The Journey: A Needs & Values Approach To Change

The Journey

A Needs & Values Approach To Change

Neil L Griffiths

Published by Neil Griffiths 2014

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Index

Foreword

Chapter 1: Change - Why? What? How?

Chapter 2: Attitudes To Change

Compete Or Cooperate

X Marks The Spot: Where We Stand On Change

Chapter 3: Needs And Values

DNA's Values

The Needs, Values & Characteristics Of Different DNA Types

Chapter 4: Change As A Journey

Chapter 5: Facing Up To The Challenge Of The Journey

1. 'A' Where We Are - The Starting Point

2. 'B' The Destination

3. Getting from A to B - The Journey

4. Action - Making The Journey Real

Chapter 6: The Journeying Mind

Framing

Awareness

Decision Making & Risk Assessment

Learning

Chapter 7: Roles In Change

SDs

ODs

TDs

IDs

Chapter 8: Case Studies

Appendix: The Evolution Of Values

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Foreword

This book is intended to help people negotiate their way through change more effectively, whatever that change may involve. While it has been written to appeal to a business audience, the principles involved are universal, and therefore can just as easily apply to anyone, in any situation, faced with the challenge of instigating or responding to change of any kind.

There are already many good books and useful models designed to help people through change, so I want to begin by explaining why I have thought it worthwhile writing this, and why reading it might be worthwhile for you.

The short answer is 'needs and values'. These are commonly used words but few people seem to understand them properly. They are psychological mechanisms that have slowly evolved over millions of years. Most of us, psychologists included, fail to fully appreciate how evolution has shaped the workings of our minds. Given that needs and values are the most significant aspect of this evolution, this failure leads to profound misunderstandings regarding how they work, the massive impact they have on our perceptions and decision-making, and the emotions we experience when confronted with change. The aim with this book is to correct this: to help people see things (ourselves and others included) in a different light, make more effective decisions, and, in so doing, better navigate our way through the often turbulent waters of change.

70% of major organizational change programmes fail. The consensus is they fail because, in concentrating on hard things like process and organizational objectives, they underestimate and fail to understand how the people who drive the processes, define the organization and represent the customers and clients they serve, respond to change.

Organizational failure to deal with change reflects the difficulty we, as individuals, have when faced with making and responding to change. The challenges we face are always personal. It is just that organizations involve a lot of people, and therefore individual challenges run into those of others, become magnified and transform into collective challenges.

This book will, by exploring the personal dimensions of change, illustrate how challenges as great as changing the culture of an entire organization, or as small as buying a new outfit, can be successfully overcome using the same methodology.

In order to do this it uses the simple metaphor of a journey (The Journey) to describe the process of change; following the idea that every change starts somewhere, ends up somewhere else and in between takes us on a journey. Professionals involved in change will be familiar with many change models. All of these can be seen as describing a journey. In order to help you relate these to The Journey, in the final appendix to this book you will find a diagram mapping a selection of these change models across the various phases of The Journey.

In 2008 the management consultants McKinsey & Co published a report entitled The Inconvenient Truth About Change Management. This listed nine reasons why major change programmes go wrong and fail to deliver what they were intended to. All nine relate to psychology: how people perceive, think and behave when faced with change. In the chapter devoted to case studies, I have provided an illustration of each of these 'inconvenient truths', and shown how the needs and values approach can be used to reach the parts other interventions cannot.

Chapter 1: Change - Why? What? How?

Change isn't a thing, it's everything. We can't avoid it. Our success in life is determined by the changes we make and how we react to and manage the changes imposed upon us.

Whenever we do something something else changes. When the world around us changes, something changes for us. Every thought, word and deed changes something for someone in some small way.

Sometimes we instigate change: we have a need and set out to make changes so as to satisfy it. In doing this we actively seek out a different: role, way of doing things, partner, environment, responsibility, etc.

But change comes to us even when we think we are standing still. Everything changes in time: we grow older, the people around us change, the world changes.

Consequently, whether we actively seek change or passively find ourselves on the receiving end of it, we are likely to come off best if we face forward and prepare ourselves to successfully negotiate its hurdles and take advantage of the opportunities it brings.

Some examples of change...

Environmental - time, weather, resources, technology, culture, politics, etc.

Corporate - takeovers, re-branding, relocations, floatations, recruitment, restructuring, working conditions, training, expansion, diversification, product launch, sales, income, costs, etc.

