How to make change more successful

00:00:15: Johannes Schartau: Welcome to episode 13 of "transform together – the Holisticon Podcast Meetup". I'm Johannes Schartau, and today I'm talking to Lynn Kelley. Lynn Kelley is an executive advisor, author, and organizational change leader whose work focuses on making large-scale transformation practical and sustainable.

00:00:33: Johannes Schartau: She's the co-author of Change Questions, a playbook for effective and lasting organizational change, written with John Shook.

00:00:41: Johannes Schartau: Lynn draws on a career that has included senior leadership roles in healthcare, work at Fortune 200 companies, teaching statistics and research methods at the university level, and advisory and board work in business.

00:00:54: Johannes Schartau: Lynn, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:57: Lynn Kelley: Thank you, Johannes. I'm so happy to be here.

00:01:00: Johannes Schartau: Okay, my first question to you is that, of all the careers you could have chosen.

00:01:06: Johannes Schartau: Why change? What fascinates you about this topic?

00:01:11: Lynn Kelley: What if I told you I didn't choose change? I.

00:01:16: Johannes Schartau: really curious to know more about this, but it, when I'm talking to people in this field, usually the answer is, I didn't really choose this, I just kind of stumbled into it. So this seems to be the same for you?

00:01:28: Lynn Kelley: It is. I spent… My early career, the first 20 years.

00:01:34: Lynn Kelley: implementing lean, mostly lean manufacturing on the factory floor in automotive industry and aerospace mining, partially because I was working for Textron, who owns Bell Helicopter Cessna aircraft, EasyGo Golf Cars.

00:01:51: Lynn Kelley: And at that point, they had a whole division in mining. I was…

00:01:54: Lynn Kelley: based in South Africa and Australia. So, I was working, really, in… in manufacturing environments on lean, and… and then what I realized, every time I… like, I would, you know, periodically fail, actually more frequently than… than not.

00:02:13: Lynn Kelley: fail. And then I… I would realize, oh my gosh, what… what did I do wrong? And I… so I started… first thing I did is I started adopting the change methodologies. Cotter's was one of the first ones out, and I would…

00:02:26: Lynn Kelley: rigorously follow step, step, step, step. And, and then I'd fail in a new way, and think, whoa, that's not in there. So then I would, you know, look at other… other types of change methodologies, and…

00:02:40: Lynn Kelley: Just experimented, and then I realized, wow, I need to dig into the research. So I really dug in and did real research in peer-reviewed journals, and started experimenting. And that's part of what I love about change, is just the experimentation and finding out what would work.

00:02:56: Lynn Kelley: And so that's how, eventually, when I was reporting to the CEO at Textron, I was responsible for basically all of the operational excellence improvements.

00:03:08: Lynn Kelley: At the holding company level, rolling that amount to all those business units.

00:03:13: Lynn Kelley: And… and particularly in engineering and manufacturing and quality and supply chain. So you can imagine how popular I was when I would go to the VPs of engineering who are designing the new aircraft at Bell Helicopter and CESTA, and I'm like.

00:03:29: Lynn Kelley: you know, we're gonna… let's work on improving and changing the way you design your aircraft. That, you know, not the most popular kid on the block. I'm not even an engineer, I'm a statistician. So… I had to really learn that you can have the very best solution, the best change.

00:03:49: Lynn Kelley: But if you don't understand change.

00:03:53: Lynn Kelley: methodologies, frameworks, how to get buy-in, it's… it's probably going to fail. And so, I… I really then became a disciple of change for what… whichever… whatever change I'm implementing, I'm still feeling like I'm an expert. My expertise is more in lean and some of those other things.

00:04:10: Lynn Kelley: But I was, you know, I had to implement supplier portals for across 32 different countries, getting buy-in from the supply chain procurement people, that they're now gonna lose a little bit of control and send all their suppliers to corporate first. Again, so popular.

00:04:28: Lynn Kelley: So, that's… that's why. That's why.

00:04:32: Johannes Schartau: your experience seems to be rather typical from what I hear from others, that…

00:04:37: Johannes Schartau: you have this really good intention, or you feel really positive about what you're trying to change, but that doesn't seem to be enough. So, if we look at statistics, or even the anecdotal evidence that I personally have, it's more likely for change initiatives to fail than they are to succeed.

00:04:55: Johannes Schartau: But you have found a way to kind of turn this on its head, and make change

00:05:02: Johannes Schartau: you make success more likely than failure. So, of course, the question now is, what's your secret sauce? How do you do it?

00:05:11: Lynn Kelley: A few things. Let's back up a minute to the premise of your question, which is, you know, is change more likely to fail than succeed? And when you dig into the research on this, the lowest

00:05:27: Lynn Kelley: failure rate that I could find was 56%, and it goes all the way up to 70%. And then there have been articles written, like, oh, it's not that… it's not that much.

