Making Change: Lessons from Crisis
Whether you’re preparing for an organizational change project, in the midst of one or still recovering from the last attempt, you know how massive a challenge these can be. What you may not realize is that you’re set up to fail. It’s not just you—up to 70% of planned change projects do not meet their objectives¹.
Nonprofits undergo organizational change on two wildly different tracks—planned change and crisis (unplanned change). The planned change path appears manageable, with detailed process, stakeholder engagement, deliberate implementation and measurable goals. Unplanned change looks much scarier. Fear and anxiety take hold as an organization scrambles to stave off the sudden danger it has encountered. And yet, crises have a capacity to propel change that planned efforts can rarely match. Why is that?
The status quo. Projections about change are grounded in how the present is perceived. Stakeholders, particularly staff, consider the status quo not just as it relates to organizational performance, but to their own personal situations. If change does not appear substantially better from both perspectives, they are likely to resist it.
In a crisis, the status quo is not an option. Refusing or subverting change does not mean things stay the same; it means they will get worse. Change doesn’t need to be either certain or even good to be the preferred option. Resistance to change in favor of the status quo simply makes no sense.
By contrast, planned change begins with the status quo intact. It may well be dysfunctional, frustrating and unhealthy, but people have adapted. Change efforts have to reach a high bar to persuade that the new path is both likely to succeed and—even if it does—worth the effort. On a personal level, some staff and Board members are inevitably benefiting from the status quo, enjoying power, privilege and other benefits that would be threatened by change. Even when the organizational need for change is urgent, some will nevertheless favor the status quo.
Common Purpose. The alignment of interests between the organization and individuals in a crisis supports everyone pulling in the same direction. No one much cares where they’re sitting in a lifeboat. Even those who will ultimately be disadvantaged will generally be inclined to support the unplanned change because:
The danger to the organization is more immediate and appears more intense than the risks to individuals.
Peer accountability is strong. Organizational change is a social process and, in a crisis, colleagues will be expecting each other to perform and conform, not to resist.
Because of the danger of the status quo, dissenters have few alternatives to offer. They may pick at the details, but this is unlikely to generate enough support to erode common purpose.
With planned change, the social and community drivers that lead to common purpose are far weaker. Individual agendas are less constrained. Alternatives are encouraged and dissent is tolerated by leaders who both value staff opinions and are ambivalent about setting expectations and boundaries. Pre-existing challenges in the relationship between leaders and staff can be leveraged by dissenters to gain power in the process. Even when common purpose is well established at the outset of a change process, it generally erodes over time.
Clarity of Goals and Strategies. Clarity is closely tied to commonality. With unplanned change, the fundamental goal is to alleviate the crisis. The strategies for doing so are likely to be simple and direct. This clarity makes decision-making so much easier. Think about how easy it is to reject a request for a week-long professional development training during a financial crisis. In fact, think how unlikely anyone would be to even ask, since the rejection would be obvious to all. Clarity and simplicity contribute to the likelihood that the change will be successful.
Most planned change projects become intrinsically tied to a host of ancillary goals. These may include:
Board, donor and community engagement;
Improving staff morale;
Generating new revenue; and
Repositioning the organization.
This multiplicity means that it isn’t always obvious which goals to prioritize or what strategies to follow. In these circumstances, only leaders can make decisions, creating bottlenecks, disempowering staff, and weakening common purposes. Some of these decisions inevitably subordinate the change process (e.g., embracing the questionable approach of a significant donor because it carries with it the hope for a big contribution). At the very least, multiple goals create complexity, the antithesis of clarity.
Urgency. No one has trouble finding time on their schedule to deal with a crisis. It’s on your mind as you try to fall asleep and crowds your thoughts when you wake up in the morning. At work, it supersedes everything else on your plate. There are tight timelines, action steps and no one misses meetings.
In sharp contrast, planned change projects rarely move quickly. Or stay on schedule. The more carefully they’re planned, the more steps, the more delays. Change projects compete for attention with other activities; often, they’ve been piled upon already full plates. And the more things slip, the more they continue to slip. Planned change is always at risk of being subordinated to crises—which demand immediate attention—or opportunity—which will often be more appealing than change.
