 
### The Journey

A Needs & Values Approach To Change

Neil L Griffiths

Published by Neil Griffiths 2014

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Index

### Foreword

Chapter 1: Change - Why? What? How?

Chapter 2: Attitudes To Change

Compete Or Cooperate

X Marks The Spot: Where We Stand On Change

Chapter 3: Needs And Values

DNA's Values

The Needs, Values & Characteristics Of Different DNA Types

Chapter 4: Change As A Journey

Chapter 5: Facing Up To The Challenge Of The Journey

1. 'A' Where We Are - The Starting Point

2. 'B' The Destination

3. Getting from A to B - The Journey

4. Action - Making The Journey Real

Chapter 6: The Journeying Mind

Framing

Awareness

Decision Making & Risk Assessment

Learning

Chapter 7: Roles In Change

SDs

ODs

TDs

IDs

Chapter 8: Case Studies

Appendix: The Evolution Of Values

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###  Foreword

This book is intended to help people negotiate their way through change more effectively, whatever that change may involve. While it has been written to appeal to a business audience, the principles involved are universal, and therefore can just as easily apply to anyone, in any situation, faced with the challenge of instigating or responding to change of any kind.

There are already many good books and useful models designed to help people through change, so I want to begin by explaining why I have thought it worthwhile writing this, and why reading it might be worthwhile for you.

The short answer is 'needs and values'. These are commonly used words but few people seem to understand them properly. They are psychological mechanisms that have slowly evolved over millions of years. Most of us, psychologists included, fail to fully appreciate how evolution has shaped the workings of our minds. Given that needs and values are the most significant aspect of this evolution, this failure leads to profound misunderstandings regarding how they work, the massive impact they have on our perceptions and decision-making, and the emotions we experience when confronted with change. The aim with this book is to correct this: to help people see things (ourselves and others included) in a different light, make more effective decisions, and, in so doing, better navigate our way through the often turbulent waters of change.

70% of major organizational change programmes fail. The consensus is they fail because, in concentrating on hard things like process and organizational objectives, they underestimate and fail to understand how the people who drive the processes, define the organization and represent the customers and clients they serve, respond to change.

Organizational failure to deal with change reflects the difficulty we, as individuals, have when faced with making and responding to change. The challenges we face are always personal. It is just that organizations involve a lot of people, and therefore individual challenges run into those of others, become magnified and transform into collective challenges.

This book will, by exploring the personal dimensions of change, illustrate how challenges as great as changing the culture of an entire organization, or as small as buying a new outfit, can be successfully overcome using the same methodology.

In order to do this it uses the simple metaphor of a journey (The Journey) to describe the process of change; following the idea that every change starts somewhere, ends up somewhere else and in between takes us on a journey. Professionals involved in change will be familiar with many change models. All of these can be seen as describing a journey. In order to help you relate these to The Journey, in the final appendix to this book you will find a diagram mapping a selection of these change models across the various phases of The Journey.

In 2008 the management consultants McKinsey & Co published a report entitled The Inconvenient Truth About Change Management. This listed nine reasons why major change programmes go wrong and fail to deliver what they were intended to. All nine relate to psychology: how people perceive, think and behave when faced with change. In the chapter devoted to case studies, I have provided an illustration of each of these 'inconvenient truths', and shown how the needs and values approach can be used to reach the parts other interventions cannot.

Chapter 1: Change - Why? What? How?

Change isn't a thing, it's everything. We can't avoid it. Our success in life is determined by the changes we make and how we react to and manage the changes imposed upon us.

Whenever we do something something else changes. When the world around us changes, something changes for us. Every thought, word and deed changes something for someone in some small way.

Sometimes we instigate change: we have a need and set out to make changes so as to satisfy it. In doing this we actively seek out a different: role, way of doing things, partner, environment, responsibility, etc.

But change comes to us even when we think we are standing still. Everything changes in time: we grow older, the people around us change, the world changes.

Consequently, whether we actively seek change or passively find ourselves on the receiving end of it, we are likely to come off best if we face forward and prepare ourselves to successfully negotiate its hurdles and take advantage of the opportunities it brings.

Some examples of change...

Environmental - time, weather, resources, technology, culture, politics, etc.

Corporate - takeovers, re-branding, relocations, floatations, recruitment, restructuring, working conditions, training, expansion, diversification, product launch, sales, income, costs, etc.

Career - promotion, relocation, team responsibility, role definition, learning and development, coaching, etc.

Personal - age, health, relationships, friends, family, wealth, location, experience, knowledge, responsibilities, etc.

Why Change?

We instigate change to better satisfy a need.

How Do We Go About It?

In order to help us make a change we put a value on everything and anything likely to help us satisfy that need (or needs) and apply our resources accordingly. The things most likely to help us are given the highest value and are prioritised accordingly.

For example, if the change we need to make is as simple as making ourselves a cup of tea, then a teabag, a mug, boiling water and some milk will be prioritised as the highest valued requirements, as without these there will be no cup of tea.

Once these have been sourced, we may then look at lower valued considerations such as the design of the mug, the availability of a spoon and a place to drink it.

With changes as simple as this things rarely go wrong, but the more complex the change and the more people are involved, the greater the challenge of valuing the various components correctly becomes.

An organization with many offices and warehouses, a veritable army of employees, a large and complex website and intranet, pressing financial commitments and a host of systems and processes attached to each, presents organizational leaders seeking to make changes with a challenge comparable to solving a Rubik's cube puzzle: a change in one part will affect others and make a seemingly simple objective difficult to arrive at.

The needs of buildings, websites and systems are relatively simple to understand and satisfy. Consequently, with a clear vision, a good overall understanding and the support of people with the right specialist knowledge, they are resources you can hopefully martial successfully to help you satisfy your organizational needs. People are a different matter.

Even if the change you are seeking to make involves just one other person, the challenges can still be great. This is because, unlike others resources, people have their own complex needs and values, and these may not be so easily aligned with the needs you are seeking to satisfy through change.

Aligning different needs in The Journey: process (top), personal (middle) and organizational (bottom)

In the simple scenario illustrated above we see three linked journeys of change.

The top one shows a fridge/freezer being taken from a warehouse by lorry to a shop from whence it moves on to someone's home.

The middle one illustrates the journey undertaken by the driver.

The bottom one illustrates the journey the business makes to achieve higher turnover and profits.

On the simplest level the driver's journey may seem to replicate the part of the lorry in the top line. However, from the driver's perspective, the deliveries are just parts of a greater journey he or she is making; involving their social life, their family and any greater ambitions they have. If the work satisfies their emotional and financial needs it can be said to align with their needs. If it fails to do this, or actively frustrates the satisfaction of their personal needs, the needs of the business and the driver will not be aligned. The tension caused when the demands of work and the needs of ones personal life travel along diverging paths is almost bound to lead to difficulties.

When all three journeys are perfectly aligned the products satisfy customer needs, the processes are efficient and the needs of the driver's are satisfied as he or she performs the role the business needs them to perform. Consequently business's need to achieve growth is most likely to be satisfied.

If they are misaligned - products don't appeal to customers, deliveries are routed wrongly, costs exceed revenue and drivers are inclined to pursue personal agendas ill suited to customer satisfaction - then the organization will struggle to satisfy its needs.

The business will likely find it easy to value the quality of its fridge/freezers, its warehouse, its retail outlets and its sales. These can all be estimated, measured and recorded on a spreadsheet, and plans amended according to the outputs. The lorry driver is not so easy to deal with. On any given delivery it is quite likely he or she will do as the business wants, but over the course of the greater journey the business is undertaking he or she will be required to complete this and other journeys thousands of times over. Whoever the driver is, it is almost certain that making these deliveries will not satisfy all of their needs.

In the short term the job will likely satisfy an important need of theirs. If it didn't they wouldn't have taken the job. But as time goes by, the greater the misalignment between their personal needs and those of their role, the greater the likelihood they will not perform the role as the business would like. The combination of a lack of alignment and the passage of time will open up a yawning gap between the needs of the business and the driver. Eventually this will lead the driver to disengage, work less hard, cause problems, leave or have to be laid off.

Introduce organizational change into the above scenario and the potential for misalignment is magnified.

The organization may decide its need for survival requires it to place a higher value on increased profitability and market share. This will likely give rise to new goals and targets, the attainment of which will become perceived needs for the business; needs that may cause it to value increased regulation and different working practices more highly.

The driver may initially value his or her pay packet sufficiently to compensate for other needs their work doesn't satisfy. As time goes by, foregoing the other things they value in order to keep their pay packet coming in may become more difficult to sustain, and, if the organization introduces changes that deprive them of certain freedoms they previously valued, this may prove to be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

Given that organizations are dependent on their people, and we are all dependent on others to satisfy our needs, in order for people and organizations to optimise their long term potential they need to understand their needs and values as well as those of others. The more they are able to do so the more the decisions they make will be informed by and benefit from this understanding.

In a perfect world we should all be able to align our needs with those of others. This may seem impossible, but given we are rarely chained to another person or an organization so tightly that we have to move as if we are competing in a three legged race, there is considerable potential for us to do far better than we currently do.

Chapter 2: Attitudes To Change

How Do We Feel About And React To Change?

When confronted with change we either embrace it willingly or meet it with resistance, and we will do so either in competition with others, through cooperation with others, or a combination of the two.

The 4 Poles Of Change

Despite the apparent simplicity of this model, everything* capable of change can be usefully modelled in relation to its four poles. Indeed the evolutionary foundation for our needs and values can be fully explored within it. The science behind it, its role in mapping our evolution, its wider significance and its relationship to our thinking and behaviour is explored at length in From Stardust To Soul: The Evolution Of Values and isn't something I will cover again here, but its practical significance is at the heart of this book.

* literally 'everything' from electo-chemical reactions between atoms (where the poles of change become reaction and lack of reaction, and the poles of cooperation and competition represent bonding and displacement) to organizations (in which the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument represents the cultural equivalents of cooperation and competition as 'Clan' and 'Market' and the poles of change as 'Adhocracy' and 'Hierarchy').

Change Or Resistance To Change

We decide whether we should change or not according to how we think our needs will be best satisfied. Our decision could be driven by any of the following desires:

a) innovation and creativity - imagining something different and entirely new and setting about making it real - very pro change

b) aspiration and ambition - wanting something else we know exists, having seen it elsewhere - moderately pro change

c) fear - a concern that events will overtake and deprive us of something we value unless we take action - change neutral

d) comfort or uncertainty - wanting to keep things as they are for fear that change will make things worse - resistant to change

e) regret or nostalgia - wanting to restore something we have lost due to change \- regressive resistance to change

These attitudes mark different points along a continuous spectrum of enthusiasm for change.

Potentially any one of us could find ourselves adopting any one of these five stances in relation to change, but interestingly we all tend to exhibit relatively consistent biases in our enthusiasm for change generally dependent on our needs and values. So much so we can usefully map our general attitude by placing an 'X' somewhere along the 'resistant to change' to 'change' axis of the drawing below.

Some people are very open to the idea of change: have a general belief that things can always be done that little bit better and show a willingness to explore opportunities by which to do this.

Others exhibit no particular bias either for or against change. If change comes their way it as likely to be perceived as a threat to be resisted as it is an opportunity to be welcomed.

At the other end of the motivational spectrum will be those who would, in an ideal world, put a 'DO NOT DISTURB' sign on their door, and accordingly make minimum effort to engage with the changes going on outside the sanctuary of their domain.

Compete Or Cooperate

Whether we instigate change or are subjected to it, in addressing and dealing with it we are presented with a choice as to whether we would be better to adopt an 'all for one and one for all' cooperative strategy, or a go it alone (winner takes all, early bird catches the worm, first past the post or every man (or woman) for himself (herself)) competitive strategy.

As before, there will be circumstances in which anyone of us could adopt either, or a combination of, the two strategies, but, taken as a whole, we all tend to demonstrate a consistent bias toward one or the other.