00:05:38: Lynn Kelley: Because it depends on industry, it depends on how you define change, and I agree, it's… I don't know how… what it is, but these are self-reported people saying, yes, my change failed, however they defined it, and I haven't seen any studies

00:05:53: Lynn Kelley: that show a better change, you know, percentage than that. So, think about that. Your organization is going to implement change, and your boss says, oh, we're going to roll out this change across the organization, and you kind of raise your hand. Okay, since it's probably going to fail.

00:06:10: Lynn Kelley: You know, how well is that gonna go over?

00:06:15: Lynn Kelley: That's the truth. That is the truth, and if we want to accept the fact that we need to think about change before we implement it, and think of how to beat the odds, that's the first step, is just saying… getting together and saying, okay.

00:06:33: Lynn Kelley: it is more likely to fail. We are not… we always go in believing we're the exception, we're not the exception. Let's… but why not be as successful as you can be? So, what then I ended up doing… all these other change methodologies are… they're frameworks, and they're often sequential.

00:06:52: Lynn Kelley: And, man, they got me my good start. I can't even believe how beneficial they were. But I realized, if I have a change that only fails 5% of the time, 10%, it's not gonna make it in a framework.

00:07:03: Lynn Kelley: But, like, at Textron, or even when I went to Union Pacific Railroad, we're rolling out a change to 42,000 union employees throughout the organization. If it fails 5% for 5% of the time.

00:07:18: Lynn Kelley: That's a big failure rate, so…

00:07:22: Lynn Kelley: Instead of having, like, a 26-step framework, I just decided it's questions.

00:07:30: Lynn Kelley: So that's the name of the book is Change Questions, and it's basically a series of questions. So early on at Textron, I started experimenting with every time we're going to implement a change, let's start with these questions. Is this applicable? Is this? Is this?

00:07:45: Lynn Kelley: And we only answered the questions that were applicable to our change. So, we're not overproducing a change solution and underproducing, it's like Goldilocks, it's just right.

00:07:56: Lynn Kelley: Because every change is different. So why should our framework be the exactly the same every time? And so, that's… that's… that's how this percentage of change… look, I was at a 30% success rate, too, at the beginning.

00:08:12: Lynn Kelley: And gradually, as I added more change questions, it increased, increased, increased. And by the end of my time at Union Pacific the last year, over hundreds of change implementations a year at Union Pacific, we were at a 96% sustainment success rate.

00:08:30: Lynn Kelley: And okay, now I'm a statistician. If I hear a number like that, I go, yeah, how did you measure that? But what we also did is put a very rigorous measurement system to hold ourselves accountable, and it had to have

00:08:44: Lynn Kelley: be better… the… whatever metric we wanted to move, it had to be better than the baseline metric when we started. So better…

00:08:54: Lynn Kelley: the same or better, then, for 6 consecutive months, consecutive. And they had a year to get there. And if they couldn't get there in a year, so you consider that 4% of those hundreds of things couldn't get there in a year.

00:09:07: Lynn Kelley: We've, you know, we thought of it as a failure, but…

00:09:10: Lynn Kelley: because a part of one of the change questions is an early warning sign, one study says you can detect change within the first… if you're… you can detect if your, change initiative is going to succeed or fail within the first four weeks. The hints are there. So part… one of the change questions is, what's our early warning sign in the first 4 weeks? How can…

00:09:30: Lynn Kelley: Well, how are we doing in the first 4 weeks? And if it's starting to go deviate from the ones that are succeeding, we go in, we may pivot, we may coach, whatever it takes. So, it's not that everybody just succeeded off the bat. We had a lot of this, which then we brought back early on, and that's part of the success, too.

00:09:51: Johannes Schartau: Wow.

00:09:52: Johannes Schartau: So, you actually dug into the research.

00:09:56: Johannes Schartau: So it's not just your opinion, or your claim, or anything, but you dug into the research. I'd be super curious to see what are the key

00:10:06: Johannes Schartau: failures, or the key reasons for failure that you have found? Because I, for example, I would be super curious to know…

00:10:15: Johannes Schartau: then, like, what should I really pay attention to? What is most likely to…

00:10:21: Johannes Schartau: to happen when we engage in any kind of change, how can I help my clients more? So, what have you found out?

00:10:28: Lynn Kelley: Yeah, this was, this was a good finding because the two key failure modes of

00:10:34: Lynn Kelley: that the research shows, either this one's number one and this one's number two, or this is number one and this is number two, so they're both in the top two. And yeah, and of course, then.

00:10:46: Lynn Kelley: they appear in every change framework. There is always a step that will address both of those, because of course they're the top two.

00:10:53: Lynn Kelley: I'm gonna tell you what they are in a minute.

00:10:56: Lynn Kelley: keep… I'm making sure you don't get off the podcast, I'm keeping you in suspense. So of course there are those two in the top two, but yet.

00:11:04: Lynn Kelley: I would fail, and when I'd go back and look at what was it, and I always tried to research why the failure happened so I could prevent it the next time, I'd find, oh wow, I thought I did this.

