Need a Major Organizational Change? Dissatisfaction Is Your Friend!

With the New Year just underway, and many of us still determined to follow through on all those resolutions,  I thought I’d write about what it takes to drive successful, lasting change, whether that change is on a personal or organizational level.

First of all, understand this: change is hard. Human beings seem to be hardwired to resist it. Before we can really commit ourselves to making a change in how we think or behave, we need to be seriously dissatisfied with things as they are.  Think about it for a moment. Have you ever made any significant change in your personal life—whether in a relationship, your weight or fitness level, your career, or just some habit you’d rather not have—without being deeply dissatisfied about that particular issue? People who have achieved the most difficult types of change—recovering from addiction, for example—typically talk about having to “hit bottom” before even being able to get started.

What’s true for individuals is also true for organizations—which should come as no surprise, since organizations are made up of individuals, each “doing their own thing” in ways that don’t always align very well with the organization’s stated goals or preferred practices. So when the people in an organization generally feel that things are going well—when the sense is that the established ways of doing things are OK—achieving real change is next to impossible.

It comes down to, “Things could be better but we’re still delivering results. Isn’t continuous improvement good enough? Why make a big change when things aren’t broken?”

But leadership is about helping people and organizations get to a place they would not—could not— achieve by themselves. That’s why leaders need to be appropriately paranoid about the future. They need to cultivate an ability to look past today’s success, identify the challenges (and opportunities) that others might not see, and drive the changes necessary to deal with what’s coming down the road.

Inevitably, that process involves identifying, leveraging—and when necessary, stimulating—dissatisfaction with the status quo. That doesn’t mean that you as a leader run around like Chicken Little shouting that “the sky is falling.” It certainly doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t recognize what your organization and its people are doing well. But it does mean that you need to point the way from good to great.

I like to take some of my clients through an exercise I call “Standing in the Future.” I ask them to write a headline and an article for the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal, or their professional magazine that will appear five years from now. The article should discuss what your customers and shareholders think of your products, services, and employees? It should talk about how your employees feel about the company, and touch on the impact of the company on the communities where it operates, and on the larger world. Then I ask them to identify three actions that will help them make dramatic progress towards that future in the next year. In all the times I’ve done it, this simple exercise has never failed to produce a very thought provoking discussion.

With this in mind, I hope you’ll spend some time identifying the changes your organization needs to make, and the changes you need to make in the coming year to help the organization move in that direction. You might try “standing in the future” and writing an article about what you see that others may not see. Then embrace the dissatisfaction this process may well create. Use it to get mobilized, and let me know the results!

Happy New Year.