X Marks The Spot: Where We Stand On Change

Knowing where we stand between competition and cooperation, and between willingness to change and resistance to change, enables us to place a single marker on the diagram at the intersection of these grid references. It is possible to do this for all individuals as well as for the roles people have to perform, and the teams and organizations in which they perform them.

Mapping The Needs Of Individuals, Roles, Teams and Organizations

When we do this the diagram effectively becomes a motivational map on which we can plot the motivational bias of any individual, role, team or organization.

To illustrate this, let's take the following four examples:

A - individual: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia founder);

B - role: sales executive (e.g. commission based estate agent)

C - team: advertising creatives

D - organization: police force

A. Jimmy Wales changed the way we can look up information. Without charging users or selling advertising he harnessed the willingness of contributors to provide content for free and those prepared to anonymously sponsor the costs of running Wikipedia, he has provided something for the public good, and, rather than seek to commercialize it for personal financial benefit, preferred to take his reward indirectly through the goodwill generated by his initiative. Pro-change and cooperative.

B. Commission based sales executives are typically given a product to sell with which they have little personal involvement. Their sole mission is to shift as much product as possible in order they can maximise their income. This effectively places them in a competitive situation with other sales executives: those working for the same organization and others selling similar product for competing organizations. Change is generally not welcomed by people in competitive roles as it disrupts the development and honing of a winning strategy, however, if it presents a losing competitor with a chance to catch up and overtake others then it may be welcomed. Highly competitive and slightly change resistant

C. Creative advertisers try to capture people's imaginations by giving their audience something familiar enough to relate to but different enough to grab their attention. The purpose of an advert is to give the advertiser a competitive advantage, but creative staff often adopt softer, more indirect and cooperative strategies than sales executives. Also, while the central purpose of the creative team is to compete against others, within the team there is likely to be cooperation in the sharing and shaping of ideas. Pro-change and broadly competitive.

D. Police forces exist to enforce the law, not to create it. The reason why we have a police force is to enforce the rules and regulations we, as a society, via our elected representatives, have deemed necessary to maintain order for the collective good. It exists to thwart those who wish to break the law and change the way we conduct ourselves, and, while it competes with these people, its central purpose is to protect the wider interests of society. Resistant to change and broadly cooperative.

Chapter 3: Dominant Needs Analysis (DNA): Needs And Values

A WORD OF WARNING:

The following introduces DNA types. These are categories into which people can be allocated according to the make up of their values based motivational systems. The values form an evolutionary sequence in which the thinking of those at the red end of the motivational spectrum is more gene dependent (i.e. shaped by the trial and error processes of natural selection) whereas those at the violet end are more meme dependent (i.e. their opinions and attitudes are shaped more by rational analysis of experience). The values toward the violet end of the spectrum represent evolutionary refinements of the neighbouring values toward the red end. This gives rise to the implication that IDs (DNA's most violet types) are in some way better than SDs (DNA's most red types) which some readers may find objectionable.

If so, firstly, it should be borne in mind that 'better' and 'worse' are subjective terms. What is better in one environment may be worse in another. It just so happens, in the ever more fast changing, meme driven world we live in, IDs have increasingly greater potential to do better.

Secondly, while the pattern of our values is relatively stable it is not fixed. Therefore a person who is an SD is not defined by this categorization in the same way as they are categorized by their height or ethnicity; these cannot be changed, our values can.

All that we think and do: how we perceive, judge, act and communicate; the experiences we seek and what we make of our experiences, is determined by our needs.

Our needs are programmed into our genetic code, and while the neural pathways in our brains develop as we are shaped by experience, our underlying needs, the ones defined by our psychological programming, remain relatively stable. While we may be forced to dance to the tune of our changing experiences, our underlying values move more sedately, evolving (if at all) slowly over many years. Since dancing to tunes we don't like can prove very tiring, we tend to seek out the tunes our values prefer.

Needs & Values Action & Learning Cycle

"A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest" Paul Simon

We filter information coming from our environment (our perceptions) in accordance with our needs and values. This affects the lessons we learn, the thoughts we have and the decisions we make (judgement). These determine what we say and do (action). Our actions affect our environment: others and the things around us, and so set up a continuous cycle or feedback loop. The engine of this cycle is our genetic desire to satisfy our needs, which finds expression through our different values.

Our needs are realized in the set of largely unconscious values we hold. Pass the thread of personal values through the loom of experience and what emerges at the other end is the fabric of the individual. Pretty much all that defines us as individuals can be understood in terms of the experiences we have had and the values we hold.

Skills and knowledge are important, but they are products of our values and environment, and are more easily acquired than values. Intelligence and personality are important, but these are also functions of mental processes governed by our values and the experiences they allow us.

When we have to deal with change the skills and knowledge that enabled us to be successful yesterday may not do so tomorrow. Therefore skills and knowledge based attributes that may have made a person an excellent leader in one environment may not serve them so well in another. In rapidly changing environments only the most adaptable people, those with a particular set of values, are consistently able to cut the mustard.

In slow changing or stable environments it is much easier for differently motivated people to acquire the necessary skills and knowledge, and be conditioned to exhibit desirable behaviours, to succeed.

The faster the changes come and the bigger they are the more difficult this becomes. In these circumstances the differing capabilities of differently motivated people become increasingly significant.

This is why needs and values are so important, and why understanding them is becoming the number one priority for anyone charged with leading and managing change.

The Importance of Feeling Comfortable

We seek out environments in which we feel comfortable; which we sense provide the greatest opportunity to satisfy our needs. If we find our needs and values are at odds with those of the people around us, or the actions we are asked to perform, it is likely we will feel uncomfortable.

Just as poorly engineered machine components create friction when the machine runs, so does a misalignment between our needs and values and those of the people around us. In our relationships with others this friction takes the form of conflicting goals, poor communication, poor decision-making, unsatisfactory compromise, emotional stress, poor performance and bad outcomes.

Friction can also arise when personal needs don't align with the needs of a role or an organization, and this gives rise to the same kinds of problems.

The Effects of Discomfort

Because people don't like being in environments in which their needs are misaligned, when confronted with such situations, or people that might create such an environment, they do one of the following:

(1) endeavour to impose themselves in a bid to create an environment in which they might feel more comfortable (regardless of whether this is right for others, the role or the organization);

(2) take avoiding action - refrain from forming such relationships or entering such environments in the first place;

(3) stumble into them and then leave; or

(4) stay by disengaging or enduring stress.

Just as friction between the moving parts of a machine will tend to break bits off, deform them and smooth away rough edges, so does friction caused by the interaction between people and systems with different needs. While there is engagement the personal effects may include arguments, hostility, anger and frustration. While this friction may gradually ease as people develop coping mechanisms, smoothing away differences so as to create something of a shared culture, this is not necessarily a good thing.

It will likely involve people disengaging: not saying the things they want to say, behaving in ways that please others but not themselves, saying things that aren't necessarily true, and generally thinking, behaving and communicating in ways that not only feel bad, but get in the way of getting the job done correctly and quickly.

The greater the incompatibilities and the more people involved the more difficult the creation of a functional shared culture becomes. While smoothed edges may reduce friction, if these edges are the teeth of cogs intended to make wheels go around, when they are lost these wheels will stop turning.

It is difficult enough for married couples (who usually choose each other after extended periods of courtship) to reach a shared understanding and create a shared domestic culture. In large organizations, where there is greater scope for people to disengage and less scope for most individuals to have a significant impact on the shared environment, the culture tends to be either inherited or imposed from above; which leaves people with the four options mentioned above.

Consequently people naturally gravitate toward environments in which they fit and are surrounded by like-minded people.

Feeling comfortable is very important to us, and not just in choosing the right environment. We make almost all our decisions on the basis that we 'feel' comfortable with them. Feelings and intuitions exert such a strong influence on our perceptions and decision-making we rarely do things of our own free will that feel wrong or defy our intuitive sense of what's right.

However, the confidence we have that our intuitions and feelings will not let us down is misplaced. The neural programming behind them evolved over billions of years when the world was a much more stable place. Now our technological advances are giving rise to unprecedented levels of change, affecting our personal, business and political lives and our environment in ways our genetic programming does not fully equip us to deal with. In order to cope with change we need to understand and allow for the genetically rooted, unconscious biases affecting our feelings and intuitions.

We are not logical we are emotional. Our emotional response to any given situation is determined by our needs and values, and this is why they are so important.

While our judgement and the things we say and do may not always appear consistent - shifting according to the environment in which we find ourselves - they are always consistent with how our values seek to find expression in any given environment with any given set of circumstances.

DNA's Values

The values we attach to different things and concepts are entirely subjective, and are based on their ability to satisfy a particular need.

The market value of a car, say a Bentley, is the price it fetches when put up for sale. However, this value is not something everyone can agree on. The price achieved (the market value) represents what those who value it most highly are prepared to pay for it. This value is determined by their needs and their ability to satisfy them. Bentley owners not only have a need to get from A to B reliably and comfortably, they also have needs relating to self esteem: to giving themselves a pat on their back for their achievements and letting others know how successful they are. People without esteem related needs would value a Bentley only as a means of transport, and therefore value it less. This is why Bentley owners are likely to be people with a similar set of emotional needs and values, not just people with enough money to afford them.

The same valuation process we apply to physical things like Bentleys also applies to activities and concepts. Communication, for instance, has different values for differently motivated people. For some it is highly prized as a two way medium through which to learn and share ideas. For others it is to be treated with caution or used strategically: a medium by which to gather useful information and give others a desired impression, but also a medium by which advantages may be given away and potentially damaging information leaked.

While we may all value a concept such as communication, communication is an expression of these more deeply held values and not a value itself.

Even when considering such universally cherished concepts as the well-being of ourselves and our children, our personal needs and values filter and distort our perceptions such that we may make very different decisions in order to achieve these common goals. This is why parents have differing views on education, discipline, bedtimes and how their children spend their leisure time.

The particular set of priorities governing how we look at and go about things is described by the pattern of our personal values; which reflects the emotional programming underpinning how we value all other things.

Prof. Shalom Schwartz initially tested the relative priorities of c.60,000 culturally diverse people from all over the world attached to 57 basic value concepts, e.g. honesty, ambition, curiosity and respect for tradition. He discovered consistent patterns of positive correlations and negative oppositions that enabled these values to be plotted around a circular map.

If, for instance, 'ambition' was one of a person's most important values, it was found that values such as 'success' and 'preserving ones public image' were also likely to be important to them. Similarly if 'honesty' was one of the most important, then 'forgiveness' and 'social justice' were also likely to be ranked highly. People motivated strongly by ambition were likely to place a low emphasis on honesty and vice versa.

The mapping exercise showed the values to be arranged around two axes: one representing an opposition between openness to change and conservation, and the other representing an opposition between self-enhancement and self-transcendence.

These axes correlate directly with the poles of the motivational map previously described. Self-enhancement = competition; self-transcendence = cooperation; conservation = resistance to change; and openness to change speaks for itself.

Since then, over 20 years of peer reviewed international research has given this model of values unrivalled validity. This information provides the foundation for DNA's (Dominant Needs Analysis's) circular motivational map.

Individual value concepts such as honesty, forgiveness, success and ambition are grouped together under the 10 value headings of tradition, conformity, security, power, achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism and benevolence. Honesty and forgiveness come under the heading of benevolence, with ambition and success under the heading of achievement.

The 10 DNA values (outside) and 5 DNA types (inside)

The values arrange themselves in a sequence around the motivational map that fits with Maslow's allocation of values in his hierarchy of needs and with a logical evolutionary sequence. The values on the left (tradition to achievement) all have equivalents in life forms without brains, while the values on the right (hedonism to universalism) are exclusive to conscious life forms. Benevolence has an equivalent in cooperative life forms such as ants and bees, in which individuals place collective interests above individual ones, but this is very different from non-tribal benevolence of some people. Tribal benevolence associated with tradition is similar to the genetic equivalent of benevolence in social insects, whereas benevolence associated with universalism is an entirely human, meme dependent motivator.

