 Hello and thanks for having me. Is that for me? Now for something completely different perhaps to some of the other tracks and presentations you've been in. Today we're going to do a bit of a gallop through change management because you've been hearing and you still will be hearing in the presentations of best methods, best practices, the best way of doing things, but it still remains that you can lead a horse to water but you can't make a drink. there these problematic elements called humans that have to implement all these wonderful ideas that you're coming up with. So we're going to do a bit of a gallop through change management. Just briefly, we'll be looking at what change management is and how it differs from change leadership. We'll do a high level overview of John Cotter's eight step framework for change leadership and overview of the change management process and then the really interesting part, the psychology of change. Gwyddon ni'n dweud o'r cyhoedd yr edrych? Gwyddon ni'n dweud o'r cyhoedd y gواith? Gallwch y cwyrdd fawr yma, mae'n gwybod y gallwch chi'n mynd i wneud ymlaen. Rydych chi'n gwybod i'n mynd i wneud ymlaen yw'r gweithlaen? Mae ydych chi'n byw'r gweithlaen o'r peth, oedd o'n gofynu'n gweithlaen, oedd o'n gweithlaen o'r gweithlaen, oedd o'n gweithlaen o'r gweithlaen o'r gweithlaen. Now quick as fast as you can, ride it down. Yes you too. You in the back, I see nothing happening. Ride it down as fast as you can, as accurately as you can. If I was going to be really mean and nasty I'd carry on with the presentation while asking you to do that at the same time. Who's got it? Who's got it? Everybody? Anybody? You're almost there. Do we have anybody in the room who didn't even try? Oh no. Time-a-confession time, why? Okay. So when we perceive that change is going to be too difficult, sometimes we don't even try. Who started and then gave up? Come come come come I know it happened yes. What was your story, why did that happen? Did it help that I was putting on pressure and say go faster, didn't. ydych yn ymgyrchu? Rydyn ni'n gwneud ffocorol fyddaeth hwnnw? A tyn nhw'n gyfer hynny'n ddodol? Rydyn ni'n gwneud y ffocorol? Ac mae'n bwysig i'r llunio'r bobl yng nghymru? Mae gyda'r ffocorol? Yn ymgyrchu? Felly mae yna. Yn ymgyrch yn gallu y proses a wneud ymlaen ac yw'r hyn sydd yn fawr. Rydyn ni'n gwneud hynny'n gwybod i'w gyrfa o'i pethau a'r ysgol. Why? It's easier and faster, people do what works, people do what's easier and faster, I told you to write that I gave you a clear instruction, everyone knew it was required and some people still found the faster way of doing it and that'll happen and change transformations too. So too often organisational transformation is like this, people change only reluctantly as soon as they can, they slip back into their comfort zones, they grumpy that things were interrupted and that they were made to feel uncomfortable. Too often enterprise architecture implementations or reinvigurations are like this, poorly communicated, you don't know why you're doing it, how does it fit into the bigger picture, why should you have to do it, what's going to happen if you don't do it. So hopefully today you'll learn something about change management and how we can do it differently. Because often nearly 40 years of research change leadership guru John Cotter estimates that more than 70% of organisational transformations fail because they aren't implemented holistically. There's too much of an emphasis on the technical side and not enough cognizance given to the human side. So what is change management? If it's not something you just check a box to get HR off your back. How do we get from here to there? There are many definitions about what change management is, I don't know that they always clarify the picture. Really it's managing that human fuzzy muddy side of change. The humans are going to be implementing your change and it has some elements in common, it draws on multiple disciplines, psychology, behavioural sciences, business sciences, engineering systems thinking and is predicated on systems theory that nothing happens in a vacuum. If you try and change one little aspect of an organisation that change is going to ripple through to the individuals in the organisation and bounce back, echo back and change what it is you're trying to achieve. When I was still a novice, a complete novice because I still am a novice to EA and was battling to understand what it is, it was explained to me that EA can be understood as being the glue between IT and business. If that's true, I think it's an epoxy. This Pratley party was invented in South Africa in the 1970s and you had to cut the exact amount from each stick and mix it together and then you really had a super glue that could glue the heaviest things together. If EA is the glue that binds IT and business, I think it's an epoxy of the technical side of enterprise architecture best practice and change management of the human side. If you only use one type of glue it's not going to stick but if you use the two together you might have something strong and lasting. So what's the difference between change management and change leadership? They have a lot in common and they overlap. But I think if this transformation in the organisation was conceived of as being a train then the locomotive engine is change leadership. That's what pulls you through into the future. You decide where you're going and you head off of that with lots of noise and motion and steam. But change management is about keeping the train on the tracks. It's about controls and switching systems and drivers and carriages so that we don't become derailed in the process of moving strategically to where we want to move. Sales are dropping like a rock. Our plan is to invent some sort of doohickey that everyone wants to buy. Well, the visionary leadership work is done. How long will your part take? Okay, how not to do change leadership. There's a table that lays out the core differences