I was at a client site last week and I noticed this box taped out on their conference room table. It was labelled “TV Remote”. You’ll notice that it’s empty. Looking around the room, the remote was nowhere to be found. We have the same problem at my house. Do you? My first (wry) thought was that even 5S can’t help us keep track of our remote controls.
But then I had a second thought: Why? Why did this remote control go missing? Why, despite a clear plan and system for keeping track of it, did this important tool simply up and disappear? Why didn’t the employees who use this conference room simply put the remote control back where it belongs given the very obvious home for the device?
Change doesn’t fail because it’s not a good idea. Most of time, the improvement is very much desired, something we all want to see happen. We largely agree that we “should” make the change. Nevertheless, the change just doesn’t stick.
In my experience, change fails to stick largely because of all the “other stuff” that gets in our way. Things like conflicting priorities, overwork and overwhelm, momentum, change fatigue, political agendas, cynicism, and so many other systemic barriers that put “friction” between the change and the actual desired outcome.
This is why change agents talk so much about the need for discipline, focus, and accountability. The assumption here is that we’re just not trying hard enough. But it could be so much easier. If we would just remove the systemic barriers, implementing change would be much simpler, faster, and cheaper.
It turns out that change is a lot less about the tactical act of making the change itself and a whole lot more about the strategy and environment around the change. We need to make it easier to make the change and harder to stick with the status quo. When we do this, we encourage the right behavior of both ourselves and our employees.
I wonder which systemic barriers got in the way for this organization? And what their leaders might have done differently to encourage their preferred outcomes? Were the employees too busy to be bothered? Were leaders not fully aligned in support of the change? Did the remote need to be used with another TV elsewhere in the facility making it difficult to get it back to it’s fancy yellow home? Maybe the batteries died and it got lost somewhere between this conference room and a far away tool crib when someone went looking for replacements. Any number of things might have happened that could have sent this remote control on a journey away from its home, never to be seen again, but chances are slim any single worker purposely decided to ignore the working agreement and purposely hide the remote control.
So the next time your team fails to bring about a change you’ve requested, consider shifting your mindset away from trying to pinpoint who is not being accountable to the new policy, and instead toward how you’re supporting their efforts. Get curious about what friction is still in their way and where you can remove it How can you incentivize the behavior you hope to see? And, perhaps most importantly, what changes do you need to make in your own behaviors to encourage your team to follow your lead?
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