How Telling People What To Do is Easy, but Building Real Change and Agreement is Hard

Today I am in for a rant: I am amazed at how people still believe that change is so easy it is enough to tell people what to do. To force them doing something different. In reality, deep and sustainable change has to be built over time over a wide agreement of the participating group.

Not quite the right manner to implement change management

I am still called up to effectuate deep changes in organizations under the belief that the orders from the top combined with the industry best practice experience from a consultant will create a sustainable change of habits and ways of working. Worst is that many consulting firms do nothing to dissipate this illusion; they are too happy to work undisturbed to develop tools and processes that at the end will never get deployed for lack of knowledge and understanding.

This is too naive to be true, but believe me it still happens! (although not always exposed as directly). And we have some great examples at the moment in the world that this approach does no work: an American President that tells people what to do, and noting gets ever really done after the announcement.

Creating sustainable change requires a more subtle, engaging and inclusive approach that involves the people that will later implement those changes in their daily activities. This is why successful transformation programs are often longer and more resource-intensive at the start, because they need to involve more people. This investment redeems itself many times after during actual implementation.