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As a business discipline, meaningful and effective measurement sometimes proves to be elusive. But, it is an absolute must in transformational change, certainly if there is to be continuous improvement.

Consequently, “Evaluate Effectiveness” is the sixth step in The Brookside Group’s ASPIRE Change Leadership Model^TM, and builds on the measurement work from earlier steps. In this step, you measure the effectiveness of your tactics. Because, typically, you’ll be looking for both business and behavioral results, you’ll need the right balance of quantitative and qualitative insights.

Quantitative surveys can statistically validate what tactics were most effective at creating awareness, understanding and participation in the program. They also can help you assess such factors as the degree of individual commitment to the initiative.

As a partner to quantitative surveys, you also should implement qualitative surveys because they can give you valuable insights on your employees’ thoughts, attitudes, perceptions and emotions that might figure into engagement issues.

However, best practices tells us there is some foundational work to be done before starting any research project, whether it be quantitative or qualitative. This foundational work focuses on a smaller group of employees and will give you the insight to develop a more scientific research and statistically valid survey.

The foundational research should follow four simple steps:

1. Develop a list of three to five open-ended questions. Open-ended questions can’t be answered by a simple “yes” or “no,” and, thus, elicit a more detailed response.The questions should attempt to tap into the basic thoughts and feelings of employees regarding the change. Some possible questions might be:
   

   What do you think about the company’s plans to change?
   What do you understand about the need to change?
   What goal is the company trying to reach with the change?
   What concerns do you have about the change?
   How confident are you in the company’s future?
   What do you think will happen if the company doesn’t change?
   How do you think the change will affect your personally?

2. Target a manageable number of people.For an informal survey as this, aim to contact five to 10 participants. However, do so over a broad range of job levels.
3. Document the responses as best as you can. Pay special attention to words indicating emotion.
4. Analyze the responses and use them as the basis to develop questions for your quantitative or qualitative survey instruments.

The first three steps of The Brookside Group’s ASPIRE Change Leadership Model^TM tell you where you are, where you will go and how you are going to get there. The fourth step is the journey itself. “Implement Initiatives” encourages a deliberate, cautious, metrics-based approach to executing the change program. At its core is a set of approaches to overcome resistance.

Regardless of whether your proposed change is significant or relatively minor, you can anticipate resistance from some or all employees impacted by the effort. In fact, SHRM’s 2007 study on Change Management shows that about 70% of major organizational changes encounter employee resistance.

Your employee’s resistance can have many origins – such as differing on why change is needed, what change is needed or how to go about the change – and take many forms. They may show obvious signs of resistance, as when they strongly object to, or refuse to cooperate with, the change. Sometimes their resistance takes on a more subtle appearance, as when they show apathy. 

It is vital that you, as a change sponsor, not only anticipate resistance from your employees, but have a plan to detect, diagnose and eliminate it. You also must understand why they resist change so that, from the very beginning of your initiative, you can undertake preventative measures to minimize its potential effect on your success.

As discussed in our post about setting goals, gaining input on goals enables people to become aware, understand and participate in the change process. At one client, we used a three-step implementation approach for most tactics. It wasn’t the three steps that were important, it was the fact that people got to participate in the rollout of every tactic that was important. The approach consists of:

• The Laboratory – the laboratory was essentially a focus group. Beyond providing the project team the input on how to adjust messages and timing, it gave the project team the confidence that they would be able to rollout the tactics.
• The Pilot – the pilot was a internally visible test marketing of various concepts. The project team used the pilot to use new presentation material, validate training material and test new support tools. The pilot participants became change agents and ambassadors of the new ways of working. “I was part of the pilot, and it mostly worked. We recommended a few changes, but it can work for you too.”
• The Rollout – the third and final stage, the rollout is the large scale implementation of the change. By this point, confidence is high and resistance is significantly lowered.

Resistance to change isn’t necessarily all bad, as it sometimes can serve a constructive purpose. Allowing employees to express their beliefs and feelings will help you identify where their concerns lie and how to address those concerns to achieve the needed commitment to your change program.

Now that you know what your destination is, you need a roadmap to get there.

The third step in The Brookside Group’s ASPIRE Change Leadership Model^TM gets you that roadmap. During the “Plan Programs” step, you define milestone goals, strategies and tactics to reach your end goals as defined in the previous step in the model. (See “Setting Goals).  