00:11:17: Lynn Kelley: But there's something I missed, so let me tell you now what they are.

00:11:22: Lynn Kelley: communication and leadership. So, both of those are, you know, the top two. They're biggies, so they're going to be in everywhere, but… but if you just follow basic communication steps and say, well, I want what's in it for them, I want two-way communication, those are the two things you usually see in most communication plans.

00:11:41: Lynn Kelley: I would… sometimes I'd still fail, and I thought, okay, there's gotta be more to this. So, under the change question about communication.

00:11:52: Lynn Kelley: we've got some other things that showed up in the research. So, if you need to think about communication, I've got a communication plan, but then some other things that the research found. And let me tell you the biggie, okay? This is a big one.

00:12:07: Lynn Kelley: There's a McKinsey article that, when I discovered, it was like, oh my gosh, this is game-changing. What it said was… so think about the top two areas of failure, leadership and communication. This one covered both leadership and communication, the way leaders communicate.

00:12:25: Lynn Kelley: I'm gonna jump to the punchline, because it's astounding. Again, this is a number you don't see very often. People that… that followed 3 items in their leadership communication plan were 8 times more likely to report a successful change initiative. 8 times! Like, you don't see that very often.

00:12:44: Lynn Kelley: than those that didn't do it. So, armed with that.

00:12:48: Lynn Kelley: and all the other things I had found. I went to… and I'm still not telling you what those three things are. Hang in there, wait for it. I went to the head of communications at Union Pacific Railroad, which is where I was at the time, and said, okay, this is all the research I found.

00:13:04: Lynn Kelley: can you put together a template for the most robust communication plan that can be used, and where we can pick and choose which elements are appropriate to our situation? Can you put that together? And she did. And… and so what… what… when John Shook and I wrote the Change Questions book.

00:13:24: Lynn Kelley: We made that free for everybody with the template, so we'll… I will tell you how to get that, but now let's back up to the three things.

00:13:32: Lynn Kelley: think about what you wonder what they are. I wonder if you can guess. I could ask you to guess. What do you think those three things are that leaders must do in order to increase, in their communication, to increase the probability of success by 8 times? You want to take a guess at one of them?

00:13:51: Johannes Schartau: I would say, model the behavior themselves.

00:13:54: Lynn Kelley: Okay, you hit on… You, you actually jumped… jumped out of communication to my point on leadership.

00:14:04: Johannes Schartau: Okay, yeah.

00:14:05: Lynn Kelley: So the… the biggest element of success in leadership is not… is not the communication, it's that, and 33% of the time, this is… this is the biggest failure mode in the… in the study that said 70% of all change initiatives fail.

00:14:21: Lynn Kelley: 33% of the time it was because people do not see visible modeled behaviors that follow the change initiative. So that's the leadership element. That's what we have to look for. In the communication side, the first thing is.

00:14:37: Lynn Kelley: Leaders give frequent updates on the change initiative. So, it's going to be things like, this is the timeline, this is where we are so far, these are the successes. Yes, get some recognition, because that helps get some buy-in.

00:14:53: Lynn Kelley: These are the… these are the areas that's not working so well, so this is how we had to pivot in those areas. This is what we learned. Thank you for those people that taught us this. This is, these are early results.

00:15:04: Lynn Kelley: All the updates, every time there's an update, it goes out, it may go out in an email, it may go out in a speech, it may go out on the website, it may go out on a podcast, you know, because what we're used to is the leadership announces a change, and that's the last we hear of it, except at the local level.

00:15:20: Lynn Kelley: High… at the highest level, that's what we need. Second thing.

00:15:25: Lynn Kelley: The leaders in the organization, and this is all levels down, communicate and know

00:15:32: Lynn Kelley: what's going to happen to employees? Because what happens is, the research again shows the first thing that happens when a change is announced, employees say, but what is going to happen to me?

00:15:45: Lynn Kelley: So, we don't think about, when we roll out change, what is going to happen to all these individual employees. If we think about it, we want to keep it a secret sometimes. But, we all know, if people don't have the information, what do they do?

00:16:00: Lynn Kelley: They make up answers, and it's never the best case, it's always the worst case.

00:16:04: Lynn Kelley: So…

00:16:06: Lynn Kelley: We gather frequently asked questions ahead of time, and we work through legal, finance, HR, unions to get answers to questions, and we communicate those

00:16:18: Lynn Kelley: to all leaders, so that when somebody comes to them and says, well, what about this? Then they have an answer that matches somebody else, and they know those answers, and they could talk about them. And if we don't know, and the biggest one is, will I be laid off if I improve productivity? If we don't know, we say that.

00:16:36: Lynn Kelley: But at Union Pacific.

00:16:38: Lynn Kelley: We were growing, so what we were able to say, it is not our intention because our business is growing. So, what we intend to do with your increased productivity is create the opportunity for more jobs. That's our intention.