We each share an affinity with all these values. What distinguishes us is the relative importance they have for us. We place them in different orders of priority, and within these attach different levels of importance to the values relative to each other.

Values adjacent to each other serve similar needs and are likely to be similarly influential in a person's motivational make up. Values on opposing sides of the map serve different needs and tend to have reciprocal billings: i.e. the most important values to any individual are likely to oppose their least important across the motivational map. However, because our values are subject to the lottery of our genetic inheritance, this is not always the case.

The more harmonious our value system is (i.e. if our most influential values neighbour each other, our least influential oppose these and the ones in between score somewhere in the middle) the more pronounced and consistent our patterns of perception, thinking and behaviour are likely to be. Therefore someone for whom hedonism and stimulation are the most important, and tradition and conformity are the least important, should exhibit a great many of the typical traits associated with DNA's TD type; for example, be especially fun loving and sensation seeking.

The more muted or conflicted our value system is (i.e. our most influential values are spread around the map, with no one group of adjoining values dominating) the more idiosyncratic our patterns of perception, thinking and behaviour are likely to be.

The Needs, Values & Characteristics Of Different DNA Types

In order to quickly build a picture of the type of cognitive biases affecting people with different values, I am going to run through the ten values in relation to the four 'outer' DNA types (i.e. those describing people with motivational systems dominated by a neighbouring set of values).

This should enable you to form an impression of how people fitting these four stereotypes perceive, think and behave. Hopefully, this will also give you an idea of the effect other values (i.e. those more usually associated with other DNA types) have on people whose dominant values enable us to place them in one of the four outer types, and those whose values systems are sufficiently conflicted to prevent us doing this.

Once one is able to develop a feel for these motivational types, this information alone should be sufficient to help you better plan and implement change strategies. When supplemented by a more detailed understanding of how the various values interact with each other and the environments in which people find themselves, one is able to do a great deal more.

We are all individuals defined by the unique details of our values and experiences. Therefore the following descriptions of DNA types should not be read as trying to infer we can all be placed in neat little boxes labelled SD, OD, TD, ID and MD, and once done there is nothing more to be said.

However, as with any aspect of nature, art or science, it is both possible and useful to divide what is really a continuous spectrum into parts. For example, I love all types of music. For me music is a continuous sweep of human expression. I can dance to rock music and rock to dance music, be provoked by a protest song as well as tap my foot to it. The divisions between musical genres are not hard and fast, but they are still useful. If I tune into a rap music radio station I know broadly what to expect. There will be rap, almost no classical content, not much rock but perhaps quite a bit of R&B.

The following is just intended to be a useful starting point from which to begin looking at the spectrum of values that describes our motivational system as determined by our needs.

The following descriptions relate to the biases in thinking and behaviour associated with the dominant values associated with each of DNA's types. If the two or three values identified for each type were the only ones with any significance to any given person, that person would conform very strongly to that particular DNA stereotype. In reality, because we all have some allegiance to all of the values, very few people will be entirely true to the stereotypes; instead we are individually moulded by the unique mix of our values.

That said, I would estimate around 80% of people can readily be identified as belonging to one of the 5 types. For these people, the typecasting is justified even if it doesn't provide the complete picture. Just as we might separately identify colours such as crimson, scarlet, pink, salmon, magenta and geranium, we can also readily identify them as belonging to the red colour group.

SDs

The SD Values

**Tradition** is the value that most directly relates to our genetic inheritance, i.e. it is passed down largely unchanged from generation to generation and is the least affected by rationality. It works on an 'if it aint broke why fix it' basis. Traditions become established because customs and routines help build communities and offer apparently safe, tried and tested, low-cost ways of going about things; saving us time and effort.

Tradition works best when changes in the environment are slow or absent. When things change and new challenges arise, not only does tradition not have the answer, it may leave us clinging to outdated and inappropriate ideas and practices when better alternatives are available.

**Conformity** allows the possibility of accommodating change, in that it involves following what others are doing rather than doing what has 'always' been done. That said, it is little more discerning than tradition. Conformity involves copying the practices of people 'like us'. It works on a 'safety in numbers' basis: if you keep yourself hidden in the centre of the flock or group you are less likely to fall prey to some nasty external threat.

Whatever protection is afforded by 'safety in numbers' breaks down when the flock fragments or becomes infiltrated by an agent of change, such as a predator. When the benefits of being part of a cooperative group are threatened you need something else.

**Security** sets boundaries and creates rules and regulations to better define group identity, keep it together and maintain order within it; whether the group is as small as a couple or as large as a federal state or group of nations. The security value finds expression through, and relates to, any groups a person belongs to. In so doing it sets up those who fail to observe its boundaries or abide by its rules against those who seek to enforce them.

The purpose of the collected SD values of tradition, conformity and security is to embed cooperative behaviour and to protect a group from perceived competitors, who might seek to take advantage of group membership benefits such as trust and kindness without reciprocating.

Collectively these values provide guidance on the 'right' things to do. The feeling being: if you follow the established customs, abide by the rules and defer to those in the know, you should be all right.

SD Characteristics

SDs aren't looking to change the world; ideally they would like it to stay the same or be more like the way they think it used to be. They want to preserve their communities/in-groups and carry on doing things they are familiar with. Correspondingly, change tends to be viewed suspiciously as a potential threat, and is therefore more likely to be resisted. Any thought of striking out on one's own, distancing oneself from, leaving or being cast out from one's in-group is likely to be difficult to deal with.

This strong preference for stability and predictability is likely to manifest itself in a cautious, safety-first attitude to life.

The need for belonging and order tends to make SDs concentrate their energies on managing their immediate environment and maintaining existing relationships. Their horizons are likely to be set close to home, or within the vision of any larger in-groups they belong to (e.g. racial, social, faith based or special interest groups).

This means they are less likely to exhibit curiosity in, or a desire to explore, the wider world, whether physically or intellectually. This means they are less likely to seek out new experiences, want to try different things or see the world from different perspectives. In turn this limits their creative potential and ability to lead through change. Indeed, in times of change they are far more suited to following than leading, to managing process than designing or driving it.

They believe in (and therefore tend to invest their faith in people who appear to follow and represent) long respected institutions, brands, methodologies and respected authority figures. They want to invest trust in people and things, and are therefore vulnerable to those who seek to exploit and abuse this trait.

People, strongly driven by other values or beliefs, who are controversial and outspoken, who openly indulge themselves, or want to shake up the established order, challenge authority and generally play by their own rules are likely to make SDs feel uncomfortable. Because people belonging to other types are driven by values that don't seem to relate to 'real' needs (from their perspective), SDs have difficulty understanding what makes others tick: seeing them as mysterious, frivolous or dangerous.

SDs are inclined to accept things as they are presented and do not spend too much time questioning themselves or their place in the world. Consequently they are placed at a disadvantage in terms of self-awareness and their ability to understand other, differently motivated people.

SDs who develop obsessive tendencies are likely to have these centre on desire to avoid encountering any threats to their stability, an inability to break with the past and other characteristics associated with clinging onto or creating a safe nest.

SD Roles And Organizations

Given their preference for certainty, stability and continuity, SDs are more suited to regulatory and other process driven roles, especially in stable environments in which commitment to just being there and doing one's job are rewarded with reciprocal loyalty.

In order to bring SDs through change it is necessary to make the journey as smooth as possible, have it proceed along a well defined path that does not deviate from its intended course, and is protected so as to prevent people falling off it. The more a change can be presented and delivered as business as usual, or a means by which to restore something that has been lost, the better.

Large governmental organizations, public authorities or long established charities are now the most likely to preserve an SD friendly culture.

Up until the 1960s most large organizations would have maintained a broadly SD culture.

ODs

OD Values

**Power** gives security wings. It is the motivation to define and enforce the security value's boundaries and rules, and thereby fix oneself at the centre of (or at least in a position of influence in) one's in-group so as to reap maximum reward from the protection it offers. It is concerned with status and control. It directly drives us to do (or be seen to be doing) that which enhances our standing amongst our peers and increases our control, and to avoid being seen to do anything likely to diminish either.

**Achievement** is a good investment for those seeking the benefits of power, in that it drives us to do things likely to impress our peers. Without achievement power may require considerable and continuous effort, as it necessitates our having to personally exert our influence on, or induce respect from, others. Achievement enables us to leave an impression on others that we are worthy of their trust and admiration, which makes it more likely they will defer to us; giving us the respect, status and influence we desire.

OD Characteristics

These values are all about competition. While OD values are dependent on the existence of a cooperative group (with people willing to be controlled, obey rules, submit to order and give respect), whose boundaries ODs can work within and whose rules define the field of play, ODs play for immediate personal gain: to become a winner and avoid being a loser.

ODs are broadly sympathetic with the type of values espoused by SDs, but, unlike SDs, they do not live by them. In order to rise to the top and increase one's influence it may be necessary to give the impression of being a cooperative member of the group, willing and able to contribute to its well being, while at the same time seeking to push at its boundaries and adopt a flexible interpretation of its rules. While ODs may have a very strong work ethic, and the most able may have little need to bend the rules or work outside accepted boundaries, they are the most likely to succumb to the temptation to gain an advantage by doing so.

ODs are likely to have a bigger world view than SDs, be a little more curious and adventurous, largely because they are motivated to get to the head of the pack, but this does not amount to big picture thinking and creativity. OD values are dependent on extracting maximum personal advantage from the current situation, using existing knowledge and established processes rather than imagining what might be. Investing time and other resources into goals that cannot be realized immediately necessitates reducing investment in the pursuit of more important short-term goals; thereby increasing the risk others will gain a competitive advantage.

ODs are therefore more concerned with maintaining momentum than changing direction, with satisfying short-term demands than wasting resources looking too far ahead into the unknown.

The competitive drive of ODs is such that, if they are to willingly cooperate with others, they have to be confident others will not exploit the concessions they make. Mechanisms aimed at ensuring this does not happen, but allowing them the possibility of securing a personal advantage, will make such concessions seem more attractive.

ODs may be inclined to see SDs as naive and small minded, TDs as lacking focus and and IDs as unrealistic. They see themselves as pragmatists who know what's what. They see themselves as climbing the greasy pole. When they reach the top they will have made it. They will have ascended to the top of the pile and achieved mastery of their corner of the universe; a position they will defend against pretenders and potential usurpers.

The desire for control that goes with the power drive is more than just a desire for things to turn out well, it also relates to a fear that things could turn out badly if they lose control. The most feared outcome is for someone else to demonstrate an ability to do things better, with damaging consequences for their perceived status. Consequently the power-driven prefer to adopt proven strategies (even if they claim them as their own) or take their lead from known achievers.

While the power-driven like to be in control, this does not necessarily mean they are reluctant to delegate. Since leading others is emotionally rewarding, they are more than happy to instruct others to do things on their behalf. However, they are wary of those who prefer to do things their own way, especially if their actions could reflect badly on their leadership. Therefore they are likely to be prescriptive and directive leaders, especially in open environments where people have more room to manoevre.

Learning is important to ODs, both as a means by which to acquire practical skills likely to enhance their ability to achieve, and as a means to earn qualifications that serve as advertisements of their status. Therefore the relative attractiveness of competing learning opportunities will be highly conditional on the nature of their content and sources. If the subject matter is perceived to have no immediate significance or practical application to them it is not likely to be of interest. While ODs are eager to learn (and are therefore willing to accept direction) from those they regard as having specialised and relevant expertise and status, their willingness to engage with (and therefore learn from) others is more limited.

The combination of limited curiosity and a propensity to treat every aspect of life as a competitive challenge can create difficulties, particularly when resolving disagreements and sharing ideas. ODs are prone to developing an "I know it all" attitude as a consequence of a blinkered focus on the task at hand and a reliance on tried and tested methodologies. This increases the likelihood they will miss potentially significant things outside their field of vision/line of thought. They are inclined to think they know it all because they don't know what they don't know!

Their ideas are inclined to become deeply held beliefs, and their practices deeply entrenched, and consequently, when these are challenged, they are likely to feel as though they are being attacked personally, or unwittingly undermined, and respond accordingly: aggressively, defensively or evasively, as the situation demands.