Again, this might seem easier than it truly is. It is easy if you stick to general, directional plans. If you are very specific, measurable and time-bound, it isn’t nearly as easy – but your plan will be better by orders of magnitude. Stating, “Train key employees in the fourth quarter” is easy.  Stating, “Train 85% of all managers and 100% of directors and above in the first two weeks of December” makes the expectations clear for all. You might not get the 85%, but your result will be far better than the first example would provide.

Likewise, your strategies, which are the basic action items to be undertaken in support of the objectives, need to be specific. For instance, just saying that you’ll use communication as a strategy during the initiative isn’t enough. You need to dig deep down to what you’ll communicate, how, when and why.

As might be obvious, measures are the standards by which the success of the strategies is quantified. The key mistake we see is tracking activities, like counting intranet articles. Your measures need to be outcome focused, allowing you to track the degree of behavioral change that’s been achieved. And if the behavioral change isn’t great enough, then your measures also need to tell you why.

One final thought on planning your program, you must establish a system of governance over the program and a method for managing the program. A governance program will provide you and your change team with information and understanding about:

• Who the program’s stakeholders are
• The roles and responsibilities of all parties
• The process for escalating issues

Some form of program management will give you the ability to:

• Track and report program milestone status, resource plans, budget, interdependencies
• Provide transparency to risks, issues, etc.
• Make unbiased, final calls on status
• Ensure actions are executed, issues assigned and addressed and key decisions made; ensuring issues, resolutions and key decisions are communicated
• Ensure consistency of ways of working, team protocols, reporting, in an effort to improve effectiveness and efficiency

A college student researching change management asked us for information on how our company works, and this inspired us to update some documentation on The Brookside Group’s ASPIRE Change Leadership Model^TM. Yesterday, we began posting some of that work – specifically, the assessing steps required to kick-off a successful change initiative.

Rarely do people embark on a journey without knowing the destination. Well it’s the same with a change initiative. According to the Harvard Business School, a compelling view of the future is critical. However, this compelling future view is more than just a vision statement. It’s a shared vision that is desirable, compelling, realistic, focused and flexible, and more importantly, capable of motivating employees to participate fully in the change.

This need for a shared vision takes us to the second step in the model, Set Goals. This might seem deceptively easy. But in fact, it’s arguably the most challenging component of the model because it requires a very deep and clear understanding of all the issues surrounding your change program.

On the surface, it might appear that developing a vision might be a process that requires you, as a change sponsor, to fly solo. In reality, the exact opposite is true. The more you reach out to change participants to help develop the vision, the more likely you will get their assistance in carrying it forward. Involving others often results in gaining their commitment and willingness to help you implement the change ahead.

For that reason, the development of a shared vision is an important activity to undertake at the beginning of an initiative. It can serve as a catalyst to draw change participants together and share the common bond of being able to see – and own – the future success of the effort.

Therefore, once you have “assessed the as-is,” your focus should turn to creating a shared vision for the change program by establishing:

• The way participants will know they have reached the desired end state or the definition of the desired end state
• The scope and parameters of the change
• The reason – or case – for the change
• The risk if the change is not undertaken
• The relationship of the change to the company, industry and/or competitive environment
• The various workplace factors – such as processes, practices, systems and facilities – that will not be affected by the change

However, in designing the shared vision, you should not simply confine yourself to the consensus of change participants’ opinions. To give the effort meaning and scope, the vision must challenge employees to imagine, seek and achieve new heights of excellence. As Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more powerful than knowledge.” When change participants become aware of what is possible, they begin to realize that challenges can be surmounted, problems can be resolved, and a target can be achieved.

Why does a shared vision need to have the abovementioned characteristics? Because, it:

• Paints a picture of a future that is both desirable and attainable. It motivates participants to focus and achieve their goals to accomplish an end that – in many cases – differentiates their company from competitors.
• Has credibility with employees as it is tethered to the business’s needs and, hence, to a clear target.
• Focuses employees on the activities that have the most value – and discourages them from pursuing more opportunities than they can handle.
• Encourages employees to work toward new levels of achievement as the organization continuously improves its capabilities.  

In today’s business world, no competency is more crucial for a manager than the ability to spearhead change effectively and expeditiously – and in a way that fully engages all stakeholders.

As we’ve already established, change management is a systematic and coordinated approach that can be implemented on an organizational, operational or even personal level to create, lead and manage change. However, to successfully lead any change, one needs to follow a series of six comprehensive steps. These steps are manifested by The Brookside Group’s ASPIRE Change Leadership Model^TM:
 
For the successful implementation of any large project, and especially a change initiative, it is important to perform project steps in the correct order. Thus, the ASPIRE model begins at the top of the circle, with Assess the As-Is.