between managing and leading change itself explanatory. Basically change leaders work at a meta level, at the macro level. They deal with vision and they deal with strategy and direction. They are followed and their whole goal is to produce changes, to move the organisation and transform it. But change managers work at a much more detailed level and their goal really is to produce stability and predictability. So there is an inherent tension that exists between change managers and change leaders. But if you only have one, rather than the other, if you only have the change management, you're going to stay excellent but stand still. And we know what happens to organisations who do that. If you only have change leaders, you'll have lots of rah-rah and road shows, but your product and your service offering might suffer in the interim. So John Cotter, and I encourage you to read his books. They're very accessible to round out your understanding. He lays out eight steps to leading successful change, which he breaks up into three main phases. In the first phase you want to create a climate for change. He talks about generating a sense of urgency, pointing out to the organisation the worst case scenario of staying on the current trajectory. There's a wonderful Chinese quote that I love. It says, if we don't change direction, we'll wind up where we're headed. And that needs to be pointed out to the organisation if you're going to transform. You establish a change team of respected persons from across the organisation, people of influence, and you develop a simple, powerful vision that can be communicated in five minutes. If you can't communicate it in five minutes, it's too complicated, you need to simplify it. Then you engage and enable the whole organisation, primarily according to Cotter, by communicating, by over communicating, because that's how you get by in for your transformation efforts. And you empower action by removing obstacles for change and by deliberately, strategically, creating your change plan so that it guarantees short-term winds. Lots of quick short-term winds that helps offset the naysayers. It builds momentum and it builds confidence in what you're doing. It's a bit like how a dolphin moves through the ocean in lots of little leaps as opposed to how a whale moves. If you are planning an EA implementation or reinvigoration and you're going for the one big splash, you're going to struggle. You've got to break it down into small parts and the first little hops need to be really little so that people begin to believe in the change process. In the third phase you want to anchor the change into the organisation, in its leadership, in its succession, in its culture and constantly reinvigorate that change process. Maybe if you hear nothing else from this presentation, hear this, that it's not a once-off, it's not a destination, it's not something that's ever really finished. It's something that you continually need to pay attention to. So then how about change management? Well, here's my question to you. How do you change the shape of a block of ice? Who wants to volunteer and answer? Got some engineers here, yes? You chisel it. I've seen ice sculptors with those enormous things and they can do miraculous things with chainsaws. But what happens if we have an individual unit of ice and we want to change the shape of that? Come on, guys. It's not hard. I saw a hand somewhere there. Standard weight. And then what happens is that the ice melts. Then we change the shape of the container and we put the water in it and refreeze it. And that's what change management is about. How can we unfreeze the organisation? How can we melt the individuals that the organisation is comprised of? Put them in a new structure, a new management structure, a reporting structure, a way of doing business, and then set that, consolidate that into the organisational culture. It's not the full story, it's the simple version, but it's a good place to begin. So in preparing for change there's some things we need to do, form the change team from across as many business units and silos as possible this way. From as many levels as possible and with buy-in and championing at the most senior level that you can get. People who have varied and complementary skills and what you really need to avoid is a technical skew. There need to be people who can speak language that business people understand. Understand the current scenario of what do we currently have, why is it problematic? What are the pain spots of that that we're here to fix? And in doing so that's a bottom-up approach of listening, of consulting, of understanding genuinely, not paying lip service to it as in the cartoon. The more you consult and the more broadly you consult and the more genuinely you listen, at this phase the less resistance you'll have down the line. If you come in with a top-down approach to implementing change you're going to put up people's backs and get automatic resistance. Then you develop your preferred scenario, what do we want? And why do we want it? Why is it important? What will happen if we don't do it? And reset expectations. One of the things that people need to understand at this point is that change is coming. They have some say in how, but whether or not it happens is possibly not upon a negotiation. And then you create that clear vision around the core values, the core purpose of the organisation that you can clearly communicate over and over and over throughout your transformation. It's got to be clear, simple, achievable, feasible, desirable. It has to target heads and hearts. Did you hear that people? Heads and hearts. Okay, not just heads. It can't just be an intellectual message. It needs to touch people inside so that they want to change. And identify the obstacles to change. Those can be people. It can be an organisational culture that is risk averse or change averse. It can be legacy systems. It can even be the environment. We were at a client site recently, which