00:16:52: Lynn Kelley: So, and, you know, of course, we had to run that by legal. And finally, the last thing is consistent messaging by leaders, and there's ways to get that. You get key messages that you

00:17:01: Lynn Kelley: that you work with, and every leader knows, these are the key messages. Every time you talk about this change, repeat these key messages. We see this in politics, and how successful it is. We need to do the same thing in our change initiative.

00:17:14: Lynn Kelley: So, that's kind of a long answer, but that's kind of… that is the highlights, and you can download, and there's no strings attached, you don't even have to give your information on… on the change… well, you'll get the changequestions.net, website, but there's a digital workbook, which is a fillable PDF, and you can

00:17:33: Lynn Kelley: Get that and a whole bunch of other tools that you can use in your change initiative.

00:17:39: Johannes Schartau: the amount of information that you're sharing is just astounding. I'm just listening to how packed it is, and I feel like I should charge people for listening to this podcast, and then pass that on to you, because it's like this condensed mini-workshop of

00:17:52: Johannes Schartau: You know, there's so much value in there already. Okay, let's keep going.

00:17:58: Lynn Kelley: Well, that's all my… I don't know anything else. You got everything I know. I'm teasing.

00:18:04: Johannes Schartau: I'm so grateful.

00:18:06: Johannes Schartau: See what's happening.

00:18:07: Johannes Schartau: Okay, I'm a big fan of this concept of red teaming, or pre-mortem, or, you know, kind of asking how we could make things fail, so you already talked about the two most important things regarding any change initiative, so let's… maybe if we flip it, if you could design…

00:18:23: Johannes Schartau: the perfect failure, or the perfect way of making sure that a change initiative doesn't go anywhere, or even causes lasting harm? How would you do that?

00:18:34: Lynn Kelley: Okay.

00:18:36: Lynn Kelley: I… so, the first thing that I think

00:18:39: Lynn Kelley: we have to recognize is that every time we fail, we make the next change harder. So, you can think about the self-reinforcing downward spiral, right? And so, when we just…

00:18:53: Lynn Kelley: Blythely throw out all these change initiatives, but don't put the energy up front into making sure they succeed.

00:19:00: Lynn Kelley: people stop believing.

00:19:03: Lynn Kelley: The success of change depends on people believing

00:19:08: Lynn Kelley: And not faking it, but wanting to go through the activity with you, because they trust you, and they trust your message. So, think about the opposite of that. Every time you succeed at a change.

00:19:21: Lynn Kelley: You have a virtuous self-improvement cycle in that change gets easier every single time you succeed at it. People begin to trust you. They say, oh, the last three changes have worked. I trust this person. When they give me full information up front, I trust them.

00:19:40: Lynn Kelley: When they… when they come and help me if I'm… if I need… struggle, or they give me, information of if it's not working, who I can talk to, and I think of them in the process, I trust them, and it makes it much more likely to succeed. So, the two sides of that question are, if you want to fail.

00:20:00: Lynn Kelley: You probably will if you don't plan ahead and think about the things that your change needs to be successful. And you think about it before you even announce the change. And sometimes, like with the change questions, people think.

00:20:15: Lynn Kelley: Whenever I talk about… even… I mean, when I worked at Techstar, when I worked at Union Pacific, you know, you'd have a change, and my boss would say, whoever the boss was at the time, eventually it's a CEO, and it's hard to tell them no, but… but…

00:20:28: Lynn Kelley: They would say, well, we don't have time to do a pilot, we don't have time to plan the communication, we don't have time to go through legal and get answers to the frequently asked questions.

00:20:39: Lynn Kelley: And my response is always, we don't have time not to do it, because a failed change initiative is so much more costly in resources and time and energy and results

00:20:50: Lynn Kelley: but also trust, because the next time it's harder. Let's take the time

00:20:56: Lynn Kelley: And do it, and then roll this out. Now, how much time does it take? Which is going to be the next question.

00:21:02: Lynn Kelley: So, this is the information that I… that I have.

00:21:06: Lynn Kelley: We can often go through the change questions themselves in a day, in an afternoon, in an hour, depending on the complexity of the change.

00:21:19: Lynn Kelley: If it's a simple change in one area, we may only need to answer one or two change questions. We may already know most of the answers, or they're not applicable. So, it's just that little act will already increase the probability. But if you then find that you have a type of complex change, that it takes

00:21:39: Lynn Kelley: hours to answer the change questions, you know you've already got a change that's probably more likely to fail. So, so my thought is, just

00:21:49: Lynn Kelley: just probe those failure modes before you start, and if it's easy to work through them, you're probably golden. If it's not, then maybe you have some evidence that you do need to take the time.

00:22:02: Lynn Kelley: And the other thing that I always would do is go arms with data. So, when we talked about leadership briefly,

00:22:11: Lynn Kelley: all of these studies talk about that the main… the main aspect of leadership is they have to show visible support. So that's a big failure mode. And if there are a lot of leaders that have to be involved.

