There’s always so much ‘enthusiasm’ at the start of change.
Business leaders who have undertaken a major change initiative—a technology transformation, a total restructuring, or a launch of products and services—know from experience that the early days can be thrilling, particularly when you start getting your people to embrace new tools, processes, and systems.
Unfortunately, the excitement of those early days inevitably gives way to what many organizations experience as “the stall,” the point at which early enthusiasm wanes and adoption gives way to resistance from groups that are skeptical, hesitant, or outright opposed to the change.
The longer that employees push back against change, the greater the possibility that your entire initiative will end up in the “change graveyard”—the place where good ideas that were badly executed are buried.
For decades, business leaders and change architects have tried to identify the reasons why change initiatives stall. The result is a plethora of “top 10 reasons why change fails” articles and consultant presentations. Most of this advice completely ignores a fundamental reality of failed change projects: The initiative was designed for the people who were open to the idea of change and didn’t need much convincing, while ignoring the needs of people who see change through a drastically different lens.
Fortunately, not only can you predict the stall, but you can also prevent it by acknowledging that your organization is made up of an array of groups, each of which contains individuals with similar tendencies and behaviors who all see change in different ways.
Diffusion of Innovation Theory: Why Change Doesn’t Take
In 1962, Everett Rogers, an American sociologist who specialized in communications theory, published Diffusion of Innovations, a widely cited book that examines the way different people view change and why some are inherently resistant.
The key underlying principle in Rogers’ theory was that “the more we know about how to do something, the harder it is to learn how to do it differently.” The diffusion of innovation, Rogers argued, was a “social process, even more than a technical matter.”
In other words, change is really hard.
One of Rogers’ greatest contributions was the development of a bell curve model that describes how different cohorts within a market or organization respond to the demand to change.
Rogers’ model starts with “Innovators” (people who crave change and new tools) through the Early Adopters and Early Majority. In organizations, these three groups typically include those who will ultimately adopt change with minimum effort and traditional change management tactics.
However, according to Rogers’ model, those groups only account for half of all employees. The other half—the Late Majority and the Laggards—are typically the groups that slow or, in some cases, derail change initiatives.
Applying Rogers’ thinking and what we know about human behavior, what leaders of most organizations get wrong is that they design their change initiative for the Innovators, Early Adopters, and Early Majority—the people who are predisposed to the very idea of change. However, in many instances, there is no strategic planning for how to win over the Late Majority and Laggards.
When these groups begin to push back, leaders tend to view them as the problem children of the change initiative and intransigent employees who are afraid of change and resistant to new ideas. In actuality, they often have legitimate questions and concerns to be addressed.
In the face of this resistance, organizations make the fatal decision of doubling down on their original strategy. More training is ordered. Communicating change expectations intensifies. If experience with failed change initiatives has shown us anything, it’s that ordering up additional servings of a flawed strategy isn’t going to create an appetite for change among the more skeptical individuals in your workforce.
If you build a solution based on Rogers’ model, you’ll put much more effort into using peers to model new behaviors for the skeptics. The Late Majority will embrace change, but only after you’ve proven to them that it’s safe and—most importantly—inevitable. The Laggards will eventually get with the change program when they realize that the organization will, at some point, make it inconvenient or even unpleasant to do things the old way.
Unfortunately, efforts designed to win over the Late Majority and Laggards often come too little and too late to save many change initiatives. Leaders struggle to realize that no matter how hard they try to urge their people to change, the Late Majority and Laggards don’t take their cue from leaders. Top-down messaging and directives, on their own, won’t dissipate the social inertia holding certain groups back.
There are reasons behind this inertia, and organizations won’t be able to save their change initiatives without addressing them.
How to Connect with the Late Majority and Laggards
Although it’s easy to become frustrated with people who won’t embrace change, leaders must understand that, on their own, they’ll never win over the skeptics. The Late Majority and Laggards don’t take their cues from leaders; they look to their peers for encouragement and wait for proof that the new way of working is better than the old way.
Failed change initiatives share a core flaw: The entire strategy behind the initiative was designed to work with only half of the employees.
Your employees represent a spectrum of perspectives on the value of change. Applying a one-size-fits-all strategy is, ultimately, a one-way ticket to the change graveyard.
Prepare your leaders for the inevitable pushback from the Late Majority and Laggards that so often coincides with the typical post-implementation energy lull.
Make sure your leaders know their job is to find the right solution for the right group of employees. In addition, remember that the hard work to capture the Late Majority and Laggards is done after change is launched and must continue until everyone has bought in.
Above all, understand that change will only be accepted if you stop telling people it’s good and start showing them.