is one of these modern buildings where sometimes you work from home and sometimes you work from the office. You come with your briefcase and you choose a desk and you plug in and you start working, which sounds great in theory. But the net effect is that the EA practice was distributed throughout various levels, literal levels, flaws of the organisation. Had no sense of being a team and nobody in the organisation knew who they were. So sometimes even your physical environment can be an obstacle to change. And possibly the biggest one will see why in a moment is past negative experiences of change. Those are really going to be a big obstacle for you. In the second phase, in implementing change, you put together your change management action plan. Consciously targeting leaders who may not think that this is something that involves them. People, responsibilities, activities, timelines and planning for those short term gains rather than the one fatal company. Then you create an awareness of what's going to happen. What the transformation is going to involve and why. And you communicate this within your EA team from EA to the business and understand that the communication is two way. The awareness initiative needs to begin weeks or even months before your implementation begins. It's one of your strongest ways of managing and circumventing resistance. And it's got to be designed so that it's tailored to your specific audience. I've put persuasion there because this is not just about awareness, it's about selling. In advertising they say sell the sizzle, not the steak. I think in organisational transformation you have to sell the sizzle and the steak. But with love and respect too often you guys sell the chemical composition of the protein. Which is not necessarily what the organisation needs to hear or wants to hear. It's capable possibly even of understanding. Training is a huge part. You assess where the gap is, what people will need to know. You design, you develop, you implement. And then you evaluate and you plough back what you've learned into the next iteration of training. It's an ongoing process. This is also not a once off. It's something that you continually have to do within the organisation as you find out what people need to learn. And then you empower action. You are going to weave change at this phase and in the maintenance phase in every aspect of the business. So what you want to achieve needs to be factored into recruitment, selection, induction, every training programme and coaching. Job descriptions, performance management systems, KPIs. Into business processes like budgeting and decision making. These need to be aligned with the change and the values of the change that you're trying to instill. Into the design of the environment, the infrastructure, the applications and systems. And one of the ways of empowering action is to provide ongoing support. That too is not a once off. Perhaps the most important one and I've given it its own slide is communication. John Carter says, start way before you think you need to. Put together way more than you think you need to in terms of a communication plan. As often as you can across as many channels, mess and individual. Now when you've got your training plan and you think that's comprehensive, multiply it by a factor of 10. Over communicate by a factor of 10 because you actually can't over communicate. You can't start communicating too soon and it's not something that you ever stop. It's multidirectional. It happens from the EA team but also back to the EA team. You know, Godel, evolution or whatever your belief system says, gave us two ears and one mouth. And we should really be listening and speaking in that proportion if you're wanting your change to be taken up. What are you going to communicate the EA vision and the broader transformation vision if there is one? Process, timelines, expectations, what changes are going to be happening, what successes you've had, what challenges you've had. You need to be honest and communicate about those two and give regular updates to people. Communication is formal and informal but systems theory teaches us that you can't not communicate. Those of you who are married will know the powerful communication of silence. There's silent treatment and you know that something is being communicated. The problem is you're not always sure what when the cupboard door starts slamming and the pots are slamming and someone's ignoring you. That's a problem in organisations. You can be in charge of the communicating and the message you want to deliver or not. But there's still going to be communication. If there is a communication vacuum then gossip and rumour and fear mongering will flood into that vacuum to fill it. You can't not communicate. It also needs to be adapted so that your different communications are relevant and targeted at the audience that you're sending them to. It's not so much about what you want to say as it is what they need to hear. I'm not talking about soft-soaping the message that you're just telling people things that will make them happy. But it needs to be relevant to them and often what we're communicating is what we want to say rather than what people would like to know. It also needs to be targeted to different cultures and languages. A while ago I was working on a production pipeline re-engineering programme. I was doing the change management side at a pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company had two main lines. They had what they called human ethical medicines which were cholesterol lowering, blood pressure lowering, diabetes, medications. They had the agricultural and veterinary side, dips and that sort of thing. They were actually in two different buildings on either side of a road that ran in the middle. On this side where the human medicines were, the executives and the sales reps pulled up in the BMWs and Mercedes-Benz. They got out in their posh suits and their briefcases and they all