00:22:25: Lynn Kelley: One thing we can do is go to leaders and say, we're asking you and your peers to commit to two ways… think about two ways you can show visible support to your folks and your peers that you support this change initiative. And by the way, send them back to us, we're compiling a list. Then we send the list without names attached to everybody, and say, okay, now you get

00:22:47: Lynn Kelley: two ways, just choose two ways out of this when we launch the change.

00:22:50: Lynn Kelley: Two ways that you're gonna support it. Now, you can do that in a few days, but what have you done so far?

00:22:56: Lynn Kelley: First of all, you've asked them to visualize that they are supporting the change. You've gotten in their head. Psychologically, they are visualizing themselves supporting your change. You've gotten that much further. Now they're…

00:23:08: Lynn Kelley: Typing in how they're going to support the change to you. Now there's a little bit of peer pressure, because they're looking at what they submitted, and what you submitted, and all their peers submitted, but now you give them a choice, because no one likes to be told what to do, and in change, they're often told what to do. Now you're saying, choose.

00:23:26: Lynn Kelley: Choose two things. We trust you to choose. They've got peer pressure, because they're going to let you know what they chose.

00:23:32: Lynn Kelley: But then they're also, like, you're back in their head, they are visualizing themselves for the second time. Which one do I want to choose? How am I going to do that? You've got so many self-reinforcing cycles, and the last thing I showed all those leaders is, look.

00:23:47: Lynn Kelley: Here's the research. Of the 70% of times change fails, 33% of the time, the biggest reason is because leaders… leaders didn't show visible support of the change. So, you kind of are implying, if your next-door department succeeds.

00:24:04: Lynn Kelley: And you fail.

00:24:06: Lynn Kelley: buddy, it's you, right? You know, you don't go overtly on that, but the underlying message is, you've got a role in this, and if your change fails.

00:24:17: Lynn Kelley: people are going to look at you also as being responsible, because all the leaders will know that one of the key reasons is lack of visible leadership support. So, that's just, that's some of the things that we do in order to succeed and not do in order to fail.

00:24:37: Johannes Schartau: You mentioned something important, because you talked about we should plan.

00:24:41: Johannes Schartau: So we shouldn't just go in without a plan.

00:24:43: Johannes Schartau: And then, at the same time, in your book, you also write about how

00:24:47: Johannes Schartau: the plan should be incremental. Could you go into that a bit more?

00:24:55: Lynn Kelley: It went down the wrong way.

00:24:57: Lynn Kelley: Of course. Yes, I would love to talk about that.

00:25:03: Lynn Kelley: I am… for years, I implemented change according to how everybody implements change. An inter… an implementation plan that's time-based.

00:25:14: Lynn Kelley: On this date, 100% of people will be trained.

00:25:18: Lynn Kelley: On this date, 80% will roll out. On this date, the remaining 20, whatever, all time-based. Red, yellow, green.

00:25:27: Lynn Kelley: Where are you? And all we did was look at those red, yellow, greens on the implementation plan, okay? Okay, we're green on train? Yay, everybody's trained! Okay, we're green on implementation. Yay, we're done!

00:25:39: Lynn Kelley: And, I thought we were green, and we were green. We were green on everything. And the change failed. And I thought, how can that happen? We're green on everything! And… I… just by chance.

00:25:53: Lynn Kelley: stumbled across a Harvard… well, I was searching for it, but it had also just been published. A Harvard Business Review article that talked about… this was probably published 20 years ago.

00:26:05: Lynn Kelley: need speed, slow down. And these researchers examined, and nobody wants to, like, like, nobody wants to say slow down. But, but listen to how this works.

00:26:19: Lynn Kelley: The examiners took hundreds of organizations globally, all different industries, to determine if their

00:26:27: Lynn Kelley: if their implementation plan was going to succeed or fail, or did succeed or fail, and they found that there were two types of implementation plan. The one I just described, time-based.

00:26:39: Lynn Kelley: It was task done, red, yellow, green.

00:26:42: Lynn Kelley: they named an operational speed. Okay, operationally, we're moving forward.

00:26:49: Lynn Kelley: There were a fewer… a small percentage of companies that did something they called strategic speed. What that meant was.

00:26:57: Lynn Kelley: They're going to… they have an implementation plan, you have to have a time-based implementation plan.

00:27:02: Lynn Kelley: But there are these checkpoints along the way. In other words, if everybody is trained.

00:27:07: Lynn Kelley: That's great. And if we say everybody's using it, do… maybe we have… we say our implementation plan is rolling, and we have 10% of the people using it initially. Okay. Well, if they're using it, what is the value we intend to get

00:27:25: Lynn Kelley: from this implementation, and are we getting it? We may have gotten it way back when the consultant sold us the whatever it was. Maybe they found it, but are we getting that value? If we're not getting it, remember, 4 weeks is critical, according to the research, so I like to build that in in 4 weeks.

