Overview
Is it just me or is change happening around us more quickly than ever? While it can be frustrating, change is necessary if we want to get better. I’ve seen people treat change in three ways: avoid it, accept it, and embrace it. In other words, inactive, reactive, or proactive. The most successful people (and the ones who suffer the least amount of pain) are the ones who are proactive. Often they are the ones creating the change.
Getting people to buy in to change is one of the toughest tasks that exists. Our comfort zones are strong, but they aren’t invincible. Most people can be led to change if you take the right approach. In this article, we’ll discuss the three simple ingredients to change – appealing with emotion, appealing with analysis, and sealing with a clear plan.
Appealing with emotion
Think about the last major purchase you made. What made you do it? Likely it was seeing and feeling an outcome – visualizing yourself after the change and all the good that comes along with it. A refreshing vacation. The scent of a new car. The happy gatherings in a new house. Those emotions propel us toward purchasing decisions and buying into ideas.
Positive emotional appeal works well, but avoiding negative emotion works even better. Painkillers sell twice as well as vitamins. The more pain you can solve for, the more emotional goodwill you’ll have in your quest to catalyze change. People are often not aware of all the pain that is happening (they’re often numb to it or unaware of it), but agitating it and showing a vastly superior scenario is often very helpful.
The best weapons for appealing to emotions are stories, examples, and analogies, especially if the change you’re looking to sell is complex. The more relevant and simple your proposed change is, the better. The more emotion you exhibit, the more people will talk and start to sell internally.
Appealing with analysis
While people usually make the leap to buy or buy in based on emotion, that’s not enough. We have a natural desire to justify our decisions and eliminate any doubt. We live in an age where information is so quick to access that this step is easier than ever.
The best way that I’ve seen this done is with a combination of three calculations:
- Cost of inaction (COI)
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Return on change (ROC)
COI includes all the wasted time and other resources being considered. Don’t neglect all the indirectly affected areas here – those often have a huge impact. Quantify everything in hours, FTEs, and dollars. It’s powerful because it’s a known.
ROI is simply comparing the COI to the cost/price of the change solution as a percentage or dollar amount. Because it’s not a guarantee, it’s less powerful, but it’s still important to help prioritize investments of time and money.
ROC is the most powerful because it’s often where there’s the most value. So you want to save time – that’s great, what are you going to do with that time? Freeing up time to work on super-valuable tasks is a common appeal with ROC, and it often has several related benefits (reducing turnover, increasing morale/collaboration, etc.).
Sealing with a clear plan
We often second-guess ourselves with major decisions during the thinking process. We don’t want to feel like we’re making a mistake, because we’ve probably done so before. This is where having a super clear plan for success is so vital. The more relevant, specific, and clear the plan is, the more effective it is at helping to seal the deal. It drives urgency and helps get all the stakeholders aligned when they see how their role fits into the picture. Craft the plan together. Start with a battle-tested template and add as many specific components as possible for the stakeholders. Make them feel like it’s their own.
It’s often helpful to have a menu of options available for the plan, especially with complex change initiatives. Would a big bang or phased approach be better? Offering prescriptive insights based on experience can help provide clarity with the change plan.
Case studies are excellent resources for sharing a plan for success, as well as elements of emotion and analysis. It’s one thing to hear it from a change proposer, but it’s another to hear it from someone similar who when through the transformation. Case studies don’t just have to be write-ups, they can include audio and video, including more personal elements, which compound the effectiveness.
Summary
Change is tough. It’s one of the toughest things we deal with in both our personal and professional lives. But it’s often necessary to survive and thrive, especially when the world is changing so rapidly around us. There’s a science with how to go about catalyzing change, and the three ingredients above – emotional appeal, analytical appeal, and a clear change plan – make for a great recipe for change.
What’s been your most effective approach to managing change? Please let us know in the comments below!
Recent Comments