looked like little delcony replicas. On this side they were all, we call them buckies in South Africa, we call them pickups. Twin cabs and single cabs mud spattered along the sides. The guys got out, they were men to a man and they looked like farmers. They were shorts and they were leather shoes and big hats. They had the farmers tan and that's what they were selling and who they were selling to. We really were giving the same message to both groups. In fact the pipeline was the same whether you were making medicines for animals, I mean the machinery for animals or people. But we had to package it as a completely different way of training, of communicating of awareness because these were two different groups, two different cultural groups who didn't speak the same language even though they spoke the same language. How not to do it. You won't read my technical report so I summarized it in this complicated slide. If you stare at it long enough you will either experience the illusion of understanding it or be too embarrassed to admit you don't. Do you have any questions to betray your ignorance? I have a question. Is the triangle thing mad at the tube? You've been in that meeting haven't you? Okay so tailor your communications to your audience. In the third phase we're looking at maintaining change. Palm trees are amazing trees aren't they? They grow in sand with a minimal root structure to anchor them. And they are at that point where the land meets the sea and where there is most intense. That's where hurricanes hit the land, that's where these storms hit the land. Over time palm trees like certain people in certain organisations have evolved a magnificent way of dealing with this. They go oh here comes a storm and they do this. They just become really flexible and bend back and they let the winds of change blow over them until the storm has passed and then they go back to exactly how they were before. And people will do that at an individual level and an organisation will do that. Oh here comes the next transformation, we've had them before and we've survived them. Let's just pretend we're going with the flow and then when all the hurahs gone and executives are back at head office and those blessed emails have stopped coming through and pinging my e-box we'll just go back to doing business the way we know it works. So you can't just implement change. It doesn't stop with the implementation. It's an ongoing business of maintaining it so that you weave it into the corporate culture. You identify and manage resistance where people are changing in the direction that you want them to. You catch them doing something right, you reinforce that and reward that. You collect and analyse the feedback and plot into the next iteration of your change cycle so that the changes become embedded from recruitment and selection to the day that you leave and beyond. In your succession planning. The psychology of change is an interesting thing. People can be told to do the right thing, they can be explained clearly why it's important and they can still refuse to do it. I love that picture. Because people don't work like operating systems. Okay so let's look at some of the principles that guide change and resistance. How do people resist? Some people flat out refuse to change. No, won't do it, not going to happen. Some people pretend they're changing but come around from behind and do something to undermine the change or to keep going on the trajectory that they've always been on. Some people are yes butters, you know that one. I've got the perfect solution for you, it's X and they go yes but you know I don't think that's going to work because. Then you say aha okay well why will work for you and then they say yes but you know we tried why once before and it didn't work. And you say right got it perfect solution is Z and they'll say yes but our corporate culture you know those people. In psychology we call them helpless help projectors because they tell you the problem but they will never accept the solution. That's resistance. They might stigmatize the EA and change management programs so that your service offering is not respected, is not taken seriously. Or they might flee, leave the organization, bunk the training, be absent at work, those are always of resisting change rather than taking it up. Maintaining duplicate systems, warping the message in various ways getting back at the organization and these days even doing so publicly. So why do people resist change? Firstly that's a cute cartoon, it's the essence of resistance. I'm sure you've heard people do that in my practice they say fix me make it better but don't ask me to do anything different. Alright, why do people resist? What do you think is the number one factor? Who said fear? 10 points to you. Fear, fear, fear, fear. People are afraid. Fear manifests as many things, stubbornness, arrogance, often as anger. When you see an angry client in your meeting know that underneath that is fear. Fear of instability, unpredictability, failure, being revealed to be incompetent at your core. Fear of comeback and sanction, people are terrified and then they cling to their comfort zones. Inertia is not just something that applies to cars, objects at rest or in a straight line, it applies to people too. They will continue in their comfort zone unless you have enough energy, enough of the motivation to move them into a new way of doing things. If your change effort, if your EA offering is however phrased as a threat people will go into fight, flight or flee mode. A fight, flight or freeze mode where they resist you openly or they run away from the transformation or they just freeze like bunnies in the headlight. Either in any one of those scenarios it's not good for uptake of change. If people perceive that they have conflicting performance measures they're supposed to do the job they've always done as efficiently and quickly as they've always done but take on this whole new load of learning and doing