00:27:45: Lynn Kelley: If we're not getting the value, then we've got to figure out what's going on. Maybe it's the training.

00:27:50: Lynn Kelley: Maybe it's the system's not working for them, and they're just not… don't have a way to tell us it's not working.

00:27:56: Lynn Kelley: Maybe they're still doing it the old way, and we can't detect it.

00:27:59: Lynn Kelley: What are all the things that are happening?

00:28:03: Lynn Kelley: And also, once people know.

00:28:07: Lynn Kelley: that you're gonna check early on to see if the value's being delivered. And we don't check on it as like a, haha, we caught you. We come in and say, help us. You're, you know, we've just rolled out in your area, we're not seeing the values, not showing up.

00:28:22: Lynn Kelley: What's going on? How can we help? What did we do wrong? What did… you know, is the training… is it the training? What is it?

00:28:28: Lynn Kelley: And when you approach it like that, you've also now increased the probability that everybody… word gets out, and there's going to be an early checkpoint. So there's… it's again, it's just a whole cycle that reinforces itself. But.

00:28:41: Lynn Kelley: And going back to the study, the people that implemented in strategic speed 3 years later, the results of whatever they were, you know, the metric they were trying to move in that change initiative, they had 56% better results than those that didn't.

00:28:56: Lynn Kelley: So, there is some value, and that's how we got to the 96% success rate of the hundreds of change initiatives at Union Pacific, because

00:29:06: Lynn Kelley: it… we put our energy into the upfront. We didn't wait for failure to happen and go, oh, shoot, it's not working. We really were checking all along the way.

00:29:18: Johannes Schartau: So, you mentioned how you got into this change career, and I can imagine that in the beginning, you had different ideas of what would work, or what was important.

00:29:31: Johannes Schartau: What was something that changed along the way, or something that you changed your mind about once you kind of progressed along the career path?

00:29:42: Lynn Kelley: Yeah, so one thing that was kind of a later finding for me,

00:29:49: Lynn Kelley: was when I had a change that I was implementing. This was when I was… I was… I was a tech firm reporting to the CEO, and getting a little cocky, because it seemed like everything was succeeding, and my boss came into my office and said, I want you to implement this change.

00:30:05: Lynn Kelley: And I was used to big, wide-scale changes with thousands of people, and I knew that this was a smaller change.

00:30:12: Lynn Kelley: only affecting about 250 people. And it was also a group that I had worked with in the past, had probably the best relationship with… than any of the other ones, and I said, okay, well, wait a minute, you know what? Those leaders are going to be coming in, for, like, a quarterly meeting.

00:30:28: Lynn Kelley: And I'd like to really run this change by them, and get their feedback, can you wait a few weeks? Yep, no problem. So, got them together, and they said, at the end of the meeting, I told them about the change, and I said, okay, you know, like, we just want to know, what are your thoughts on it? What are your feedback? If, you know, as we go forward, what are your ideas?

00:30:48: Lynn Kelley: And nobody said anything. And I said, okay, end of a long meeting, some of you may still be jet-lagged, I'll give you a week, send me an email, give me a call, because, you know, this is something Scott, our CEO, really wants, but I, you know, want to make sure that we've

00:31:02: Lynn Kelley: you know, we've really understood what you need in this situation. Week goes by.

00:31:08: Lynn Kelley: nobody, nobody responded. I'm like, yay! I go ahead, on a Friday, send the email effective, blah blah blah, this is gonna happen, whoosh, goes out.

00:31:17: Lynn Kelley: And honestly, I got, like, I got phone calls, I got emails, I'm like, we're not doing this, not in those words, but this is not gonna work. And I… and I was… I had two reactions. First of all, I was really angry, right? I communicated two-way, twice, with multi-vehicles, like.

00:31:36: Lynn Kelley: so what? It's your problem. You know, I told you, I gave you an opportunity, done, you know, there was… I was angry. I was also hurt, like, my feelings are hurt, like, aww, these guys don't trust me, they know me, how can they do this to me? Why are they doing this?

00:31:50: Lynn Kelley: And then it just so happened, I was… I was going away for the weekend, I was meeting a friend, and so we were talking and walking, and I'm gonna tell you a quick story, because we're walking on a, like, a bay, and we're walking on a bluff.

00:32:06: Lynn Kelley: on top of… of, like, a bay on the ocean, and we… we see… we see a bunch of people coming, walking around this bay along the beach, and they're gonna swim. They've got inner tubes, they're… they've got swimsuits on. But they walk all the way… the beach is deserted. Well, they walk all the way around to the other side of the beach, and I'm thinking…

00:32:26: Lynn Kelley: why would they do that? I say to my friend, well, why would they do that? And she said, well, the riptide carries them from one end of the bay to the other. And then, sure enough, you know, the… there's one in every group, the show off, backs up, does this whole Muscle Man thing, runs in and swims and, like, flies across.

