While reading an interesting book on performance, I came across a phrase by Roman philosopher Seneca on strategy: “If you don’t know which port you’re sailing to then there is no wind that will be favourable”.

In hindsight it was a perfect reflection of my recent experience assisting a local business institution that was undergoing organizational realignment and streamlining.

Undertaking the task of securing the buy-in of key management resources from its various independent operational entities, I confidently told myself, “All we need is to do an Action Lab with the use of a tool known as the House of Quality”.

Since the mode of communication promised to the client was Bahasa Malaysia, my first task was to translate into simple explanation:  “What we need to do is an Action Lab, beginning with the facilitation of a thorough brainstorming session to get everyone’s input and thoughts, then structure it as per the transition requirement and finally quantitatively evaluate it using an excel spreadsheet.

The output will be several logical action plans that would get everyone’s buy in with respect to the organizational changes that is being proposed.

It is a simple and straightforward approach that can be accomplished within a few days”.

With the clients convinced with this interesting proposition the dates were set for the Action Lab to take place and with a confident plan, my team and I prepared the House of Quality tool.

We arrived at our client’s site that Monday morning only to be faced with a moderately large group of senior managers looking tired, concerned and guarded.

Word had reached them and ‘restructuring’ was pounding in their mind. We were essentially face to face with a group of confused people that were fearful that they were involved in some sort of redundancy exercise. “I could deduce from their expressions and responses that half were thinking ‘What’s in it for me?’ and the other half ‘What’s going to happen to me?’”

I could not help but stereotype this response as one from a typical Malaysian organization.

Institutionalized Fear!

It is the norm or belief that working in a Malaysian institution or organization is almost like working for the government in the sense that jobs are secured throughout the tenure of one’s employment.

The group of senior managers we were dealing with apparently believed their jobs were a life long security and grew into them without fear of being fired or laid-off.

Gradually, I began to learn about the dismissive attitudes on the extent services that they have been providing.  “What we provide is good enough for our clients because we are a monopoly and they will always come back to us for these services”, they said.

In a short time frame of our attempt to implement Action Lab, we witnessed the behavioural issue that we were facing. Their belief on job security had created a culture of dependency and group-think, led by an individual in the highest position of authority. There was no motivation to work hard and lead improvement or transition initiatives. To them, it was pointless.

The cultural mindset that had developed out of this was, ‘We will do what our boss tells us to do and while doing it respectfully keep our heads down and take no risks’. I soon realised that we were facing a group of senior managers that were motivated to maintain the status quo.

In a nutshell, they believed they had anchored jobs in a solid rock organization that held a monopoly over the services it provided, and they were in no way going to change this.

With this in mind, we understood why our client had very limited successes in developing the leadership skills necessary to execute strategic decisions such as organizational realignment and streamlining. Opportunities to learn new methods and approaches were overshadowed by the fact that an implementation would be faced by senior managers that wanted to maintain the status quo.

There were many questions that ran through my mind that day. They were concerns more than anything else. Are these people satisfied with simply getting by with their jobs? Why are they happy with the status quo and why are they afraid to put themselves forward to proposed changes?

Having promised a logical outcome to our client, we quickly changed our tactics to ensure that the Action Lab would turn out to be successful. After all the consensus was, it is the ‘in thing’ today to run labs in order to yield desired management outputs. Even PEMANDU is running labs under the helm of Idris Jala.

Changing into a 4T Business

The key point that we built our tactics on was the dormant talent that we were facing: the knowledge and experience of these senior managers. We rapidly added to that some training, technology and tools which were essentially, the 4T of harnessing leadership capability.

Our team facilitated an intensive brainstorming session and made sure all brainstorming rules were followed. We quickly trained the senior managers on the practicality of how the House of Quality tool can be used to derive the necessary service functions required at each independent entity. Next, to maintain these functions we evaluated the relevant output functional responsibility and matched it with the required skills and competencies to carry out the responsibility successfully.  By doing so we were able to maintain all independent entities and its operations (and customers) whilst transitioning to a new organizational structure.

With the help of some basic computing technology, the group was very quickly exposed to quantitative methods that facilitated the identification of transition gaps that were clearly functional requirements to ensure minimal impact on operations during an organizational transition.

At this stage, every aspect of fear of change became more apparent.

It was their inability to lead and assume accountability of the mission critical activities that were being done over the year. All these functional roles were led and managed by each independent entity’s general manager. This particular business institution had more than 15 general managers and each one had an assistant general manager supporting their role. It was clear that they had embraced a phenomenon known as ‘group-think’ culture.

All decisions and executions let it be either for operational or for improvement had to be independently made by these general managers or their respective assistants with the support of group members despite of processes that were open for improvements.

