Greg Satell

The first thing you need to do is to anticipate resistance and build strategies to mitigate that resistance. Unless you do that, your chances of success are relatively low. Change doesn’t fail on its own. If fails because people resist it.

The key thing is to identify shared values. When people are passionate about an idea, the want to focus on differentiating values, because that’s what’s makes them passionate. They want everybody to see the idea the way they do, to share their passion and their fervor. But if you want to spread an idea, you need to build bridges, not moats. And that starts with shared values. It is shared values that leads to a shared sense of purpose.

The very first thing is to anticipate resistance and build strategies to overcome it. One of the first things we do when we start working with an organization is to go through a "resistance inventory" of five different categories of resistance, think through who will resist and what strategies can help mitigate the resistance. You can't anticipate everything, but going through this exercise in the beginning can save you a lot of trouble down the road!

Be very wary about using change management frameworks like Kotter's 8-Steps or Adkar. They are based on very flimsy evidence based on case-study interviews and little-to-no corroboration. There's a reason why failure rates are so unbelievably high. Rather than wasting time and money on OCM frameworks that have been proven to fail, focus on learning more about the science of change. We have decades of research encompassing hundreds of studies. Everett Rogers' "Diffusion of Innovation" is a great place to start. Duncan Watts' work on networks (Six Degrees, etc), Srdja Popovic's "Blueprint for Revolution" and my own "Cascades" are all helpful as well.

What's most important is to focus on shared values. When we're passionate about a change, we want to focus on what's different, usually in the form of a "unique value proposition," because it's what we see as different and unique is what makes us passionate in the first place. That's almost always a mistake. Many will see the imposition of difference as an attack. You need to meet people where they are, not where you wish them to be. Focusing on shared values will help you build a sense of safety into the change conversation. Once people feel that you share their values, they will be much more able to accept difference.

You need to understand that humans form attachments to ideas, people and other things. When those attachments are threatened, we tend to lash out in ways that don't reflect our best selves. That's why whenever we set out to make an impact there will always be those who will hate what we're trying to achieve, not for any rational logic, necessarily, just because for whatever reason, it offends their dignity, their identity, their sense of self. It is not your job to convince people of things that they don't want to be convinced about. What you can do is focus on shared values and empower those who want change to happen. As you gain traction, your most irrational opponents will lash out, overreach and help your cause.