Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Cognitive Dissonance: Why Social Business Change Is Hard by Matt Ridings



Cognitive Dissonance is that discomfort we feel when we try and hold two conflicting thoughts in the mind at the same time.  If we believe we are inherently a good person, then when we do something bad we feel dissonance.  The disappointment we feel when someone acts differently from the view in which we held them is also a form of dissonance.  From an organizational perspective, if you've been entrenched in a long held process or corporate culture the implication is that it was the *right* process (whether you agreed with that or not).  So when someone comes along and turns over that apple cart and says there is a *new* right way, dissonance is created.


When you try and institute change within an organization, you are going to encounter this.  What's critical to understand is that this is not only 'normal' behavior, but to some degree inevitable.  It's just the way our brains work.  The larger the organization, and the greater the change, the more this dissonance (and thus resistance) will occur.
So what?  Why all the psychological mumbo jumbo?  Because change management is so utterly critical to deploying the cultural sea change necessary for the next generation of Social Business.  I see so many consultants in this space banging their head on the wall out of frustration that big companies just don't 'get it'.  They sit at lunch with me and argue about how 'stupid' these executives are because they've presented them with irrefutable logic about the 'best' way to run an organization and the executive still doesn't bite.


Logic and reason, unfortunately, have little to do with making change actually happen.  You are still creating dissonance.  You will still be resisted at every turn if you don't have a solid change management plan in place that takes into account the incredibly nuanced aspects of politics, culture shift, systems and process, etc.  You cannot just 'roll out' a decision that requires any significant change within an organization and expect a high degree of success.  Saying:

"We have new software, systems, and processes.  We are going to train you.  We will now be a 'social' company starting on Friday of next week"

is akin to saying

"I just bought you a wine cellar, filled it with wine, and gave you a book...you start your new job as a sommelier on Friday".

There is also no such thing as a unilateral change management plan.  We talk about corporate culture like it's a single 'thing', but it's really not.  From department to department, geographic location to location, the cultures are different.  Sure, they all combine to some generic sense of the type of culture a company has but that's not good enough for effective change management.  Some regions/groups respond best to well defined messaging based on self-interest, others on shared interest (sometimes corporate shared interest, other times societal shared interest).  In some regions the dictatorial style may actually work if messaged properly (France and Belgium for example).  The point is that simply knowing the 'right' thing to do for a company is not enough.  Simply saying "you must now do this" is not enough.
At a simplistic level you can look at it through the lens of one of the tools I use in my workshops called "What? So What? What Now?"*

1. What? - What are we trying to accomplish big picture?
2. So What? - Why are we trying to accomplish it?  What are the implications of doing so? What are the
    implications of not accomplishing it?  What does it mean to *me*?  What does it mean to the familial group
    (department/division)?  What does it mean to the corporation?  What does it mean to the consumer?
3. What Now? - Visualize the before and after.  What actions do we take to start down this path?

*Note - Items 2 & 3 are done in layers to accommodate messaging specific and relative to the audience, there's not just one.

So to my consultant friends who are so frustrated right now...knowing what someone should do, no matter how correct, is not a substitute for knowing how to get them there.  It's not that those executives are necessarily disagreeing with your assessment, they simply don't believe that you understand how to truly make it happen.  Show them they're wrong, demonstrate your understanding of complex change management and you may find your success rate goes up.
Best of luck.

Cheers,

Matt Ridings - @techguerilla

About: Matt RidingsFounder of MSR Consulting, a referral only firm focused on delivering tangible results to its clients via Managed Services and Relationship Marketing with specializations in the areas of Social Media, eCommerce, and Healthcare.

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