Leadership. Hierarchical leadership is well-suited to addressing crises. Staff generally look to the ED to take charge and make decisions. Leaders that accept responsibility for addressing the crisis, project calm and confidence, and communicate effectively receive substantial deference. On the other hand, they are also held accountable for alleviating the crisis. The clarity of the situation makes it apparent to all whether or not they’re successful.
Absent crisis, nonprofits tend towards ambivalence around power and authority. Planned change processes can exacerbate this ambivalence as staff are engaged for their opinions and insights while decision-making processes are ill-defined and opaque. Power struggles can emerge for a variety of reasons, including:
Staff are engaged outside their normal hierarchies, often with external facilitation, giving them freedom to overstep lines that normally limit power struggles.
Leaders will rightfully worry that expressing themselves too assertively will undercut staff or Board engagement. This may manifest as indecision about their leadership roles and create an appearance of weakness.
Leaders are asking for buy-in and engagement, and staff have the ability to withhold or condition, shifting the power dynamic.
Staff are thinking big thoughts; and—surprise—some of those may correspond to leadership vulnerabilities.
How does this help?
Unfortunately, better appreciating the differences between these two paths to organizational change does not provide a simple recipe for planned change success. The temptation to artificially generate crisis is not a good idea. Crises have significant negative consequences. The stress can be profoundly unsettling on everyone. Those who can, may choose to leave. Funders may lose confidence. Programmatic work will be disrupted, meaning constituents may bear the brunt of the crisis. To the extent that crisis is manufactured rather than organic, backlash may be intense as staff, board and others are likely to feel manipulated.
We do have important clues about how some elements of planned change processes can be manipulated to support the success of that change.
Status Quo. Without crisis, maintaining the status quo will always appear to be a possibility, at least to some. You can make it a less appealing possibility, though, by lowering the risk of change and increasing the cost of resisting. You can incentivize or reward pro-change behaviors, and call out or penalize anti-change conduct. By building an aura of inevitability around the change, the status quo recedes as a viable alternative.
Common Purpose. The staff of most nonprofits share a sense of mission. But within the context of a shared mission, numerous agendas—personal and professional—proliferate. The common purpose engendered by crisis is unlikely to be available as a foundation for planned change.
The challenge for leadership is not to artificially create common purpose but to actively confront behaviors that oppose change. This can be as simple as forcing a conversation about such behavior and as difficult as dismissing a valued staff member who is unable to reconcile to the planned change.
Clarity. Unlike with status quo and common purpose, leaders have the ability to instill a high level of clarity into a planned change process. The challenge is actually choosing to do so. There is often a lot to be said for the ancillary goals that are muddying the planned change process.
The best approach here is to intentional about when you decide to compromise organizational change for other priorities. Successful change may will be imperiled by pursuing other goals, but that might be a reasonable trade-off if those goals are in fact more important than the change.
Urgency. Here again, leaders have substantial control. They can set rigid schedules for the change process and hold themselves and others accountable to these. This will be most effective when leaders make sure the urgency is realistic, by adding capacity or otherwise limiting the responsibilities of those working on the change
Leadership. Leading change—planned or unplanned—is extraordinarily difficult, and deserves much more extensive consideration than I can provide here. Just a few points to frame future discussion:
The leadership and management culture you’ve fostered prior to the change process will have a profound impact on the success of the change.
In particular, if your leadership doesn’t allow for learning and iteration both by you and others, the change is unlikely to succeed.
Be ready to be challenged. If you are uncomfortable receiving criticism, you may be in for a rough ride.
For change to succeed, you must consistently communicate that the need of the organization to change will take precedence, that obstacles will be overcome, and your unwavering conviction and determination that the change will succeed.
Planned change projects fail largely because following the conventions of planned change undermines their potential for success. So creative leaders must mitigate or bend these conventions to beat the odds. Just because you’re being set up to fail doesn’t mean you have to do so.
¹ This percentage does not seem to have budged over the past 25 years: Hammer, M. and Champy, J. (1993) Reengineering the corporation: a manifesto for business revolution, London: Nicholas Brearly; Beer, M. and Nohria, N. (2000) Cracking the code of change. Harvard Business Review, Vol.78, Issue 3, pp. 133-141; Kotter, J.P. (2008) A sense of urgency. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.