Leaders, Do not tell us, Show us what to Change.

Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand - Chinese Proverb.

Why some of the transformation initiatives are not successful?

What I have been seen, the transformation roadmap steps have been developed somewhere in a close room in the headquarters with some great minds.

Now the same assumptions and directions have come to us with an instruction to enforce the same, What to do and how to go on?

We (The Agile coaches) have been asked to follow the order, and we have received the order to numerous departments and telling them to follow the order of transformation!

Workers with the (Business units) department are perplexed as some of the activities are not aligning with their ways of working or vision. We are also discovering the challenges! the close room designed plan is not matching in a specific context. Due to the cultural and Ego clash, individuals are not eager to acknowledge the mistake!

Leaders are pressuring why things are not progressing? by this time miracle should have taken place! Who to blame?

So they started searching for the scapegoats, someday, we got the scapegoat, some time execution process to be blamed for the transformation failure.

Few of the root cause we noticed, but headquarters are not granting us to deviate the path as they might have lost the power.

People tend to resists changes if those changes are thrust upon them.

Telling is like thrusting changes on them.

When we tell, the signals pass, this is the better way of doing, your current ways of working is incorrect. This provokes resistance in the mind as it hurts the self-esteem of the people who are working at the grass-root level.

The magnitude of resistance is expected to be inversely proportioned to our level of self-esteem.

It depends on how the team members at grass root level feel about themselves with the unique changes.

They essentially act in reaction, reactive thinking is most of the time due to low self-esteem.

The creative thinker does not resist changes.

So the telling approach will have tremendous resistance which leads to a lot of waste of time and energy.

So what do we do? A different approach. 

what is that?

How can we alter the telling to show? How can we change telling to involving?

Let us use lean thinking, where people who are with the system, they realize what changes we require. People in the team possess vast knowledge, wisdom, creativity, and energy. Best leaders access the wealth of experience and empower their people through the effective use of the questions.

Based on our experience what is functioning in the approach which are:

• When we tell people what to and how to do it, there is an inclination to resist.
• When ideas come from the people they will support it
• When we tell, it is giving the message that they are doing something which is wrong and they become more defensive.
• When we ask the team to provide input they get encouraged and they become more creative and they get in buy-in

For any such transformation change initiative, we first call for the workshop with all the team members. we do 1-2 days workshop to discover the problem and later we do a solution workshop.

Where we all together come out to figure out what best works for us.

We start the experiment and determine what is best applicable to our environment.

As an expert, we become mentors and facilitate the session.

Where ever require we do training, coaching and mentor the team member?

It works best as a team co-create the solutions.

I am sure you might have also experienced similar types of approach and with the design thinking approach, this has become much easier to implement and get the buy-in from the people easily.