Career - promotion, relocation, team responsibility, role definition, learning and development, coaching, etc.

Personal - age, health, relationships, friends, family, wealth, location, experience, knowledge, responsibilities, etc.

Why Change?

We instigate change to better satisfy a need.

How Do We Go About It?

In order to help us make a change we put a value on everything and anything likely to help us satisfy that need (or needs) and apply our resources accordingly. The things most likely to help us are given the highest value and are prioritised accordingly.

For example, if the change we need to make is as simple as making ourselves a cup of tea, then a teabag, a mug, boiling water and some milk will be prioritised as the highest valued requirements, as without these there will be no cup of tea.

Once these have been sourced, we may then look at lower valued considerations such as the design of the mug, the availability of a spoon and a place to drink it.

With changes as simple as this things rarely go wrong, but the more complex the change and the more people are involved, the greater the challenge of valuing the various components correctly becomes.

An organization with many offices and warehouses, a veritable army of employees, a large and complex website and intranet, pressing financial commitments and a host of systems and processes attached to each, presents organizational leaders seeking to make changes with a challenge comparable to solving a Rubik's cube puzzle: a change in one part will affect others and make a seemingly simple objective difficult to arrive at.

The needs of buildings, websites and systems are relatively simple to understand and satisfy. Consequently, with a clear vision, a good overall understanding and the support of people with the right specialist knowledge, they are resources you can hopefully martial successfully to help you satisfy your organizational needs. People are a different matter.

Even if the change you are seeking to make involves just one other person, the challenges can still be great. This is because, unlike others resources, people have their own complex needs and values, and these may not be so easily aligned with the needs you are seeking to satisfy through change.

Aligning different needs in The Journey: process (top), personal (middle) and organizational (bottom)

In the simple scenario illustrated above we see three linked journeys of change.

The top one shows a fridge/freezer being taken from a warehouse by lorry to a shop from whence it moves on to someone's home.

The middle one illustrates the journey undertaken by the driver.

The bottom one illustrates the journey the business makes to achieve higher turnover and profits.

On the simplest level the driver's journey may seem to replicate the part of the lorry in the top line. However, from the driver's perspective, the deliveries are just parts of a greater journey he or she is making; involving their social life, their family and any greater ambitions they have. If the work satisfies their emotional and financial needs it can be said to align with their needs. If it fails to do this, or actively frustrates the satisfaction of their personal needs, the needs of the business and the driver will not be aligned. The tension caused when the demands of work and the needs of ones personal life travel along diverging paths is almost bound to lead to difficulties.

When all three journeys are perfectly aligned the products satisfy customer needs, the processes are efficient and the needs of the driver's are satisfied as he or she performs the role the business needs them to perform. Consequently business's need to achieve growth is most likely to be satisfied.

If they are misaligned - products don't appeal to customers, deliveries are routed wrongly, costs exceed revenue and drivers are inclined to pursue personal agendas ill suited to customer satisfaction - then the organization will struggle to satisfy its needs.

The business will likely find it easy to value the quality of its fridge/freezers, its warehouse, its retail outlets and its sales. These can all be estimated, measured and recorded on a spreadsheet, and plans amended according to the outputs. The lorry driver is not so easy to deal with. On any given delivery it is quite likely he or she will do as the business wants, but over the course of the greater journey the business is undertaking he or she will be required to complete this and other journeys thousands of times over. Whoever the driver is, it is almost certain that making these deliveries will not satisfy all of their needs.

In the short term the job will likely satisfy an important need of theirs. If it didn't they wouldn't have taken the job. But as time goes by, the greater the misalignment between their personal needs and those of their role, the greater the likelihood they will not perform the role as the business would like. The combination of a lack of alignment and the passage of time will open up a yawning gap between the needs of the business and the driver. Eventually this will lead the driver to disengage, work less hard, cause problems, leave or have to be laid off.

Introduce organizational change into the above scenario and the potential for misalignment is magnified.

The organization may decide its need for survival requires it to place a higher value on increased profitability and market share. This will likely give rise to new goals and targets, the attainment of which will become perceived needs for the business; needs that may cause it to value increased regulation and different working practices more highly.

The driver may initially value his or her pay packet sufficiently to compensate for other needs their work doesn't satisfy. As time goes by, foregoing the other things they value in order to keep their pay packet coming in may become more difficult