Since sharing ideas with others may be seen as giving away the means by which one seeks to gain an advantage, this is something ODs do with caution, and since asking for the opinion of another might be interpreted as an admission of ignorance, this is also something ODs can struggle with. All of which inhibits the ability to ODs to obtain objective feedback on their own ideas or learn from others.

ODs like change when they perceive the reshuffling of the deck or the dealing of a new hand will leave them better off. However, if they think they already hold a good hand, they are more likely to resist it. As with many other aspects of life, ODs are likely to demonstrate a high degree of inconsistency in their attitude to change. As with value concepts such as honesty, loyalty and social justice, change is to be embraced only when the circumstances allow, and it serves their competitive instincts.

ODs who develop obsessive tendencies are likely to become control freaks (power) or workaholics (achievement).

OD Roles And Organizations

Since the 1980s we have lived in an OD world, i.e. one in which target driven performance in a highly competitive marketplace has dominated the culture. The OD desire to win, to be focussed in the pursuit of a prize (whether it be a high salary, a bigger house, a flashier car, the latest thing, a place for one's children at the best school, a seat on the board, a more important title, greater market share, more profit, higher growth, etc.) has become the norm, and has set the standard by which we judge our well-being; or, more accurately, how we think others judge our well-being - gaining the approval of others being the central need associated with the OD values.

ODs are most likely to seek and secure high office in any organization, whether political, military or commercial.

While the competitive drive and desire to lead possessed by ODs are potential assets for any leader, the more dynamic the circumstances, the wider the range of influences and the greater the variety of input required from differently motivated people, the more ineffective OD leaders become.

When the pace of change was slower OD leaders had the luxury of time to slowly feed in the tried and tested innovations of others, while maintaining stability and control. As the pace of change increases the challenges now arising demand a more flexible and open style of leadership.

ODs are ideally suited to any role where they can work within known parameters toward a clear objective. If they can do so in competition with others, or toward a benchmarked target, allowing them to demonstrate their abilities, so much the better.

TDs

TD Values

**Hedonism** is superficially concerned with fun and enjoyment, with pleasurable self-indulgence, as stimulation is with novelty and adventure. In order for such values to dominate a person's motivational system implies they have an emotional surplus left over from satisfying the needs associated with the previous values, and want to spend it.

However, when viewed from an evolutionary perspective, these values are not as frivolous as they may at first appear. Unlike all the previous values, hedonism and stimulation are not dependent on others. While they may find expression in the company of others, they are not concerned with following, leading, impressing or pleasing others. They encourage experimentation and self-reliance: trusting one's senses to determine what is good or bad without the need to defer to, or seek approval or validation from, others.

Hedonism in pre-civilization times might have related to tasting the unfamiliar fruit and deciding whether it was good or bad on the basis of what it tasted like. If it's sweet and tastes good, eat it. If it tastes bad or bitter, spit it out.

**Stimulation** represents the more conscious pursuit of activities and experiences likely to add variety, stretch, surprise and perhaps even frighten the individual. It helps to broaden ones horizons and test one's abilities so as to feel more alive.

Together these values oppose tradition and conformity. They prioritise doing something new and different over doing the same old thing that everyone else is doing.

TD Characteristics

As these values are dependent on change, TDs are predisposed to look favourably on change, to consider the possibility of doing something new, making a break with the past, seeing things from different perspectives, etc.

Underlying all of these is the desire for greater self-knowledge and to prove one's capabilities to oneself.

Given that new stimuli and variety are likely to generate the experiences TDs are looking for, TDs favour lifestyles, working environments and relationships that provide these. This is likely to correspond to variety in terms of subject matter, places to visit or people to meet, and the ability to take on new challenges in each. This inclines TDs toward becoming sociable and engaging.

The TD values are less likely than the others to dominate a person's motivational system without significant input from neighbouring values. Therefore TDs will often be OD/TD or TD/ID hybrids; more open minded, easy going and progressive ODs or more energised, but perhaps less settled or independently minded IDs.

TDs may find SDs particularly frustrating: as a hare might view a tortoise. They may find ODs rather too blinkered in their outlook and view IDs with some suspicion; uncertain whether they are to be admired or not, the former opinion likely to be reserved for IDs who have achieved.

If TDs develop obsessive tendencies these will likely relate to a relentless pursuit of activity for activity's sake, or other activities relating to sensory overload: being an alcoholic, drug addict, party animal, sex addict or shopoholic for example.

Roles And Organizations

Roles that suit TDs are those offering the type of variety and new stimuli mentioned above. Consequently roles demanding high levels of engagement with other people, those offering opportunities to travel and the opportunity to engage with a succession of new things are likely to be particularly attractive and suitable.

It is difficult for large organizations to maintain the type of high energy levels, commitment to having fun or adventurous spirit that would mark them out as having a TD culture. New, growing companies in which the founders are still actively involved, and are still enjoying the thrill of seeing their dreams come true, are those most likely to create and sustain a TD culture. It is more likely a TD culture will be something of an emotional starburst experienced by organizations (especially ID based businesses based on a hot new idea) as they begin to achieve success. As organizations grow and their systems (and the order they create) evolve this will quickly give way to an OD culture.

IDs

ID Values

**Self-direction** should be the pot of gold at the end of hedonism and stimulation's rainbow: a self-confidence born of self-discovery through challenging oneself and others and gathering information directly from one's environment. Self-direction is the sense that one can justifiably rely on one's own judgement and challenge received wisdom and the customs, rules and lead of others.

**Universalism** opposes security, and so, rather than setting up boundaries by which to divide people, places and things, and rules by which to control them, universalism inclines people to set aside or see through such divisions so as to see the world and all its people as being threads in the same fabric. It involves making connections; whether this takes the form of empathy with other people or seeing relationships between concepts, beliefs, systems and physical things.

**Benevolence** , as an ID value, is the realization of a fully fledged cooperative life strategy in which personal resources are willingly invested in others without any immediate expectation of reciprocation; the underlying belief being that, regardless of whether any investment is ever repaid directly by a recipient, what goes around comes around.

Since benevolence (giving as opposed to receiving) is not sustainable as a survival strategy if it is never reciprocated, it is dependent on other values to determine how it operates. The interplay between these values demonstrates the nature of the in-group reciprocation involved (i.e. the size of the relationship based goldfish bowl in which 'what goes around comes around').

For example, those driven more by tradition than universalism will tend to have a more narrowly defined in-group (smaller goldfish bowl), in which members have similar beliefs, ethnicity or circumstances; whereas those with high universalism will be less conditional (and therefore relate to a larger goldfish bowl). For those driven more by power and achievement, benevolence is more likely to be used tactically to people capable of helping advance their cause.

ID Characteristics

The values of self-direction and universalism relate to Maslow's state of self-actualization, and promote the type of characteristics identified by Maslow as follows:

"A self-actualizer is a person who is living creatively and fully using his or her potentials. They have:

an ability to judge situations correctly and honestly; are very sensitive to the fake and dishonest, and free to see reality 'as it is';

a comfortable acceptance of self, others, nature with all their flaws; shortcomings and the contradictions are accepted with humour and tolerance;

an ability to extend their creativity into everyday activities; being unusually alive, engaged, and spontaneous;

a mission to fulfil in life or some task or problem 'beyond' themselves (instead of outside of themselves') to pursue;

a freedom from reliance on external authorities or other people; being resourceful and independent;

an ability to constantly renew their appreciation of life's basic goods with an "innocence of vision", like that of an artist or child;

a deep identification with others and the human situation in general.

interpersonal relationships marked by deep loving bonds;

despite their satisfying relationships with others, an ability to value solitude and are comfortable being alone;

a non-hostile sense of humour; their wry comments being more like gentle proddings of human shortcomings;

frequent feelings of ecstasy, harmony, and deep meaning."

IDs tend to be inquisitive and knowledgeable, prepared to listen to, learn from and empathize with others regardless of their situation or station in life.

The addition of benevolence to the self-actualized mindset creates an additional sense of selflessness (self-transcendence), in which the interests of others become more deeply entwined with, and inseparable from, personal interests.

Because IDs recognize the needs of the other types as 'real needs' (although they are not uppermost in their minds), they are more able to empathize with others and see the world through their eyes.

ID Roles And Organizations

IDs are likely to feel uncomfortable blindly following the lead of others, but unlike the power driven, not because they feel they have to be in control, but more because following others limits their ability to pursue their passions, discover things on their own terms and do their best, and will almost certainly lead to their being asked to do things that cause discomfort because they believe they are wrong. Consequently they tend to flourish in roles where they are afforded high levels of autonomy, in which they can seize the initiative and do things on their own terms.

Creative roles of whatever type are ideally suited to IDs, including leadership roles where the demands are such that new information and changing circumstances demand an agile, pro-learning mindset and an ability to take decisions without having to rely on the direct application of previously learned routines or methodology; i.e. transformational leadership roles

Large organizations struggle to incubate or maintain an ID culture because of the perceived need to impose order by rules and regulations, generate a collective focus on hitting shared targets, exert control and ensure consistency. Therefore ID cultures are more likely to prevail in small, highly creative and intellectually active groups or organizations, in which the central mission, purpose or goal is fully understood and shared.

MDs

MDs exist as a type only inasmuch as some people do not have motivational systems in which any value, or group of neighbouring values, dominates sufficiently to justify placing them in one of the previous types. MDs are idiosyncratic in that no one set of value combinations characterizes them. Their individual characteristics arise from their particular value combinations.

The only recognizable characteristic of MDs as a group seems to be the greater likelihood of their taking a rather measured 'see both sides' approach to life. This is likely a consequence of an absence of the consistent biases that incline members of the other types toward certain types of thinking and behaviour.

Chapter 4 Change As A Journey

All change can be looked at as being a journey. We start somewhere, something happens and we end up somewhere else.

All the journeys we instigate ourselves start with an unfulfilled need and are aimed at a destination at which it is hoped this need will be satisfied.

Simply put, the challenge involved in making a successful change involves:

1) assessing our starting point (A) - where we are now - what unfulfilled needs we have

2) what is our destination (B) - what the world will looks like when we have satisfied our needs

3) planning and making The Journey - comparing A and B, deciding what needs to happen to take us from A into B, procuring the necessary resources and setting off.

Change As A Journey

The need for change may not always be of our own making. It may arise because of changes forced upon us by others, or may arise as a consequence of changes in the environment. Either way, if these impact directly on ourselves, or disrupt changes we are already trying to make ourselves, then we will have to adapt and change accordingly.

Actually, because change is not so much an event as an ongoing process, all our journeys end up being part of other journeys. The thread of each journey is woven into others, which, as with the needs and values they are tied to, together make up the fabric of existence.

In order to complete one big journey we may have to complete many little journeys. Even when the change we seek to make seems quite simple, it may be that our path from A to B could be interrupted or disturbed at any point. When this happens it becomes a series of smaller journeys itself.

All Journeys Are Journeys Within Other Journeys

Also, because no man or woman is an island, and no organization operates within a bubble, our journeys cross, react and merge with and diverge from the journeys of others, and together contribute to the great journey of life.

Different Types Of Journey

Some changes we wish to make, or need to adjust to, are so simple and familiar to us, not only can we be very confident we will negotiate them successfully, but this confidence is very likely to be justified.

Many of these changes are similar to ones we have made before; e.g. for a plumber: fitting a different design of bath, for a teacher: teaching next year's school class, for a retailer: serving a new customer, etc. In these circumstances the adaptations we have to make to deal with change are small.

While few changes are as simple as the journey represented by the passage of the ball in the top left diagram below, if they only involve simple tasks and reliable mechanisms, or are ones we have completed many times before, we are likely to be successful. We know our destination (B), we know our starting point (A) therefore we can be very confident as to how the journey will pan out.