things and upskilling and there's going to be no slack cut for while they are upgrading themselves, they're not going to do it. If they believe it's going to interfere with family time on a permanent basis they're probably going to avoid doing it. A perceived lack of ownership or involvement, if the project is seen to belong to one business unit, one exec, if it's seen as being something on the side rather than as integral to the whole business, people are going to reject it particularly if organisational politics are involved. That's one of the reasons why you want to consult and communicate as broadly and as deeply and as thoroughly as possible in the early days of the project. If it's seen to not benefit your little domain, your little piece of ground and you yourself personally, people are not going to do it, organisational politics we've spoken about. If there's a lack of trust in you as a change agent in the EA practice, so you have to be integrated in the business, you have to talk, people have to know who you are and see what you're doing that's right. Some people don't have skills and so they don't change, some people can't learn the new skills and that needs to be managed and really a perceived lack of incentive to change. That's what we call the whiffam. Whiffam is what's in it for me. Not just what's in it for, I don't know, IT, EA, the business, but me. Can you bring home the benefit to the individual? That is what will motivate the individual to change. So these are some of the guidelines for change. What makes people change? How does their psychology influence people's rate of change? This is a photograph from South Africa where we have some interesting drivers. This guy's determined not to get his vehicle scratched, he's obviously very proud of it and he's found that making it into a bumper car, a sort of Dodgems car really works. People do what works. Make sure that what you're offering them works. But more than that, they are doing what they are currently doing because it works. You look at it and you see something faulty, substandard, inferior, and you think, why are they doing it? This is clearly not the right way of doing it. It works. I'm sure we have some smokers in the organisation. You know what? Smoking works. That's why people do it. It buys them a moment of relief or clarity or relaxation or takes them out into the sunshine for five minutes. They know why it's bad but at some level it works. So if you can't replace the need that people are getting with the current way of doing things in a better, easier, faster way, they're not going to change. They're going to keep on doing what works or they're going to circumvent it like the people who took the photograph when I asked you to write with the left hand. Wally, are you done with your project yet? I'll be done next week. You've said next week for seven weeks in a row. What makes you think I'm going to believe it this time? The first six times. So people do what they can get away with. Most folk have an external locus of control. Even good people, even wonderful people like you and me will slow down when we know we're coming to the place where the traffic police sit and are finding and measuring speeds. And then we speed up when we know we're safe again. People will do what they can get away with and so they need to be monitored, they need to be managed, they need to be made accountable for what change you're expecting to happen. People do what they are rewarded for and avoid what they're sanctioned for. Rewards can be tangible things. It's a bonus time off. Everybody stands up and applaud you get a certificate. But they can be a little bit more subtle. Just attention, eye contact. Make sure you are rewarding the behavior you want repeated. If Joe's soap gets more attention, more q-dust, more street cred, more popularity from resisting change efforts than from falling in line, guess what he's going to do? Reward, catch people doing something right. More than you monitor when they're doing something wrong. People do what's easiest. I call this convenience insures compliance. You've seen public bathrooms. If the bin is one meter to the side of the handrail, people just drop it on the floor. Make sure that the changes you are asking people to make are easier. Make it easy for people to do the desired thing, the right thing, and begin to make it more and more difficult, more and more of an energy expenditure to do the wrong thing. People are pleasure seeking and pain avoiding. There's an interesting thing in the human brain called the negativity bias. Basically, the human brain is like Teflon for negative experiences. No, it's like Velcro for negative experiences and like Teflon for positive ones. We are sticky for the stories of failure, past transformation efforts, the things that didn't work last time. The little rumours and gossip we hear about how this new organisational change is failing or didn't work in this area or that division or that company or how this consultant had trouble at the previous client. Those stick in our head and the stories of success and wondrous achievement just flow over us like water for ducks back. There are evolutionary reasons for that. We need to be more sensitive to pain. We need to pick it up quicker. We need to trigger a fight or flight response quicker because otherwise we're not going to linger in the gene pool. If you have a positivity bias, you think it's a good idea to pick up a stick and poke a sabre tooth tiger, you're not going to last really long. That means people will always remember your failures and past transformational failures and it also means that you therefore need to continuously communicate the good stories, the successes that are happening with your organisational transformation. Another reason why people might not change is that change hurts even when it's desired. Those of you who've gotten married when you want to be married or moved house or got the job that you wanted, no, that's really stressful. It