00:32:43: Lynn Kelley: And then somebody comes right after them, then the inner 2 people, there's… there's like 10 of them, so 2 people went early, like, 6 people, you know, 5 people kind of floating along. And the last couple of people decided not to do it. Went in a little bit, you could see they were gonna… they walked all the way back.

00:33:01: Lynn Kelley: And this is really a true story, but just then, I realized, wow, I just read a study about this, and it was in Michael Hammer's book, and it was the change curve, and it said, in any given group, 20% of the people will accept change.

00:33:17: Lynn Kelley: 60%.

00:33:18: Lynn Kelley: will be just… they'll be neutral. They'll just be floating along on their inner tubes, kind of hanging out, no effort, and then a couple… 20% will resist, and that's exactly what I just saw.

00:33:30: Lynn Kelley: And weirdly, I just also finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's book about the tipping point.

00:33:37: Lynn Kelley: which says, that… and I'm going to quote it kind of loosely, but, you know, at any given point, a change in idea will cross a threshold, tip, and spread like wildfire. And Gladwell accompanies that with research that talks about what percentage of the people do you need for the tipping point.

00:33:56: Lynn Kelley: So it's slightly more than 20%, but the whole idea then, it changed my approach to change. Because if I want the tipping point

00:34:08: Lynn Kelley: I probably get… I probably have the change agents, but that's not enough. Who do I need? I need the neutrals. I need the people that are floating along on their inner tubes.

00:34:17: Lynn Kelley: But the problem is who has the louder voice? It's people who don't want the change. So, the problem early on is the tipping point goes in the wrong direction, because the people who don't want the change are… and then, once you get

00:34:33: Lynn Kelley: that tipping point happens, you can't turn it around easily. I mean, it's… usually those are the ones that you have to restart a year later. Oh, we're gonna try it again, it didn't work the last time. So.

00:34:45: Lynn Kelley: What I… what I changed at that point, and this is, like I said, this is kind of later on in my career, but by the time I got to Union Pacific, it's the way I did things.

00:34:54: Lynn Kelley: is to start with, you know, we often do pilot tests, and I believe them then, because we want to get the bugs out. We want to learn if we're delivering the value we expected. We don't want to give any ammunition to the people that are going to tip it in the wrong direction.

00:35:08: Lynn Kelley: And so, we do pilot tests, but we don't often think about piloting it with change agents.

00:35:14: Lynn Kelley: And so, because if I can pilot it with a change agent, I've already got that group then, or that person, and then if I can build my communication plan in.

00:35:24: Lynn Kelley: to reward and recognize. So everybody's talking about, look what's happening here, and their metrics are improving, and yay, yay, yay! I can get some FOMO, fear of missing out, in the neutral group

00:35:36: Lynn Kelley: and get a tipping point started in the right direction. So, when I…

00:35:44: Lynn Kelley: started applying that principle, and you can't do it all the time, but when I started experimenting with that and applying it, I saw a step change in the success rate. And the whole idea is

00:35:56: Lynn Kelley: when you have a little change that's like a little plant that's more likely to die than to grow, you want to do everything in water, sunshine, you want to do everything to make it support it. And to put it in

00:36:09: Lynn Kelley: an environment where someone's actively resisting is making it harder to support. If I can have an equivalent experiment with someone who is… can be a partner along, and create FOMO, and get some neutrals.

00:36:24: Lynn Kelley: I can start that tipping point, really going. And the research on what that tipping point

00:36:32: Lynn Kelley: where that percentage is varies depending on which kind of research, but it's in the mid-20% of the people. It's not that much, 26, 23… there's been one study that was even under 20, but if you can get this group of people, you can change the dynamic, and it's

00:36:49: Lynn Kelley: It's… doesn't require a ton of effort. It requires a lot of…

00:36:53: Lynn Kelley: recognition, and… and just creating a desire of other people to be a part of this very cool thing that everybody's talking about. They're presenting to leadership. They're at the… they're on… there's a little podcast on there, and they're at their conference. Their numbers have moved in the key, you know, in all of the key success factors, the key metrics.

00:37:11: Lynn Kelley: Those are the types of things people are looking for.

00:37:17: Johannes Schartau: Alright, last question, unfortunately.

00:37:20: Lynn Kelley: I'll make it short, I'll give you a short answer.

00:37:22: Johannes Schartau: No, no, no, please, no, take your time, please.

00:37:27: Johannes Schartau: A lot of people that I talk to see a need for change in their organization, but they do not have the formal authority to actually make that change. So you were talking about, for example, involving the CEO, or having some kind of power within…

00:37:40: Johannes Schartau: The organization to really make that change, so they feel basically trapped, because they see the need, but they're unable to change it themselves.

00:37:49: Johannes Schartau: Do you have any advice for people who feel like they're caught in this situation?

00:37:54: Lynn Kelley: Yes, yes. So, the first thing that I like to do is take data

00:38:01: Lynn Kelley: so when I… in an organization, if you need… if you need support from peers.