The bar chart shown below this diagram illustrates that, no matter how many times the ball is dropped, it will always land at point B (the height of the bar reflecting the number of hits at landing point B).

left top: when a ball is dropped from A to B it always lands in the same place

right top: when a ball dropped through a matrix of pins its path from A to B is chaotic

below: these bar charts indicate the frequency with which the ball lands on the corresponding space in the diagrams above (higher bars = greater frequency)

However, if instead, as a plumber, you are asked not just to fit a new bath, but to sculpt the bath and fit it into a rotating platform; or if, as a school teacher, you are asked to teach a class double the size, comprising children many years older than you are used to, using different media and taking different subjects; or if, as a retailer, the new customer belongs to a different culture and wants very different things from the those you are used to selling, the challenge created by change becomes greater.

The more variables and unknowns we introduce the more difficult it will be for us to enact change and accurately predict the outcome. In the example shown in the diagram on the right the ball has to drop through a grid of fixed pins on its way down. In this scenario even the slightest change in our starting position will affect where the ball hits the first pin and where it will bounce thereafter. The uncertainty of where the ball will go next, which pin it will hit and how it will bounce off, makes every step of the journey difficult to predict.

The chart immediately below the pin matrix diagram illustrates that while the ball is more likely to land at the same point as before than any other single destination, overall it is far more likely it will land somewhere else, and miss its intended destination.

The point being: the more complex the process of change becomes, the more unknowns we encounter, the less control we have, the more likely it is it will end in failure.

This illustrates what happens when there are many factors at play during the change process, and, as mentioned previously, nothing adds complexity to the process of change than the introduction of people. Complex change processes tend to become chaotic. While it may be difficult to predict exactly what will happen in any given situation, when the change is repeated again and again a predictable pattern will emerge that at least allows us to predict the likelihood of success. This is why major organizational change programmes have a fairly consistent 70% failure rate. Forecasting the weather and the likelihood of earthquakes also fall into this category.

The changes that challenge us the most, in both our personal and business lives, can be even more complex than those represented by the pin matrix diagram. Rather than simply dropping a ball, pulling a lever or otherwise setting a mechanical process in motion, we (people) are both the balls and the pins; we are the things that have to make the journey and we populate the environment through which we must travel. If this didn't make things complicated enough, more often than not, a person or group of individuals are part of the destination as well: the ones we need to impress, whose needs we must satisfy and whose values we must appeal to.

The above diagrams represent three changes involving people. On the left one person acting alone, in the middle one person having to compete with others, on the right a group of people cooperating.

Because people are not fixed like pins, the more people are involved in a change process the more chaotic it can become.

The diagram on the left represents the type of people based change process that most closely corresponds to the simple, vertical ball drop we are likely to encounter in real life. It involves someone who is a bit peckish (with a need for food) wanting to get to a coffee shop across an empty train station concourse to satisfy his or her need. This journey can usually be completed as easily and predictably as a ball being dropped through empty space: the person just walks straight to the shop and asks for cake and coffee, pays for them and eats and drinks them.

The diagram in the middle represents the same scenario but at rush hour, with a concourse packed with people going here, there and everywhere. This time the individual has to compete with others for platform space at every point on their journey. Rather than being a simple journey from A to B, the person must bear in mind the end destination, but also break the journey into separate journeys; each one with a destination set at a point just beyond the next person crossing their path. Failure to do this would lead to disaster, likely involving personal injury and the injury of others.

The final diagram represents what would happen if, rather than completing the journey alone, the person enlists the support of a team of people. In this instance the people cooperate and form a supply chain. Rather than walking from A to B messages are passed from A to B before the coffee and cake make the return journey hand to hand.

This is how teams and organizations seek to operate. Whether the supply chain involves physical packages (as in logistics or manufacturing), information (as in all businesses) or a ball (as in most team sports), the ability for people to link together as seamlessly as possible toward the achievement of a shared goal is the key to success.

Life would be very much simpler if all changes could be effected like this. However, too often the changes we make resemble the scenario in the middle, with people competing with each other, frustrating each other's aims, wasting time and effort in managing conflict.

While teams and organizations strive to achieve something approximating the scenario on the right, the more complex the challenge and the greater the number of people involved, the more likely it is the change process will look like a cross between the ball and pin diagram and the middle scenario above.

Like the ball and pin diagram, achieving the desired outcome in a complex change programme becomes something of a lottery, as the journey veers unpredictably from its intended path. In order to compensate for these aberrations, and then make renewed progress toward the goal, it is likely that a great deal of time and effort will be wasted as people with different needs compete with one another.

Large organizations will usually rise to the challenge of complex change programmes by devising systems intended to make people function like cogs in a well oiled machine. They will do their best to ensure their people have the appropriate skills for, and, ideally, previous experience of, working in such a system. This works better for simple and relatively predictable processes (e.g. logistics) but is less satisfactory for less mechanistic and predictable processes; i.e. all those in which people have greater discretion as to what they do next.

In these more demanding human systems fool proof processes are difficult to design and deliver at the best of times. In these times of rapid change the chances of success become even more remote. Imagine a situation with elements of both the ball and pin and crowded concourse scenarios, and then imagine: the pins and people multiplying, changing direction and/or disappearing as time goes by, the concourse transforming itself into a series of conveyor belts moving in different directions at varying speeds, and the location of the destination moving as well. This might be a better approximation of the type of systems we will increasingly be faced with. In the type of dynamic, multi-layered, interrelated systems our ever changing world is creating, inflexible, highly mechanised change management solutions are likely to be found wanting.

In these dynamic systems human flexibility is as an asset not an impediment. If something unpredictable happens, a rigid mechanism will either grind to halt or sparks will fly as cogs rip into each other. People can adapt, and in well designed, people sensitive change management systems, they allow organizations to evolve continuously to maximise performance.

In order for this to happen the needs of individuals need to be aligned with the needs of their roles, and the needs of roles need to be aligned with those of the organization. If needs are fulfilled at destinations then, regardless of what obstacles present themselves en route, people will look for a way to satisfy their needs and so find their way to the desired destination. If corporate needs and personal needs are aligned, people will be personally motivated to find a way to do what is necessary in any given situation.

Skills and experience are important, but in times of rapid and ongoing change they are not enough. This is why it is vital to understand the needs of the individual, and be able to relate their needs to the situation in which they find themselves.

The way to understand what makes a person tick, and hence their ability to deal with change, is for us to look at the structure of their personal values. While roles, teams and organizations don't have values in quite the same way (because values are components of human psychology and cannot be held by things without a brain), because they are all things we have created to help us satisfy our very human needs, they have characteristics that relate directly to personal values, and therefore can be understood using DNA.

Building Personal Needs & Values Into The Process Of Change

Just as with any journey, if we are to make a success of change, we need to understand where we are, where we need to end up and how best to get there. Simple as this may seem it is surprising how often we fail to look at change in this way, and how often change fails, or becomes more difficult than it need have been, as a consequence.

In undertaking journeys of change, as distinct from those involving conventional modes of transport, we must take account of more than physical considerations like oceans, roads and rivers. The wider terrain of change may involve all kinds of things: time, money, property, technology, knowledge and skills.

In order to successfully plan and execute journeys of change we need to understand what needs have to be satisfied, what resources we will require and what resources we have at our disposal. We then need to attach appropriate values to these resources, assess the procurement options of any additional resources required, and schedule how our collected resources will be deployed before we set off.

Sometimes this process is relatively easy, and we are likely to make good decisions, but sometimes it is not.

If we have started a business and we have started to incur costs and make sales, it will soon occur to us we need find a means of recording these; for our own information and so we can satisfy the demands of the tax office and other official bodies. The options available to us are: (1) hire someone to keep these records for us, (2) buy some accounting/customer management software to automate the process for us, (3) compile such a system ourselves using spreadsheet and database software, or (4) keep as best a written record as we can.

In order to determine the best means for us to satisfy this need (reach the destination of having a fully functioning account management system) we have to consider our starting position (skills, knowledge, IT resources and finances) and what our greater destination is (how large our business is likely to become and what resources we are willing and able to commit to getting us there).

If we have no accounting or computing knowledge we either have to opt for (1) or invest time to enable us to pursue options (2) or (3). If our business is one requiring us to commit all of our time to non administrative matters, and we have the financial resources available to pay for someone else's time, then option (1) it will be. If we lack sufficient financial resources for (1) but we can afford (2) and are willing and able to learn how to use it then (2) it will be. If we lack the resources for (2) it will have to be (3), but if we are not willing and able to learn how to use this software, then we will either have to make the best of it with (4) and hope that our reduced financial awareness, the time it takes us to satisfy the demands of the tax office and mistakes aren't our undoing.

If we have extensive computing knowledge then all three options will be immediately available to us as long as we can at least afford option (3). Which option we choose will therefore be governed by the relative values we place on our time and our financial resources. If, in the early stages of the business, we can afford the time to set up the appropriate software, this may be the best option for us. If, however, our time is at such a premium and sufficient financial resources are available from the outset, then the opportunity cost of even the relatively small time it would take us to set up the system would not be justifiable and option (1) would be best, especially as all large and successful businesses tend to end up employing an accountant to do this type of work.

This is an example of the type of simple decision all small businesses have to make when they start out. Sure, it is a more complex decision than choosing which brand of mobile phone or printer you should have, which involve a direct comparison akin to choosing whether to have a banana or an apple for lunch, but nevertheless the variables are still relatively easy to value.

The decisions that present us with greater difficulties are those in which the costs and benefits are hidden.

Some costs and benefits are hidden because they are unknowable. Future revenues are difficult to predict, especially if they relate to a totally new product or service from a new supplier. Future costs, such as a key employee becoming ill, may also be impossible to predict. The best we can do in relation to these is carry out a risk assessment and bear this in mind as we set off on our journeys of change.

However, many hidden costs and benefits are hidden only because we are not aware of them. They are knowable it is just that we have either (a) not discovered them, or (b) misunderstood them.

Perhaps the most significant hidden costs and benefits to business come about when established businesses have got themselves into a groove. When organizations reach maturity they do what they can to set themselves up like a well-oiled machine; in which everyone has a job to do and is expected to do it; where no time is wasted on non-essential activities. Part of the problem for established businesses lies in their definition of 'essential', the remainder lies in their ability to understand that people are not simply cogs in a machine. The solution for both of these problems lies in understanding the impact of our values on our ability to make effective decisions and work together.

Whether a business is growing or is just trying to maintain its position in a changing market, organizations need both room to manoevre and people with time to do more than spin like cogs in a machine. These are essential if the business is not to fall victim to short-term decision-making, stagnation and ultimately self-implosion. Yet, given a short-term perspective, the investment of time and resources to matters incapable of providing an immediate and quantifiable return compromises efficiency and competitiveness, and can therefore (especially in difficult times) seem inessential.

Whatever a business is doing, whatever its situation or market position, its survival depends on people making the right decisions and working well together. If the person on the shop floor puts the wrong thing in the wrong place the business suffers. If the CEO adopts the wrong strategy the business suffers. If what one person does or says upsets or is misunderstood by another, or something they don't do impedes another's ability to do their job the business suffers.

Systems are usually in place to ensure procedural mistakes on the shop floor are identified and corrected, but poor decision-making from senior employees is harder to identify; often only coming to light when disastrous consequences ensue. It is not always easy to see when people aren't working well together. Open hostility and major holes in internal communication may be easy to identify, but these may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The epidemic of poor decision-making that precipitated the global financial meltdown in 2008 is as good an example of the dangers of hidden costs and benefits as one might possibly wish for. They were only 'hidden' insofar as the responsible decision makers (from CEOs to brokers to politicians to the individuals taking on debt) either chose not to see them or were unable to understand them. While the warning 'past performance is no guarantee of future performance' is attached to most advertised investment opportunities, these decision-makers' cost-benefit analysis significantly overvalued past performance and placed far too little value on a rational assessment of the likely consequences of their actions.

Aside from any intellectual shortcomings, their decision-making was impaired because they adopted too narrow a frame of reference: their thinking was biased toward personal considerations rather than their impact on others, and in terms of the short-term consequences of their actions rather than the long-term. This amounted to a total misunderstanding of the interconnected nature of our existence and what happens if we continually seek to take more from the cookie jar than we put in.