The Assess the As-Is gives you with some critical components to launch your change initiative:

• The awareness and understanding to explain why change is needed based on current business issues.
• A clear picture of your current state. You might have an idea of how your organization is performing, but thoroughly investigating the as-is state ensures you have the facts and not just guess work.

All this results in a platform for change that helps you establish the sense of urgency – one of John Kotter’s key reasons for failure (see posting Why Transformation Efforts Fail) – to rally support. Support is critical because for change to happen, according to Harvard Business School, 75% of managers must believe that maintaining the status quo is more dangerous than making a change.

In future posts, we’ll discuss the other steps in detail. But one final comment for now: You’ll notice, that The Brookside Group’s ASPIRE model is a closed loop. That’s because it needs to be a repeatable and sustainable process of continuous improvement that brings about meaningful change and continues to drive your organization ever closer to optimal performance. This is an important point to remember as we discuss the other steps.

In an earlier posting, I briefly mentioned Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s grief cycle. Her cycle defines the rollercoaster we all ride during times of loss, and includes the five stages:

• Denial (this isn’t happening )
• Anger (why me?)
• Bargaining (I’ll … if …)
• Depression (I no longer care)
• Acceptance (it is what it is)

This cycle is often what employees experience during times of change. The instability from the unknown future state causes employees to feel they’ve lost their power or control over the work lives. The instability causes undue fear and doubt in themselves and their futures, causing them to get stuck somewhere between immobilization and depression.

Helping employees to move through these stages toward acceptance can be difficult, but not impossible, especially if we employ the strategies of awareness, understanding and participation to help them through it.

By creating awareness of the change to come, we help employees move through the denial phase and make the change a reality for them. Likewise, helping employees move to an understanding of the need for change helps them to deal with the anger they feel. Finally, using participatory methods helps employees to move through the depression and past just simple acceptance to a level of engagement in the change.

One place to look for a different take on creating awareness, understanding and participation is Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers helps individuals seeking weight loss through their Four Pillars. The Four Pillars are behavior, exercise, food and support that make up a comprehensive program of support, education, and encouragement.

These pillars take members through an awareness of their weight issues – why they are overweight – to understanding the best ways to address their issues -the right food choices and exercise – to engagement through participating in meetings or an online community.

Alcoholics Anonymous is another good example of personal change programs that address the need for awareness, understanding and participation. Through fellowship meetings and their 12-step program, members are encouraged to participate in their own healing. This is done by helping members acknowledge their situation and then finding ways to live with it.

Perhaps with a little effort, companies can work to apply these participatory and supportive means to their change efforts. 

The view of communication as information transfer was furthered by the application of Claude Shannon’s “Mathematical Theory of Communication,” as posited in his 1948 paper of the same name.

In his paper, Shannon posited the reproduction of messages as an engineering problem and looked at the process of communication in terms of accurately conveying the symbols of communication through technological sources, such as the telegraph. The main issue at stake for Shannon was the proper encoding of information, which he felt would allow for a time savings by encoding the message sequences into proper signal sequences that eliminated some of the redundancy found in language, and which, in turn, would lead to better encryption forms.

Shannon’s one-way communication model helped to set off the academic field of modern communication theory and research by providing an understanding of the main components to communication: source, message, channel, receiver.

The ability of a theory from one academic discipline to provide intellectual points of leverage for investigation in another discipline shouldn’t be discounted. Applying theories in new ways enhances our ability to think more broadly about the worls. However, not carefully exploring new paradigms can intellectually trap us in unfounded assumptions.

That said, the No. 1 reason Shannon’s theory shouldn’t have been applied to human communication rests in its origins. Shannon’s major goal was to determine how an information source could be described mathematically to ensure proper information encoding to save time and protect the message. It was not to influence or cause someone to take some action.

Shannon’s theory grew from the desire to prevent effective communication, by introducing noise to the message, making the encrypted message more secure. Thus noise was a positive aspect of his information theory. The more noise, the more secure the encrypted message.

As I mentioned in an earlier posting, the transmission model is based on the work of John Locke. It also has ties to the transport model from the 19^th century when writing (communication) had to be transported from writer to reader in some physical form like books, letters, newspapers (Chandler, 1994, para. 15). Applying the transmission model to modern communication is problematic because it focuses on the transmission of information and not of meaning.