00:38:07: Lynn Kelley: to help get buy-in, or your boss, is to take data and not just lead with emotion, right? So, so you have a little bit of maybe early results or some studies of what other companies have done and why it's worked there. And if it's a big change.

00:38:26: Lynn Kelley: I'll even, you know, see if there's a local company that we can just… I could take one or two people over just to… just to see, just to experience it, the… understand what it is. It was easier with Lean, because it's on the manufacturing floor.

00:38:40: Lynn Kelley: But you want to demonstrate

00:38:42: Lynn Kelley: why… and these are controversial changes, right? I mean, the easy change is you just go to your boss and say… but if you know it's going to be controversial, or you know your boss has already said no, or whatever, then I try to get some data, and then… and then if I still get a no, then I say something like, okay.

00:39:01: Lynn Kelley: Can I run… A little experiment.

00:39:04: Lynn Kelley: And sometimes, you know, you can just say, look, I can… I'll do it on my own time, but when you have employees that are gonna get paid overtime or whatever, you have to see if you can get budget, but you could just say, I get it, look, you know, but can I run a little experiment? Can I just see, if I could try this out in a little bit? And you had such a great podcast on her

00:39:29: Lynn Kelley: webinar, recently with the slicing concept. I… I loved hearing Arnold, I think, is his… was it… his name was Arnold, is that right?

00:39:40: Johannes Schartau: Anton.

00:39:42: Lynn Kelley: Yeah. I love that podcast, because he talked about slicing these little test, experiments, pilots into the tiniest pieces if you can't run a big one. But even if you could run a big one, and there's lots, it's very complex, can you test little pieces of it?

00:40:00: Lynn Kelley: And starting to get any kind of early results, but the other thing that will do for you is it may show you that your idea's not gonna work in your environment, right? Or not work the way you described it.

00:40:11: Lynn Kelley: I also will often go with a half-baked solution, so that my boss or my peers

00:40:19: Lynn Kelley: can own it… I may know how I want to do this in a perfect world, but if I can think of the things that I think are non-negotiable, then I may just talk about those things and say, and what do you think about

00:40:33: Lynn Kelley: this, so what… and try to get… give people space

00:40:38: Lynn Kelley: to own, own it, and also understand that may mean you have to compromise what your ideal solution is. I mean, it happened at Union Pacific because

00:40:49: Lynn Kelley: We needed to have a name for this lean thing that they wanted, and the abbreviation for Union Pacific is UP, and because Toyota is the Toyota way, they wanted to call it the UP Way.

00:41:02: Lynn Kelley: And, and I was like.

00:41:03: Lynn Kelley: UP Way. Like, I just… I hated the name, right? And I said, what about up? UP is… can we say UP Way? Like, it's pretty… no, it, you know, and… and so for them, it was what they wanted, and for me, I always cringe when I have to say, oh yeah, we call it UP Way. So, it was… it was a bit,

00:41:24: Lynn Kelley: I don't know, you just… I just had… I… I… they also wanted…

00:41:27: Lynn Kelley: different tools than some of the ones that I like to lead with in an early implementation, because they… they wanted to go complex pretty quickly, and I had to give them a little bit of complexity so that I could satisfy their needs. So, you have to be open that you don't come with a pure solution.

00:41:46: Lynn Kelley: And finally, lastly, if your boss doesn't want it

00:41:50: Lynn Kelley: And is adamant, and not give… then, okay, look.

00:41:54: Lynn Kelley: You walk away, because there are a couple things. Your boss may know things that you don't know. They may know budget cuts are coming. They may know that layoffs are coming. They may know that you're going to change your direction on a product line.

00:42:06: Lynn Kelley: So, so you gotta give them credit for that.

00:42:09: Lynn Kelley: They also may be somebody who's really not open to change, and will never say yes, right? But the thing is, you don't… why fight against it? You report to this person, and if you believe so strongly in it, and you feel they're squashing your creativity, then you start looking for another job.

00:42:27: Lynn Kelley: You just, you know, you just don't… part of your own growth is important. You recognize that, and you say, this isn't the place for me.

00:42:35: Lynn Kelley: there's a mishmash of cultures, and then you find a way to fulfill yourself in another environment. So,

00:42:43: Lynn Kelley: Yeah, that's the way I… that I would suggest.

00:42:47: Johannes Schartau: Incredible. Thank you so much. People can find you on changequestions.net and on LinkedIn, is that correct?

00:42:53: Lynn Kelley: Yes.

00:42:55: Johannes Schartau: Alright, thank you so much for your time. I hope this session has given you some concrete ideas for your own transformation challenges. At Holisticon, we put into practice what we discuss and transform together. We provide companies with holistic support throughout the digital transformation process.

00:43:10: Johannes Schartau: We make our customers more resilient, establish a future-proof agile culture, create new business models, and inspire people with better services and products. If you're facing any of these challenges, please feel free to contact us. You can find all the information you need at holisticon.de, and I'm hoping to see you at the next transform together session.