Another insight from McKinsey’s research that 70 percent of change programs fail to achieve their goals is the tendency to look at the organization as a whole and not as a group of individuals and that the main goal is to see a change.
Imagine you come across a Newton’s Cradle for the first time in your life. What do you think would be the reaction when you lifted and released one ball? Do you expect all the others to move, or just the last one?
This is an exciting demonstration of a manager with all the superiority (potential energy), with the right motivation to change and move his team (kinetic energy). All his energy is transferred between his team (via the potential energy of a spring), and in the end, only one ball moves because we are all individuals, and we communicate with each other. We all know that we have early adopters, influencers, and followers in the social world. These are all nodes in a social network — one that expands and contracts, has strong and weak bonds, and has critical nodes of influence.
If we match up the social world to its counterparts in the physics world, we define people as cubes, their relationships with each other as spring, and the entire group as the network structure.
Now to achieve a change: instead of focusing on the structures and organizational chart, let’s start with the ”suitable cubes”: the early adopters and the influencers. Let’s ensure they are bought into the new process and executing successfully. By doing so, we can achieve the following:
- Demonstrate to the organization that it can be done.
- Reduce resistance and eliminate skepticism.
- Bring early adopters and influencers under the tent and let them evangelize the new concept, roles, and organization chart.
- And most importantly, we will achieve our goals and our work will not equal zero.
Blue Cairn 