You know you need to make changes in the business, but there are competing forces, those that help to drive the change and those that impede the change. How do you identify and then solve for each of those and, ultimately, bring everyone together?
I’ve written about change a lot, especially in the last 18 months or so. The bottom line is, if we’re talking about customer experience or employee experience, change (and continuous improvement) is a critical constant – and we’ve got to overcome organizational inertia or suffer the consequences. Why? Because customer and employee needs evolve, the business evolves, mergers and acquisitions happen, products change, new products are launched, customers change, new competitors enter the marketplace, the world changes, etc.
Recently, I wrote about:
- Nothing Changes if Nothing Changes
- Change Management and the 20/60/20 Rule
- The More Things Change, The More the Excuses Don’t
Those articles all seem to be good segues into today’s topic, using the Lewin Force Field Analysis to identify drivers of change and impediments of change within your organization. Not familiar with this analysis? Here’s what it looks like, and then I’ll explain it.
You’ll use this analysis to get a better understanding of those forces for and against change within your organization, to define how you’ll communicate to not only bring along the detractors but also to amplify the promoters of the change, and to make decisions that will ultimately help to make the change palpable to everyone in the organization.
Here’s how you build it out. Start with outlining your change vision or your desired future state. Let’s say that your desired future state is to change the culture to one that is customer-centric. Then capture forces that drive and support this change, followed by those things that impede or obstruct the change. Next, score each of those forces on a scale of one to five, where one is weak and five is strong. Sum the two forces’ scores. If one is higher than the other, perhaps it’s time to talk go/no go. But first, analyze each of the forces based on their scores:
- Which driving forces offset the impeding forces?
- Which impeding forces are detrimental to the desired outcome?
- Which impeding forces require training, communication, technology, support, etc. in order to neutralize them or to flip them to driving forces?
Completing this exercise starts to paint a picture of where you need to focus your efforts in order to ensure that your change vision is achieved successfully. Get to work to offset the impeding forces and take advantage of the driving forces!
Nothing happens until something moves. ~ Albert Einstein