomes the organization requires of each unit. But defining outcomes is different from standard setting as a tactic in initiating change or implementing some recommendation. What corrupts the process is the belief that one group knows what is best for another. And that is why these engineering and installation strategies fall short. The focus on standards is also very seductive for the consultant. After we have been through a contracting and discovery effort with a client manager, we want to be on their side and too easily align with that person's traditional ways of making things happen.

People Need Fixing

We need to avoid planning something in a huddle with our client manager that is supposed to change the behavior of others outside our circle. We are not here to fix people. Our task is to stay focused on the gifts and capacities of people in the room and what they can do about their own actions. If managers believe in higher standards, let them set them for themselves and live according to them for a while.

This keeps legitimacy in the consulting effort and in our relationship with the client manager. When we join with bosses to plan for the changes in their subordinates, we have been co-opted into the belief that the employees need to change and the managers are just fine. We then miss the opportunity to shift in a more fundamental way the beliefs about how change happens and accountability is created. Change and accountability occur when we live them, not preach

them. The common instinct to begin implementation with clearer and higher standards is most often a trap.

If We Can't Measure It, It Doesn't Matter

One more way we interfere with implementation is through our attitude about measurement. We have turned it into a god. The question here is similar to the questions above. No argument with the need for measurement; it's the question of how central it should become and who should provide it. When we impose measurements systemwide, we have to be very careful that we really need and can make use of the measures that are collected.

Measuring the quantitative elements of work has definite value. The simplest example of the legitimate need for common measures is common accounting practices. The economics of each unit in the organization need to be folded together to meet regulatory requirements, and so we know our economic viability. There is the need for common measures of product quality and customer service, and for many more measures that assess the success of the institution. We move on to soft ground, though, when we invite the economist in to develop common measures for how we are working together, what processes will create quality, and, in general, anything in the realm of how human systems operate. Every measurement of the human or qualitative dimension of work leaves more untested than it covers.

The belief that if we cannot measure something, it does not exist treats the human system as if it were a mechanical one. The belief that people will do only what they are measured against is a cynical view of the human condition, and while it may be true of certain sales situations or certain classroom dynamics, we have taken the value of

measurement to places it does not belong. When we attribute to measurement the capacity to create the behavior we want, we have moved into a simple cause-and-effect relationship and hold on to the belief that implementation and change can be engineered. With a human system, that is more fancy than fact.

Each of us wants feedback on how we are doing. But the feedback does not create the doing. Imposed measures on the qualitative aspect of work may actually get in the way of the doing.

We particularly dilute the value of measurement when we separate the people who evaluate from the people who do the work. Quality control used to be separated from those who did the work. It was a judging function and created alienation between the doing and the quality assessment. This has changed in the past ten years, for the betterment of both the quality of the product and the quality of the relationships that surround the workplace.

We can learn from the quality movement that while there are useful tools for measuring, they need to be under the control of those doing the work and need to be kept in perspective as simply one part of making change. Much of what matters cannot be measured, and our consulting needs to reflect that.

Betting on Engagement

None of this is an argument against vision, standards, or measurement. They are important elements of organizing people's efforts. It is just that we have abused them when we make them coercive instruments of control. And then we compound the error. When they do not result in genuine change, we try harder to make them work instead of betting on other strategies. Trying harder, pressuring, and persuading have limited impact on changing a social system. And when they do help, they soon develop their own immune system.

A social system is a living system and not that amenable to linear or mechanical beliefs about organizations.

Whenever management or consultants bet on definitions, inducements, measures, and standards, they unintentionally reinforce the bureaucratic mind-set that we are trying to reduce. They are the tools of engineers and economists. Engineering and economic strategies do not build commitment and accountability, despite their appealing face value.

What we have undervalued is the power of engagement and dialogue. The movements toward the learning organization, total quality, and teamwork are in the direction of engagement, but with a few exceptions, they are rarely given the importance that they deserve. The next two chapters explore engagement in the implementation process and offer some concrete examples for involving people in a way that increases the likelihood of real, lasting change.

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