In responding only to short term needs as they arise, and making the short and easy journeys to satisfy them, we may frustrate our ability to successfully complete longer, more important journeys. In the build up to the global financial meltdown people whose values inclined them to believe what happened yesterday would happen again tomorrow, and those most motivated by money and the acquisition of material possessions, were the most vulnerable to reaching out to grab what appeared to lie before them, apparently or actually ignorant of the hidden costs of their actions, as well as the hidden benefits of resisting that temptation.

Every change we make, every need we seek to satisfy, is a journey taken with other journeys in the greater journey of our own lives. We may work to pay for food and accommodation, but we may simultaneously also work to learn, travel and meet people. The people we meet may become friends and partners: people with whom we make journeys independent of our work; whose journeys may entwine, merge with and diverge from our own in countless ways.

Therefore the challenges involved in successfully dealing with change and completing its many journeys require us to understand how our wider interests relate to our narrower interests, our short-term interests relate to our long-term interests and how our interests relate to the interests of others. In decision-making terms we call this framing: i.e. the frame of reference we use when considering information and making decisions (explored in Chapter 6).

Sometimes our outlook is so blinkered, so narrow framed, we disregard vital information and our decision-making suffers as a result. We ignore the long consequences of our decisions as well as potential alternatives.

We tend to narrow frame when concentrating our energies on satisfying what seems to be an immediate need, but in so doing we run the risk of incurring unforeseen long-term costs because we ignore the less apparent, but still vitally important, long-term needs we have. In order to satisfy these needs we have to redefine our current needs (where we are - our starting point), redefine our destination need state and place an accordingly higher value on the resources available to get us to our newly realised destination.

The problems we have in working together have a similar root. In our relationships with others our tendency to narrow frame presents two problems. In a personal context, narrow framing involves seeing the world from our perspective and not from the perspective of others. Therefore, when our interests appear to differ from or partially overlap with others, we are inclined to do what suits ourselves, which may involve us overlooking our shared interests or directly competing with others to get what we want. If we are supposed to be working as a team, this is likely to be counterproductive. But the problems don't stop there. Even if we are willing to cooperate with others we are handicapped by our inability to understand them; we don't know what they want, what experiences they can draw upon, how they see things, what they know and how they think.

By far the most challenging aspect of resource management in change is the human element. Because we all have different value priorities we all have different biases, which affect all that goes on in our heads. How any one of us is likely to: react to change, raise ourselves up to meet a challenge, perceive, think, judge, behave and communicate is difficult to predict for certain. When a process of change involves many people the uncertainties multiply, as does the likelihood that the journey of change will become a cycle of dissatisfaction that ends in disaster.

Needs, Values & Behaviour

It is commonly acknowledged the reason why so many large-scale organizational change programmes fail is due to an inability to deal with behavioural issues. While it is not always easy to make a success of dealing with the non-human elements of change, when compared to dealing with people, handling issues relating to money, technology, systems and the working environment are a walk in the park. If other aspects of change management can be likened to juggling balls, then managing people through change can be more like juggling eels.

Our different needs effectively mean we each have different journey plans. Coordinating a group of us so we can make the same journey together, cooperatively, without constraining or crushing our individuality, is therefore a challenge. The key to overcoming it, achieving high levels of collaboration, whilst preserving the full force of our individual passions, lies in the fact that, despite our different value systems, our ultimate needs are the same. Ultimately we all want to be happy. We want food to eat, air to breathe, water to drink, to feel safe, to laugh and share experiences with others, and, if we have (or desire to have) children, create a world in which our children can experience the same things. In order to achieve our shared aims we have to accept some compromises; compromises that acknowledge the resources available to us are not infinite and have to be shared.

The problem with people is we are emotional rather than rational. Give a group of computers a problem they will communicate perfectly and all come up with the same answer. Give a group of people a problem and we will not. The reason for this being we are emotionally programmed to satisfy our personal needs in accordance with our personal values.

We are incapable of taking in all the information potentially available to us, let alone be able to process it completely logically and dispassionately. We perceive information differently, dependent on its relationship with our particular needs. This affects when, where and how we look for it. We then think about and judge the information we take on board in the context of our needs, and make our decisions on how to act, behave and communicate accordingly.

Just as we need to be able to understand the relative values of other resources required to complete any journey of change, we need to understand the relative values of the people involved. This is where DNA becomes an invaluable aid.

DNA's values based insights not only help us stand in the shoes of others and see life from their perspective, it also helps us understand the way they translate information into their own internal emotional language, so we might better understand what it means to them. This helps us better predict how they will react to and deal with change related challenges. It can also help us encode the information we impart to others so it stands a better chance of being interpreted as we might wish it.

Chapter 5: Facing Up To The Challenge Of The Journey

In 4 Parts....

1. 'A' Where We Are - The Starting Point

With conventional geographical journeys we can easily ascertain our starting point, relate this to our desired destination and plan our route, all of which can be marked on the map. With other journeys this is not so easy. That said, even geographical journeys demand we consider our starting point in other ways, so we can relate these to the experiences we are likely to encounter en route to our destination.

Time, weather, clothing and other resources are also likely to be key considerations. Starting out at 9 am, on a fine day in a T shirt, shorts, training shoes and sun glasses after a light breakfast with a banana in hand, are all factors relevant to a broader definition of our starting point. The significance of this information becomes clear when considered in relation to our intended destination, and the likely demands of the journey to reach it.

If the destination is a friend's house, a 10 minute walk away, the significance of this starting point will be a good deal different than it would if the destination was a mountain peak, a three day walk and stiff climb away. For the former we would be good to go, with all we needed; for the latter, we should perhaps not be setting out just yet.

Journeys of change demand we assess our starting point in relation to all sorts of factors. Every factor likely to be called upon or change along the journey needs to be considered.

We can assess what resources we have at our disposal under the following headings.

\- Personal: (health, state of well-being, experience, skills, motivation (needs & values), personality, intelligence, relationships & contacts)

\- Corporate: (people - collective personal resources)

\- Physical: (technology, property & location)

\- Financial: (income, capital, market share & other assets)

\- Temporal: how much time do we have?

Then consider our status: how do others perceive us? If we are to enlist the support of others, what we seem to be is likely to be as important as what we actually are.

\- Third party perceptions of the above (brand, reputation & the relative value of our assets)

Then consider, what is the state of our environment?

\- Economic, cultural, social, political and environmental

Many changes we seek to make may not seem to be affected by many of the above, but, when confronted with changes that could have significant consequences, it will still be worth running through the list. For instance many people buying a house in the 1990s might not have been too concerned with the state of the environment. Wind forward twenty years and many of those who bought houses on low lying land, on the coast or close to rivers will be reflecting on the narrow frames of reference they used to assess the attractiveness of prospective homes.

In the 1990s our collective 'starting point' included broad agreement in the scientific community that the likely impact of changes taking place in our environment would significantly impact on the likelihood of flooding in future years. This is a point less likely to have been missed by those with high scores for universalism. People less interested in what was going on in the wider world bought houses in high risk areas in blissful ignorance of what might lie ahead.

Thinking we already know our starting point, and can therefore take it for granted, is one of the key mistakes we make when planning change. We may have an idea that something is wrong or there is something we want. This may help us decide upon a destination, and with this in mind we may wrongly assume this is all we need to plan our journey.

The reality is, as a consequence of a lack of self-awareness and the often hidden impact of changes in our environment and the passage of time, the starting point we have in our minds, that we assume to be correct, is wrong. The trouble is, even if we do not seem to be actively involved in a journey of change at any point in time, we are all passive subjects to change; the conveyer belt of life on which we stand moves ever forward whether we wish it or are aware of it. It is this fact that undermines the accuracy of any notions we may have of where we are at any point in time.

When we actively plan a journey and take responsibility for making it happen, we are more likely to know where we are at any given point than if we are mere passengers watching change going on around us.

Whether we still think of ourselves as being little changed from our teenage years (when we are certainly older, perhaps wiser and probably less energetic), or whether we still think of our organization as the leading operator in its field (when it has in fact lost ground to a new generation of competition), unless we are constantly moving forward, actively engaging with change, the passage of time tends to undermine our ability to accurately assess where we are.

Because where we are at any point in time is both the starting point of our onward journey and the place where our previous journey ended, starting points and destinations can both be thought of in similar terms; as places at which our needs have changed from what they were before; the equivalents of locations on a map of needs and values.

While being able to set a destination or goal implies an awareness of an unsatisfied need, it does not necessarily follow this will allow us to accurately define our starting point. We may think something will satisfy our needs, only to find when we get that thing our need has not been satisfied. Mapping our needs and what we have to do (value) in order to satisfy them is not as simple as mapping out a physical journey. We are therefore prone to make more mistakes.

Map the starting point wrongly and any bearing taken for the desired destination will be wrong, and any journey based on this will take us to a different destination - one that doesn't satisfy our needs.

When addressing the human element of change we tend to concentrate on skills, experience and personality. The problem with this approach lies in its inability to deal with change. If we assess our starting point in relation to these factors alone we place ourselves at risk.

In new environments and when faced with new challenges, it is not always easy to assess how transferable certain skills will be, how useful past experience will prove to be and how people's personalities will hold up. In change it is more helpful to look at people's core drivers as revealed by their values, and explore how these are likely to find expression as change gets going.

Similar behaviours and levels of competence may be expressed by people with very different values in any given situation, but when that situation changes so may these behaviours and competencies. Peoples values are far more stable. If we understand an individual's values, it is possible for us to predict how they will behave, and what level of competence they are capable of, in any changed situation.

Consequently, the less we understand our own values and those of others, and the greater the change we are faced with, the lower our chances of bringing about a successful outcome.

In the past the pace of change we experienced at home and at work may have allowed us to get by with a sparse, intuitive understanding of what made ourselves and others tick; if something worked yesterday it would probably work tomorrow. The increasing pace of change we are now experiencing makes this way of doing things increasingly unreliable. We now need to get a better handle on how someone is likely to be able to handle change: how they are likely to learn about and adapt to new environments and ways of thinking. A greater understanding of how our values affect us is therefore key.

Technological & Social Inflation

The curve in the above diagram shows the rate of technologically driven change increasing exponentially, which is the way things are. The 'x's on either side of the coloured areas a, b & c show where a change has been deemed necessary to bring something up to date. The horizontal dotted lines show the implementation of changes marked by the first 'x's (the ones on the left). This stops beneath the second x where another change was deemed necessary because the previous change had run its course - e.g. the technology had become outdated, the product had gone out of fashion, the building had become too small, etc.

The heights of the vertical dotted lines indicate how disadvantageous the last adopted change became relative to the change curve (which can represent anything: the prevailing state of technology, fashion, ways of thinking, market movement, social habits or any of the changes brought about by new technology) - the greater the height the more outdated and unfit for purpose it is.

Once a change has been made it is usually desirable if a period of stability follows, enabling people to get used to the changes, extract maximum benefit and to recover the costs of making them. The faster the pace of change the shorter this period has to become, as adopted practices more quickly reach their sell-by date and leave those who abide by them vulnerable to competition.

At 'a' (say 20 years ago) the initial change may have been good for many years and the next required change to bring things up to date was relatively small. As time moves on to 'b' (say now) the next change is seen to have a shorter shelf life and the scale of the next change is much greater. By the time we reach 'c' (say in 10 years time) the pace of change is such that an almost constant stream of innovation/change is required.

The above diagram can be related to any aspect of change. It illustrates how increasingly vulnerable we become if we look to the past, even the recent past, and rely on precedent in times of rapid change.

While we will explore how people with different values are likely to respond to the challenge of assessing their starting point on the journey of change in the next chapter, from what we have already covered it should be no surprise to learn that the people most vulnerable to misjudging their starting points relative to where they need to go are those with dominant values at the red end of the DNA motivational spectrum, i.e. SDs, and the people least vulnerable are those at the violet end, i.e. IDs.