demands a lot out of you. It demands adaption and it demands energy to the organisation. So we have to believe that it's going to benefit us in the long term. I think it's great if you can change people's attitude and let that flow into the way that they behave but it's not always possible and it's certainly not the fastest way. We have learnt in South Africa, there's been a lot of research from the United States, where we've had racially divisive histories that you can for example do workshops with people on racial sensitivity training and work very hard at changing their attitude and there is some kind of trickle through over years but really the fastest way to change people's attitudes is to force the change. It's to make everyone go to the same schools and ride on the same buses and swim in the same swimming pools and then people change their behaviour. The implication for EA rollouts therefore is that don't wait until everybody's attitude is changed and they are on board because people learn by doing and they overcome their resistance by doing and doing it successfully. That's the science from South Africa where restrooms were racially segregated in the past. Another reason my people don't change is procrastination. Roughly half the world's folk are natural born procrastinators and that's why you need to design your project like a dolphin because if you say oh we're rolling out our transformation on your EA practice on September 15, some people will begin moving on September 14. So you want lots of little mini deadlines to get people moving. Change isn't consistent or predictable. There will be different rates of uptake in different individuals, business units, even different organisations. But because it's inconsistent and unpredictable and knocks people out of their comfort zones, they want control. The more they feel out of control, the more they seek control, see if there are ways that you can build some sense of choice or control into your rollouts because people are five times more likely to implement what they believe they themselves have chosen than what has been foisted onto them. We have a problem. Complete the sentence. The only constant is change. So we know this. The business has to keep up with the changing business environment, the changing technological environment, best practices. But the problem is that excellent service, perfect widget production, actually flows from doing the same thing over and over again. That's where you get your optimised routines. From staying the same helps you deliver a better product, but then you fall behind. So we have a tension between these two, between delivering the goods and changing, and that happens at the individual level as well. If you are continuously demanding that people in an organisation change, they will burn out. They will burn out and they'll leave and they'll take their skills and experience with them. You need to build islands of stability into your programme so that the organisation and the individuals within it can change, pause, catch their breath, regroup, optimise routines, perfect the new system before we initiate the next change. So instead of thinking of the only constant is change continuously, think of it as continually. You with me? Something that's happening in spurts. Change is non-linear. You have step changes, you have plateaus, you have cycles. Sometimes it feels like a roller coaster. It's not going to be the same for every organisation. Change management is about maximising your chance of success, not guaranteeing it. It's about trying to avoid the problems and prepare for them before you get them. Success breeds success. I'm sure there are people in this room who have tried to lose weight, and what is the most motivating thing when you're on diet? What's going to keep you good today? Anybody? The scale gives you good news. So you step on a scale, you've lost a pound, you go, I'm on top of the world, I'm so good today, grapefruit for me. You step on the scale and you've gained half a pound, particularly when you were doing all the right things. What happens then? It's a chocolate cake there. So success breeds success and failure breeds failure. So I guess what I'm saying to you is that change needs to be consciously led, consciously managed. It's not some afterthought. People aren't some afterthought. They aren't some inconvenient nuisance in the way of your EA implementation. They're the reason for it. They're the main channel through which it's going to happen. We need a lead change, we need to manage change and above all we need to understand that people's operating systems are different to computers operating systems and factor that into our projects. Thank you for your time. Can you join me up here and then we'll see if there's any questions from the floor, Steve? So you've seen Steve already. So I'm guessing that one of the no-knows when you're doing change management is to sit down and say to someone, what you need to understand is, I've had that many times. I guess what you need to do is to sit down and say, tell me, tell me about your problems, tell me about your needs and make sure that you listen before you speak. And then try and tailor what it is you want to say to what they've given you, what their needs are. Spin. Steve. Thanks, John. I thoroughly enjoyed that. You talked about the change needs to be not just an intellectual exercise but a fact, grab people by the heart too. A lot of people don't like change, it makes them uncomfortable. How do you get their hearts? What kind of things can you do? You want to find out what motivates them, what they're with them is so that you can speak to that. And you want to find out what their fear is so that you can address that in a more constructive way. I mean, in our smoking example, if someone is smoking because it gives them a little rest or a break, is there somewhere we can replace that with not smoking but that will give them the rest and the break and a little bit of time