Facing the prospect of organizational streamlining and realignment, the group’s fear was being delegated with accountability.

“I can’t be responsible for an operational budget of more than RM3000. That is beyond my limit of authority. We need a committee to evaluate such budgets and a general manager to approve it. That has always been our policy!”

For years they have been shielded from assuming accountability that would have ensured progressive improvement of service delivery. For years, their activities were dependent on one individual with the highest responsibilities making all the decisions and taking accountability.

Such organizational structure and group-think culture is a reason for its poor operational performance and capability for efficient service delivery.

The crucial question then is: Are we creating fear through change?

The natural reaction of people, when an unexpected predicament is presented to them, is obviously resistance. All of a sudden, everyone retreats to their comfort zones of familiarity, perhaps even to denial and selective ignorance. This fear of change is often associated with confusion and negativity.

Let’s face it. Everyone is sensitive about change because it affects all of us and in almost every way has an impact to our existence. It can be small personal fear or even the fear of the unknown. Fear of change exists because people are concerned about changes to the work that people are used to doing and its affect on the potential change in lifestyle. Organisational changes could impact the compensation and affordability that is a result from the work that they do.

As changes are introduced to the people and their knowledge and experience of the past is viewed as irrelevant (so would all the past accomplishment become irrelevant), it generates a personal threat resulting in the resistance to change.

A Bitter taste of Courage Best!

The case for change unfortunately begins with one’s brush with fear and the flip side is courage. That’s a talent that every manager or leader needs to develop. How to transition fear into courage?

It requires guiding people with the utmost care to transition from their comfort zone to the courage zone. The key factor is to ensure that the necessary changes, bad experiences and fears are not avoided but are treated as the lessons learned and the catalyst to move towards the courage zone.

An interesting quote comes to mind that creates the urgency for change:

“When the change on the outside is faster then the change inside, then the end is in sight.” ~ Jack Welch

The fear of change is often due to the inability to envision the landscape of the future, or rather, as a good leader the inability to paint the picture of the future to his or her people moving them from the comfort zone to the courage zone.

The wisdom is to look at every problem not as an overwhelming resistance but as an opportunity to widen knowledge and from the lessons learnt to use them to your favour and achieve the necessary changes for the future.

The knowledge that was considered irrelevant is actually intelligence to formulate change. It should be applied by including the people with the intelligence in formulation of change as inclusion leads to ownership and commitment towards change.

Communicating change as an opportunity, positions people positively with a receptive optimism that change is not always for the worse. Communicating the levels of discontent or the reasons behind the issue that created the case for change will raise awareness of the current imperfections and promote consensus towards the case of change.

Additionally, as future leaders, one must be willing to embrace change and carefully guide the people towards the courage zone overcoming the initial tendency of being afraid or unwilling to take the risk. Again, communicating how change would take place with a clear view of transition from the current state to the future state and what participation levels are required from people to make the change happen.

Every effort to mitigate risks and avoid surprises takes you closer to the courage zone where change becomes an opportunity. The inclusion of people in every step of change empowers them to envision the change and the future landscape of where they will be and the role they will play.

This will lead to a successful change activity where, confidence is gained, fears are eliminated and resistance is substituted with collaboration and support. Maintaining the status quo is synonymous to a monotonous workforce and the breakthrough from such environment is the positive step that encourages people to look at the flip side.

The group of senior managers soon came to the realisation that the realignment and streamlining meant that only roles with functions that added no value to the organization would be eliminated. It was not about the people, but the changes that involve process reengineering that would bring a significant improvement to the business. In other words, they learnt that the enemy was not the change but the non-value add functions in their roles or jobs.

And, again it requires executing the 4T: Tactics, Talents, Training, Technology and Tools. Well that is why Action Labs are done.

It did take a while to get all the senior managers to unanimously understand that changes proposed are from their very own ideas and its execution is dependent on their very own commitment. They realised that it was not only improvement that they were achieving rather it was a forward step towards business excellence.

The changes proposed were not about the little improvements that made the functions work better but it was the new ways and process changes that would bring about the best for the functions to deliver to the operations and the customers.

From the Action Lab playbook, the logical visibility was: a new beginning in sight.

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Dr. A Aruleswaran is the founder of LSS Academy Sdn. Bhd., a keen developer of customized Lean Six Sigma solutions and an online knowledge portal for the Australasian region. Trained as a practitioner by the George Group and Novelis Inc and now supporting several global deployments with UMS Consulting GmbH. Dr. Arul is also the author of Changing with Lean Six Sigma, a book about change management for Lean Six Sigma.  He can be reached at aaruleswaran@lss-academy.com.