This is not to say SDs will necessarily make more misjudgements than other types. For instance, SDs more exposed to the coal face of change in their working environment may benefit from access to information less easily available to other types working in more protected environments. However, all other things being equal, and with SDs being the least likely to seek out and find work in fast moving, forward looking environments, the greater vulnerability of SDs is likely to be borne out in the general scheme of things.

2. 'B' The Destination

If we don't know where we're going, how will we know when we get there?

It seems so obvious that we need to know our destination before we can plan a journey, but experience suggests many people and organizations don't have a clear understanding of their destination, or an abiding vision to help them decide upon it. This applies to people and organizations already on a journey as well as those thinking about making one. Setting out without a clear destination almost certainly ensures resources are committed to a series of actions that will lead somewhere, but not necessarily somewhere desirable.

Too many people and organizations are on a journey with a journey plan no more substantial than 'keep going' or 'keep up with the others'. Others are motivated to action because they want to avoid a perceived danger (a burning platform in management speak), and respond instinctively and with no greater plan than to avoid being burnt.

This is what happens when we set ourselves, and become pre-occupied with, short-term objectives that are not aligned with our longer-term needs.

When we do this we (especially those of us with the most competitive, power and achievement driven value sets) are prone to feeling good because we are achieving things, hitting targets and winning approval from those around us, even if we are storing up problems for ourselves as long-term goals are frustrated.

'Make hay while the sun shines' might as well have been the motto of the times that led up to the global financial meltdown, and reflects our propensity to think short-term. In literal, agricultural terms hay making while the sun shines makes perfect sense, but relating this metaphor to the economic climate is problematic because the concepts of 'hay making' (making money) and the 'sun shining' (the economic climate being conducive to making money) are linked, and pursuing the former too vigorously in the short-term can have disastrous consequences on the latter in the long-term.

The destinations we reach become the starting points of our next journeys. If we see ourselves as being on a constant journey of change, every point on this journey is simultaneously a destination we have reached and a starting point from which to progress.

Consequently the process of mapping our desired destinations should mirror that we used to map our starting points, but this time projecting our resource assessment forward to cover what we want (what needs we want to have satisfied) rather than what we have (our current needs).

Therefore, under the same headings as before, we should ask ourselves what resources do we want to have at our disposal in the future?

Personal: (health, state of well-being, experience, skills, motivation (needs & values), personality, intelligence, relationships & contacts)

\- Corporate: (people - collective personal resources)

\- Physical: (technology, property & location)

\- Financial: (income, capital, market share & other assets)

\- Temporal: how much time will we have?

What status do we desire? How do we want others to perceive us?

\- Third party perceptions of the above (brand, reputation & relative value of assets)

What is the desired state for our environment?

\- Economic, cultural, social, political and environmental

While the disciplines involved in setting a destination are similar to ascertaining our starting point, the key difference is that starting points are real while destinations are imaginary.

We are already at our starting points. They exist in the here and now. Consequently we should be able to gather all the information we need to about them.

Destinations lie in the future. They exist only in our imaginations. If they are as simply imagined as the train station coffee shop that lay on the other side of the empty concourse mentioned previously, then the journey of change will likely roll out just as we imagine it. Unfortunately the journeys of change that matter most to us are way more challenging, and therefore the business of setting appropriate destinations is not as simple as it might at first seem.

In the next chapter 'The Journeying Mind' we will explore how our values affect our ability to make effective decisions regarding the goals and destinations we set ourselves.

3. Getting from A to B - The Journey

The journey will involve us in taking action, selecting and allocating resources in accordance with a plan. So, once we have mapped out A and B, all that remains is to plan the journey and set off. Planning involves completing the journey virtually in a variety of ways in our imaginations, so we may choose the best route and then act upon it.

The journey is the means by which we are able to make the series of smaller changes required to enable us to travel from A, arrive at B and thereby complete a bigger change.

In between any starting point and destination there are likely to be alternative routes. While only one will be travelled for real, to be certain the best route is selected, all potential alternatives need to be assessed.

In an ideal world, with limitless resources at a our disposal, we could rehearse all the alternatives for real and then replicate the one that delivered the maximum benefit with the minimum cost. If the challenge before us is simple (making a cake, choosing a new coat, etc.) we may be able to do this. Often this is not feasible, therefore the best we can do is complete a series of virtual journeys as realistically as we are able and choose the best of these.

Breaking The Journey

It may be that we will discover in the planning phase that the destination we have selected is no longer attractive to us. If completing the journey would require more resources than we could acquire, or involve costs that would exceed the benefits, we will need to review our destination.

This may involve setting a destination that is effectively a staging post toward the previously desired goal: one that is worthwhile in itself but also keeps open the possibility of completing the previously intended journey at a later date. Alternatively, if the analysis suggests a totally different destination is required, then the journey planning process will have to start afresh. This shouldn't be seen as a waste of resources but a saving, since the cost of finding out a journey is doomed in a virtual environment is usually a good deal less than it would be in the real world; a fact that competitive ODs, keen to get on, are the most likely to set aside.

The Journey Plan

The design of the final, actionable blueprint for change may require us to build a complete virtual working model of the change process in our heads, the heads of our collaborators, in computer programmes and on paper - whatever it takes. Just as if we were designing a clockwork mechanism, every cog and wheel needs to be assembled in our imaginations, so that it runs perfectly. When we have satisfied ourselves of this, we can start the process by which the blueprint springs from the page and becomes real: setting wheels, cogs, people and process into motion toward our desired goal.

As complex as a clock mechanism might seem to be, the changes we seek to make in life and business often involve very much more complex mechanisms than those involving cogs and wheels. Since their mechanisms are likely to involve people (whether as collaborators, system designers, regulators, opponents, clients, customers, commentators or competitors), much more care and attention is needed when fitting the components together.

The only advantage offered by working with people, rather than money, metal, wood or plastic, is that potentially they have the flexibility and initiative to make up for gaps and failings in the planning and design process, and to make further improvements of their own in delivery.

However, the flipside of this flexibility is the possibility that people will not do as they were supposed to. The designers of change mechanisms may use regulatory and other security measures to prevent a range of undesirable behaviours (theft, abuse, lack of attendance, etc.) and deploy incentives to encourage desirable behaviours (hard work, long hours, unbroken attendance, obedience, sales, etc.) but these tend to be blunt instruments - effective for some (more useful for SDs), but annoying and disengaging for others (IDs hate restrictive processes) - and almost unavoidably introduce friction into the operation of the human machine; so inhibiting performance.

The larger and more complex change programmes are, the more likely it is there will be areas of excessive friction (people not getting on, failing to communicate, duplicating each other's work, etc.) and areas where components fail to engage (people not knowing what to do, disliking what they are being asked to do, not having their input valued, etc.). Some of these will arise because of basic shortcomings in the design. These would create problems regardless of the people involved. However, it is more likely that the greatest inefficiencies will arise as a consequence of misalignments between personal and organizational needs; i.e. people being guided by a personal agenda that conflicts with the best interests of the organization - e.g. withholding information that could have been used more effectively by others in order to protect and advance their position relative to others.

Once again, it is the needs and values of people that are the neglected and misunderstood ingredients of the change process; in terms of the interaction between people, but also in terms of the biases they impart on the decision-making processes involved in identifying goals, assessing risks and designing systems to best meet the needs of the organization.

4. Action - Making The Journey Real

When the blueprint for a clockwork mechanism is fed into computer controlled machinery, or given to a watchmaker, one can be confident a real clock will soon emerge; identical in every way to the virtual clock described by the blueprint. When people replace machinery things are not so simple.

The journey of change is unlikely to proceed as smoothly as one might wish, due to: the journey plan being incomplete; errors of judgement; people not behaving as they were supposed to; unexpected external changes (e.g. market environment, competitors activities, etc.) or a combination of all of the above. As problems arise it can seem as if the journey periodically grinds to a halt before it starts again.

This is why we have to look at most complex journeys of change as a collection of connected journeys. In an organizational reform many departments are likely to be going through distinct changes concurrently. These can be seen as journeys in their own right as well as being components of the larger journey. As these internal journeys reach their destinations other journeys will begin.

Even if we start our journey planning by misjudging our starting point A, with a little work we may be able to reassess and fix the true location of A, and adjust our journey plans accordingly. B, however, will remain fixed only in our imaginations until we successfully complete the journey and make it real. Therefore, it is important to review our assessment of where B lies relative to our current position as we go along.

If things go wrong, or external changes impact on our journey, it will be necessary to revisit the three phases of the journey planning process again:

(1) starting point - where are we now (what has changed, what have we learned)?

(2) destination \- is the goal the same, if not what is it now?

(3) journey - what changes do we need to make to the plan?

Trimming The Sails

In an ideal world change projects should be subject to continuous review and adjustment processes that enable them to remain on course at all times through minor 'trimming the sails' type modifications. This is effectively what the computerised engine management system in your car does. However, in most large-scale human change processes this is not practical. It is often too costly and time consuming, as people cannot provide feedback as efficiently as machinery while getting on with their jobs.

Therefore it is important to establish light touch monitoring systems that enable leaders to gather feedback from all components of the change mechanism (human and otherwise). It is then for leaders to decide how long deviations from the script should be tolerated before changes are made to bring the project back on course. As with every other aspect of the decision making process, an understanding of the needs and values of those involved is vital if one is to accurately judge the consequences of any intervention.

Don't Lose Sight Of The Destination

Another discipline in the action phase of the journey is to ensure those responsible for leading its many component journeys never lose sight of the main objective. The risk is that we (whether we are departmental leaders or not) become too focussed on solving problems particular to one component of the journey. If the solutions we come up with to keep us moving forward shift the destination of our little journey, so that it no longer falls on the intended path to the overall destination, or consume resources required by other parties, they will have a negative impact on the ability of the organization to complete its greater journey, or on our personal ability to complete our greater journeys. This is another example of the needs and values sensitive area of decision-making known as framing.

Maintaining Momentum

Even if all goes to plan, and the journey seems to be proceeding broadly as planned, there is one final area for concern. In the Prosci change management model known by the acronym ADKAR* (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement) the R for reinforcement highlights the need to take action to sustain the change process so as to complete the journey.

Unlike machine components, people can lose focus and motivation, be distracted by other concerns and develop inconsistency in their behaviour. When the initial excitement of setting off toward 'the Promised Land' wears off, people will assess again how the changes underway align with their own needs. While it may be possible to set the wheels of change in motion, it is not always so easy to keep them rolling. The ebb and flow of interpersonal dynamics: misunderstandings, failures to deliver, broken promises, disappointments, communication breakdowns and losses of trust are just some of the problems likely to arise, and then there are external distractions such as falling in love, children, job offers, divorce, etc.

Some of these difficulties are unavoidable, but a great many can be predicted, and for these allowances and tuning mechanisms can be put in place to maximise continuity. As before, an understanding of personal needs and values is key to proper consideration of the likely responses to change, and for making appropriate contingencies in the planning and response mechanisms to ensure every person, regardless of their motivational make up, is given as little reason as possible to disengage, make mistakes and otherwise inhibit the progress of the journey.

Chapter 6: The Journeying Mind

At every stage of The Journey, whether in the planning or doing phases, we need to think. If we are to reach our desired destination quickly and without incurring unnecessary costs, the decisions we make based on this thinking better be the right ones. When things go wrong it is usually because we, or others we have relied upon, have not thought things through properly.

In this chapter we will look at four parts of the thinking process. To illustrate briefly why each is important to the process of change, imagine you are tasked with bringing a boat on which you are sailing in from the sea to moor up so you can get ashore.

**Framing** \- choosing the right frame of reference and being aware of the things within it.

From our boat we can see open water between ourselves and the harbour in the distance. If this is all that concerns us we are narrow framing the challenge of getting ourselves ashore. If we do not look around, and as a consequence miss a ship far away to our right heading across our path at speed, this may lead us to steer a collision course with this ship. We should choose a wider frame of reference that allows us to gather all relevant information.