out? And you need to work that at an individual level and an organisational level and also a business unit. How can we meet the emotional need for this person, whether it's to feel in control or to feel competent or to have a sense of achievement or a sense of meaning in ways that are aligned with the EA practice rather than working counter to them? Thank you. You talked about the human palm trees, those that duck changed long enough for it to pass over and doesn't affect them. Do you bother to find a way to dig up the roots or do you just accept it as a case of survival of the bendiest? We want to make it impossible for people not to change. So if it is really woven into the fabric of the organisation in everything, every communication, every training, your job descriptions, your performance proposals, your KPIs, your coaching, succession planning, then it becomes really hard for the palm trees to duck because even if they lean to this side, it's there and if they lean to this side, it's there. I guess what I'm saying is integral to the organisation, not a pimple on the side of it. EA is not a pimple. So are there types of people that are more amenable to change? Are sales people more amenable than accountants or technical? Are there any obvious characteristics or is it just random? There are psychometric tests that you can do to find. I think something that might be important for this audience to understand is that there's probably a skew in EA professionals that you are early uptake people. You like change. You want to master it. You want to integrate it in what you already know. It excites you. There's a new version of X or Y. You're always buying the latest telephones and the latest software. But the whole world is not like that. Half the world is actually would rather stick with the old clamshell phone because that way they don't have to expend energy in learning a new system. So it's a mistake if we generalise from ourselves and just expect that people will be terribly excited because we're giving them something new and better. People will sometimes prefer to stick with the old even when it's less functional because it meets their heart need of feeling secure, feeling competent, feeling capable. So many years ago I was doing turnarounds for small businesses that were in trouble and I was talking to some of the people about how we might turn them around and help them. And I had this idea and they said that's not how we do things around here. Well that's why you're going bust. So they succeeded. They survived. Steve. So very similar one to our accountants or I forget the other one you used Alan as an example, salespeople or accountants. This will put you on the spot. Are women more embracing of change than men? I'm trying to think if I've read any theory on that. I honestly haven't read anything about that. I can't think of a sex difference on change. Just really change varies between individuals. It's so individual. I think some cultures can be less resistant to change because they place a higher value on tradition. And perhaps on hierarchy whereas the cultures that are perhaps flatter and more democratic are possibly a bit receptive to change. And that's true of nationalities as I think it is true of organisations. Some organisations are more conservative. For example I think if you were working in life insurance you want that to be a really steady ship that changes very slowly because people's pensions are invested in there. But if you're in advertising I think it would be really receptive to change. So a lot depends on the organisations culture. Another question. I've heard expressed that on average it takes two years to move or drive change through each layer of the organisation. Is this true or accurate in your experience? I think it's how long is a piece of string. How hierarchical is your organisation? How open are they to change? How tolerant are they of risk? When you do your organisational readiness assessment and you assess the history of change in this organisation as well as the change itself, the breadth, the depth, the impact, the speed with which it's going to happen, how much is going to change. I don't think there's a rule of thumb for change. Again I think that one comes down to the type of organisation. If you've got a very layered organisation in a very controlled environment it's going to take a long time to go down. Others will be quicker. Last question I have here is you talked about, I'm summarising this I guess, you talked about rewarding the right behaviour which reminded me of toilet training a dog. It is. That kind of thing but in your experience ultimately what's the balance between carrot and stick? It's interesting, there is a continuum of how directive you are in your change management. You know the story about when there's a fire in the movie house. You don't sort of say well how do we feel about forming a nice queue and exit. You know you don't go softly, softly say fire everybody out. So there is a continuum in change management depending on in how diastrates is this organisation, how vital is it that we change quickly and how much resistance are we expecting. The quicker you change the more you have to do directly from the top down using more of a stick approach. And there is a time and place for that but you need to know it comes at the risk of provoking a lot more resistance and sometimes the change is more palm tree. It happens, it happens really quickly people fall into line but then they gradually drift back to the old ways of doing it. The more non directive approach where you go softly, softly and you try and win people's hearts and heads and you persuade and you make aware and you train and you communicate takes longer but you have less resistance because you have more consultation and buy in and it tends to stick longer. Okay well thank you very much that was completely different and I hope absolutely fast that I liked it but hope everyone else did as well. Thank you very much.