Successful Change Requires Communication

Imagine this scenario:

Sound familiar? Been there, done that? If so, join the crowd. For every highly successful major change initiative, there are 99 that fall short. One leading culprit: lack of strategic clarity. To understand how the successful one percent avoids this pitfall, let’s look at three biases the organizations seem to share.

Bias One: Over-Investing in Communications is Cheaper than Under-Investing

Change masters obsess about communication. While others see it as an important support function, these folks view it as their single most powerful lever for moving the organization from Point A to Point B. To that end, they make sure the budget includes enough funding for the “soft stuff”—primarily the communication and training that ultimately makes or breaks the project.

How much is enough? Obviously, the answer varies. But for a complex change initiative, think in terms of 17 percent or more of the total project budget, says the Gartner Group, a leading information systems research firm that has documented a strong correlation between the level of investment in communication and overall project success.

Bias Two: Clear Thinking Drives Good Communication, which Fosters Clear Thinking

A professional communicator’s most valuable role on a planning team is not to serve as scribe or mouthpiece, but as the canary in the coal mine. If the communicator is troubled or confused by what’s being discussed, the general employee population probably will be too. If the communicator is empowered to probe for clarity and point out apparent inconsistencies throughout the planning process, management can gain, not just better communication, but a better plan.

For example, during a strategic planning activity for a for-profit organization, the CEO and the COO identified the company’s top priorities as soundness, profitability and growth—in that order.

Meanwhile, several other senior leaders repeatedly described the overarching goal as “sound, profitable growth.” Interestingly, no one on the team pointed out that these were two similar-sounding, but distinctly different ideas that have different strategic implications. As the team member responsible for communication, I had to ask for clarification. I asked, “Are we saying that growth is the third priority or the main objective, so long as it’s sound and profitable?” The question sparked a lively exchange that exposed some philosophical differences.

These differences probably would have come to light eventually and been resolved without a communicator’s probing.

On the other hand, we’ve all seen cases where it’s only months after an initiative has been rolled out and execution is faltering, that key players belatedly realize they weren’t quite on the same page during the planning process. Spotting and resolving such disconnects as they occur makes for crisper thinking along the way and better outcomes down the road.

Of course, the communicator can only play this role if he or she understands the organization well enough to speak up with a certain degree of confidence. Equally important, the planning team must appreciate the value a “layman’s perspective” can add, and encourage this ongoing clarification process.

Bias Three: Pictures Trump Words

Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, says the key to creating understanding is to create a shared mental model—in other words, a substantially identical picture inside the heads of everyone who needs to understand a given subject.

Let’s say the subject is a new business model. If I explain it to you verbally, there’s a good chance you’ll walk away with less than perfect understanding. On the sending end,
I’ve “encoded” my idea in words that may mean something different to me than they do to you. On the receiving end, you are “decoding” my message in a mind that has a different frame of reference than mine. Assuming we have a relatively similar experience base, your interpretation of what I said may be 90 percent on target.

But it’s that 10 percent margin of misinterpretation that can become problematic as information is relayed from one person to the next.

The solution? Whenever possible, turn complex concepts into pictures. Show how the pieces of the new operating model relate to one another. Is this model best depicted as a circular cycle? A house with four pillars and a foundation? Does A drive B, which drives C? Or does A support both B and C? Is B more dominant than C, or are they equally important? In other words, visually map out relationships and proportions.

This exercise can be challenging—and very worthwhile—for you to do on your own to clarify your thoughts. It is much more difficult, but immensely more valuable, to do as a group.

But the greater value often lies in what the picture-making process does for the planning team. I usually begin the exercise by asking each person to draw his or her own picture of
the subject at hand, showing the relationships and proportions of all the key elements.

When developing a program model, for example, team members might be asked to depict each client group served, the services provided, service channels, support systems, suppliers, strategic alliances, etc., and how they all interrelate. It’s always a shock for people who have been working together closely to see how different their pictures can be.

The next step is to create a composite picture that builds on the best of the individual pictures. Done right, this can be an arduous process, laced with frustration and debate, as participants experience the discomfort of shifting paradigms.

But in the end, it’s intensely satisfying. Like a jeweler bringing out the beauty in a gem, the team has worked together to file and buff away that 10 percent margin of misinterpretation. What remains is a crystal clear, 100 percent shared mental model. Now the team is ready to go forth and communicate with the same end in mind.

Ultimately, all major change initiatives are as much an art as a science because they hinge on changing minds as well as matter. The great change artists among us know how to use strategic clarity to help create masterpieces.

Anne Curley is president of Curley Communication, which specializes in brand clarification and related strategic planning. Before establishing her consulting practice in 2000, she headed worldwide communication for SC Johnson. Earlier in her career, she served as the business editor of the Milwaukee Journal. Over the past 20 years, she has served on a dozen nonprofit and corporate boards of directors. She can be reached by e-mail.

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