First, the transmission model fixes the roles of sender and receiver – with the sender having the primary role and the receiver a secondary, passive role – in a linear, one-way model that relies on the receiver to absorb information (Chandler, 1994, para. 22). But, a linear communication model can’t accurately explain or account for proper communication in a multi-vocal world consisting of multiple societies, languages and belief systems.

We also have the processing of information – in this case in terms of absorption, as if through the skin – of content or information in the form of words and a not their meaning. But we don’t just absorb information. Rather we frame the information we receive based on many factors – our gender, age, social class and education in a nonlinear world- and on the relationships we have with the “senders.” So, there’s no possible way any one message could have just one fixed meaning for all “recipients.”

Likewise, a third issue revolves around the purpose of language, which is to express ourselves to one another through recognizable symbols. Given that the 500 most common words have more than 13,000 different meanings, language is a tricky and elusive thing. Thus we can’t assume that two people will use or understand the same language we use in the same way. And we can’t take an Orwellian approach and create our own Newspeak to purge the shades of gray and redundancy in our language.

This leads to a fourth issue with the transmission model: the model equates content with meaning even though the intended and generated meanings might diverge. But books, letters and such only contain words; meaning is constructed when a listener or reader makes sense of those letters and words. So inserting a meaning into a message isn’t easily done.

Finally, the transmission model doesn’t account for context. Context is often based on our perception, and perception is not single-sided. We see things in their completeness – like a complete table, and not just its top – in the context of our kitchen.

Before we can discuss the true nature and definition of noise, and how to combat it, a short review of some contributing theories is called for.

First is to define communication, another term that academics and practitioners alike have many different definitions for communication. Some say it’s the accurate transmission of information (Hutton & Mulhern, 2002). Some define it as the passing of information or the exchange of ideas. Others believe it’s the process by which a sender and a receiver establish a commonness in their thoughts (Belch & Belch, 1998). Any way you slice it, most will agree the definitions all suggest a transfer of information, and not meaning, between parties.

Regardless of how you define communication, its origins lie mostly in the transmission model of communication, in which:

• A sender encodes a message and sends it through a communication channel, which might be affected by noise, interference or distraction.
• The intended recipient gets and decodes the message and may or may not provide feedback upon its receipt.

The transmission model of communication was developed by John Locke in the 1690s. Yes, it was written more than 400 years ago and communication as information transfer is still a leading communication theory. Locke believed the “end of Discourse and Language” was to convey thoughts and ideas to one another; to “excite ideas in the hearer as they exist in the speaker” (Locke, 1996).

Much of the shift in thinking about communication – from a means of sharing to a means of conveying messages – took hold following the Industrial Revolution as the modern organization came into existence. With the Industrial Revolution, society moved from an agricultural economy to one of mass production, mass distribution and mass promotion (or communication).

No longer did individuals relate with others on a one-on-one basis. Rather, they began relating to the large, impersonal organizations providing jobs, goods and services. In this way, communication took on a one-way, single-sided aspect.

Communicators grapple with noise in their message every day. We spend years honing our communication skills – everything from improving our writing to developing creative, cutting edge designs – to eliminate as much noise as possible and get our messages read. But we often feel we’re working in vain when our messages, carefully crafted for simplicity and clarity, are completely misunderstood because of noise.

Communication noise has been defined as “anything that interferes with” the message being received as intended, and it is deeply rooted in the transmission model of communication: a sender sends a message and a receiver receives it. It arose from the application of Claude Shannon’s A Mathematical Theory of Information, which he developed in the 1940s to enhance the encryption of military messages. For Shannon, noise was a positive because it meant a message couldn’t be read easily.

Since then, Shannon’s theory and the idea of noise have been applied to many different human communication disciplines, including marketing and advertising. But the definition for noise is largely insufficient, is opposite of the meaning Shannon had placed on it, and reflects the problematic assumptions inherent in the transmission model of communication: that human communication is nothing more than a sender encoding his ideas into words or pictures and a receiver interpreting them.

As a graduate student, noise became of particular interest to me. I found that my general observations of family and friends showed very different and inconsistent reactions to messages, particularly television ads. This led me to take a look at the idea of noise and to build my master’s thesis around the subject.

I’ll share my thoughts and findings from my thesis work in future posts. because, if we ever are going to combat noise in our communication programs, I feel we need to rethink the definition of noise.