How a rider, an elephant, and a path can help you change your organization

By John Purcell © 2012

When Tech Corp (not it’s real name) decided to develop new vision, mission, and core values plus a strategy to move in that direction, they invited employees to interact more on the “rough draft” of the plan. What followed threw the leaders back on their heals, as several people opposed many of the changes and even utilized the venue as an opportunity to fire criticism at the leaders about multiple concerns they had about the organization.

A key point from the book Navigating Through Change is that people will experience fear and then a real sense of loss, even grieving, when they know that change is coming.

Last year I read a new book called Switch, How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Since then I have helped several organizations apply concepts from the book to their situations. A rider, an elephant, and a path represent the book’s paradigm for change. The premise is that we must direct the rider, which represents our rational thinking, motivate the elephant, which represents our emotions, and shape the path, which represents the new direction of the change. Obviously, the elephant isn’t going to go where he doesn’t want to go, so a core finding is that we can’t ignore the role of emotions in the process of change. The authors do a great job researching the subject and describing numerous case studies to demonstrate and prove their points. I would like to explore how this paradigm applies specifically to an organization, so we will take their points and sub-points and demonstrate how to apply them.

Directing the rider (our rational thinking)

• Have a distinct vision and describe it so that your people understand where you are all going. Make sure the key leaders are the first to buy in (ideally after helping to shape the vision themselves). Then it’s not one person’s vision but a vision of the leadership. One non-profit that I worked with did this when the leaders took two weekend retreats to shape the strategic plan then took several weeks to unpack the plan with the entire organization.
• Clarify the steps each person can take to help them as individuals and the organization as a whole to get there. What do you expect of them and why? Make the steps as easy and specific as possible.
• Who is working in a way that you want to see others doing? Find out what they are doing and reproduce it. One organization did this when they realized that most of the personal growth was coming from people who had been mentored by one key leader. So they found out what he was doing that was so effected and developed a process and coaching for other leaders to enable them to reproduce their leadership as well.

Motivating the elephant (our emotions)

• Describe the vision in a way that your people can FEEL it and are moved to desire it. Utilize stories, paint a verbal or literal picture, find testimonies, and do anything else that is experiential. Leaders do this effectively when they learn to paint a picture of what the organization could look like one day in the future.
• Break the change down into bite sized chunks that can be more easily handled emotionally.
• Challenge and help your people to grow through this change experience. Offering coaching and mentoring to help them not only deal with the change but learn and grow from it can be resources well invested.

Shape the path (the way forward)

• How can you tweak the environment to make the change easier for people?
• How can you help people build new habits around the change?
• How can you make the desired new behaviors contagious to make it more and more easy for others to adapt to them? Rewarding the desired new behavior privately, publicly, and monetarily can all be options.

The bottom line is that change in today’s culture with today’s generations is going to take more REAL leadership from you and not  just directive leadership.