In such an example such a failure would seem to amount to a level of negligence few of us would be likely guilty of. However, in the wider world of change, where many of the potential hazards have no physical form, and therefore have to be researched and imagined, failures that, with the benefit of hindsight, may seem just as negligent are frequent.

Awareness of self and others

If we extend self-awareness to include the boat we are steering, and awareness of others to include all other vessels, the people on them and the environment around us, we can quickly see how important it is for us to gain an accurate picture of what is going on through awareness. We need to know how wide, long and deep our boat is, how fast it can go, how quickly it can stop or change direction. We need to know how deep the water is around us, where the strong currents and potential hazards like rocks are. We need to know where other people and their craft are, where they are heading, how quickly they could get in or out of our way, whether they can see us, etc. Getting any one of these things wrong amounts to a lack of awareness and could result in disaster.

All of the above may be very much easier to do when you are the captain of a physical ship rather than the captain of a metaphorical ship.

Decision making & risk assessment

Having gathered the information we require from the above, we then need to process it and make some decisions to steer a course that will get us in as quickly and safely as possible. Regardless of the quality of the information we gather we will still have to deal with uncertainties. We cannot be certain what others will choose to do or what the environment will throw at us. Uncertainty means risk, and therefore, if we are to make the best decisions possible, our risk assessment had better be accurate. What are the chances of the ship hitting us if neither of us changes course? What can we do to reduce that risk? What are the chances of a person in a pedalo (that may be hidden just inside the harbour wall) seeing us and getting out of our way? How can we reduce the risk of hitting that pedalo?

Learning

As the journey unfolds future events we could previously only speculate upon become past events we can reflect on. Each provides us with the opportunity to compare what we thought would happen with what did happen and consider how we might have done better. The lessons we learn from the entire journey can be applied to future journeys, but we can also learn from each part of journey (each journey within a journey) and apply these lessons to the next part of the journey as it unfolds. The quicker these lessons are learned, and the deeper the understanding we acquire, the more likely it is we will make it safely to the shore, regardless of the conditions.

These Concepts In A Little More Detail...

Framing

Framing is the word we use to describe how much information we take in; i.e. what we are aware of and consider relevant to our journey planning and decision-making. It is hugely important. Too narrow a frame and we will miss something of significance. Too wide and we will waste resources exploring and making allowances for factors unlikely to affect us.

Framing can affect everything:

physical things (such as: geography, the UK market, the European market, the global market) - what works in one place may not work in another

sociological things (groupings such as: friends, contacts, religion, nationality, demographic categories: A, B, C1, C2, D, E) - what works for us may not work for them

areas of interest (subject specializations such as: design, physics, biology, IT, language) and - what applies in this area may not apply in that area

time related things (the distant past, the recent past, the near future, the far future) - what worked then may not work now

When we see the bigger picture everything makes sense within it. If we see only part of the picture, while everything may seem to make sense within our current frame of reference, when this changes so may our understanding of the whole and the part.

Even within the context of a problem that can be expressed in a few of lines of text, we may frame our appreciation of it such that we ignore some of the information provided so as to ensure we come to the wrong answer. At the risk of repetition, the following problem is one I used in From Stardust... and in many a workshop. Based on past experience, unless you have encountered such a problem before, it would seem the chances of you coming to the right answer before reading it in the text below is very small, despite it being a very simple problem.

A potentially fatal infectious disease has infected 1% of the population. As part of a national screening programme you were subjected to a test with a 99% accuracy rate to find out whether you are one of those infected. You receive a letter from the screening clinic to say you have tested positive for the disease. Assuming there has been no administrative error, what is the likelihood you have the disease?

Most people ignore the first bit of information they are given in this problem, i.e. only 1% of the population is infected. So doing narrow-frames the proposition by considering only the 99% of the people who are infected (99% of 1%). What about the 1% of the 99% who aren't infected but test positive because the test is only 99% accurate? The correct answer is 50%.

People with dominant values toward the violet end of the motivational spectrum are those most likely to wide frame propositions and SDs and ODs the most likely to narrow frame them. While all motivational types can be trained to solve problems such as this, it is not so easy to train them to avoid inappropriate narrow-framing in general.

The SD values, when dominant, give people the lowest predisposition to consider changing the way they look at things, and the OD values of power and achievement encourage a highly focussed approach, which can often translate directly to a blinkered, narrow-framed way of looking at things. The ID values of self-direction and universalism encourage wide-framing through a mixture of curiosity, a desire to see what lies beyond the accepted boundaries and the ability to recognise and explore the interconnected relationship between people and things.

We can all learn to solve specific types of problem by following a procedure, but it is less easy to create fool-proof procedures allowing people to solve all of the wide variety of problems they may encounter. There are simply too many things that could possibly be considered, related and weighed up to train people to do this effectively.

In changing environments, even if it were possible to follow a process that had been effective previously, it may not produce the desired outcome as changes take effect. Therefore knowing what capacity people have to wide frame propositions can be of considerable benefit when allocating roles and managing performance expectations in the change process.

Framing doesn't simply operate by masking certain bits of information so that they effectively become invisible (although this may happen), it has the effect of weighting the importance attached, and therefore the scrutiny applied, to the information clearly visible. Just as when we focus our eyes on a central feature in our field of vision, and everything else fades in significance toward its periphery, our values focus our thoughts on those things deemed likely to have the greatest impact on our being able to satisfy our needs, and other things tend to fade toward invisibility.

The needs of people toward the red end of the motivational spectrum incline them to narrow-frame their attention on familiar and tried and tested sources of need satisfaction. If it is possible to ignore other factors they will. Only if unfamiliar things are pushed in their face, and so seem to present an unwanted threat, are they likely to attract their attention. Even then, this attention is likely to be angled toward avoiding or neutralising the threat, rather than engaging with it.

The needs of people with values toward the violet end of the motivational spectrum are less focussed on matters close to home in their immediate environment. Their greater curiosity and ability to look at propositions from all perspectives makes it less likely they will allow themselves to intuitively reach for immediate solutions via the narrow-framing of problems. New information and unfamiliar ideas are attractive inasmuch as they seem to demand to be investigated.

The collapse of the global banking system in 2008 didn't happen by chance, it was a result of an entirely predictable chain of events that had been the subject of conversations taking place in pubs and around dinner tables over many preceding years. It is reasonable to assume those in the best position to understand the situation (those with direct access to the facts, those who sanctioned the deals: i.e. the bosses of the banks) were also aware of what the almost inevitable conclusion of their business dealings was likely to be, yet they continued. Why?

Could it be they didn't have access to the facts? Unlikely. Unforgivably negligent if they didn't, but largely academic, since enough was known and being broadcasted by third party commentators for them to have heard there might be trouble ahead. More likely is the explanation that they were aware of the risks, but their needs and values were such that their priorities lay elsewhere; namely, on pursuing short-term interests; both corporate and personal. The promises of booking massive profits in the next quarter and taking receipt of swollen bonuses were highly valued, whereas featherweight significance was attached to any concerns they may have had regarding what would happen when the music stopped.

The value most likely to promote wide framing is universalism. The value most likely to enable a wide framed perspective to be used to maximum effect is self-direction. The value most likely to complement these values to promote the most cooperative, benefit generating application of these two values is benevolence. The suite of ID values distinguish those with the greatest potential to think laterally, come up with creative solutions (i.e. those outside the usual frame of reference), take the long-term view, predict future changes, gather information from the widest possible range of sources, be sensitive to the widest set of interests, be able to relate to people from different backgrounds and with different experience, seek to involve as many people as possible to maximise the potential benefits of cooperative, etc.

In short, IDs are the people with the greatest transformational (i.e. change orientated) leadership potential, and are therefore the people most able to plan, coordinate and steer the process of change for collective benefit. While IDs lack the short-term performance orientated focus that is also desirable when driving through change, this is a discipline that can be learned and deployed without compromising wider and longer-term interests.

While ODs, driven by power and achievement, are blessed with the type of target related performance drive beloved of most commercial organizations, and they can be given procedures to follow that mimic a wide framed approach in certain situations, it is less easy for them to develop a wide-framed way of thinking, as this would necessitate a reordering of their values. While, it may be possible to coach someone so as to shift the balance of their motivational system from the OD values toward the ID values, or for them to make this journey on their own, this would likely take many years. Consequently coaching and self-development need to be supported by other, more direct interventions, if they are to give of their best in rapid and radical change programmes.

The more dynamic and complex a change project is, the more people it involves and the greater their variety, the more important it becomes to have IDs involved in steering the processes; whether directly as leaders or indirectly as advisors. While differently motivated people may be able to lead projects with less complexity, or those that are effectively following a tried, tested and successful formula, an absence of IDs is likely to create a potential weakness.

This is a problem for many large organizations because they are likely to have ODs in most of the important leadership roles. Large organizations tend to be unfriendly to IDs because IDs speak their mind, challenge convention, are less competitively minded and are less interested in playing politics. ODs, contrastingly, are inclined to say what they think people want to hear, use the conventional flow of things to best serve their personal interests, compete to get to the front of the queue and are the most likely to be drawn into playing politics. Competitive organizations attract people with competitive values, and the most competitive of these tend to rise to the top. Leaders, like everyone else, tend to know what they like and like what they know, consequently they tend to recruit people like themselves, in so doing reinforcing the OD culture in their organizations.

This applies to political and public organizations as it does to commercial organizations, and the consequences are compromised operational efficiency and change readiness - almost certainly a significant factor in the 70% failure rate in major organizational change programmes.

The above should not be taken to imply that only IDs are able to successfully handle major change programmes. People of every motivational stripe play key roles in successful change projects. To facilitate this, journeys of change need to be planned properly, with the needs related impact of change (on organizations and their people) being properly understood, considered and accounted for. As successful football teams demonstrate, competitively minded people can be made to work effectively as a cooperative unit. However, the challenges faced by large organizations are rather more significant than getting 11 similarly motivated people to cooperate toward the destination of getting a ball into a net at one end of a 100m long pitch.

The above should not be taken to imply organizations would be better if they were staffed entirely by IDs. This is definitely not the case. It is merely addressing the problem that IDs are likely to be underrepresented in large organizations. As the pace of societal and market change increases this will become increasingly problematic for these organizations; because they will need to become more creative, cooperative, agile and far-sighted; difficult to achieve with OD leaders presiding over OD cultures.

In most large organizations it is vital to have a mix of differently motivated people, and in order for these people to work harmoniously together their leaders must better understand what makes themselves and others tick, and this requires a rather different style of leadership.

At present one of the most significant examples of narrow-framing is that of placing insufficient focus on people's needs and values. We see the consequences - 70% failure rate of major change programmes, global recessions, religious, political and personal conflict, etc. - but not the cause.

Awareness Of Self & Others

If one is to accurately weigh up the resources at ones disposal at the commencement of a journey of change one needs to be objective.

While it is relatively easy to calculate how much money you have, what equipment you have, the time available to you and how many people you may have at your disposal, accurately assessing personal performance potential is not so easy.

Given that even the person we see in the mirror isn't quite the person others see when they look at us, it shouldn't be a surprise to find we sometimes struggle to be entirely objective when it comes to self-assessment.

We all have an idea of how outgoing, intelligent and capable we are, but self-assessment by gut feel is unreliable. Without some form of external benchmarking there is no way to know whether we are deluding ourselves or not.

We can go some way to build up an independent and objective understanding of what sort of person we are through DNA, personality profiling and intelligence tests. We may also have achievements that can be assessed in relation to established benchmarks.

This will never give us a complete picture, but then again maybe that is impossible. We seem capable of surprising ourselves no matter how well we think we know ourselves. More importantly, just as we can only value things in relation to other things, who we are is defined by what others think as much as it is by what we think about ourselves. Therefore the more we can build the opinions of others into the picture we paint the more complete it will be.

The impression others have of us is hugely significant. Whatever 'the truth' about us may be, if others have an alternative opinion, it is quite possible this will more be significant in terms of determining how things work out when we are thrown together.

Scrupulously honest, open, cooperative, practical and highly skilled geniuses should be an asset to any change programme, but their potential contribution will not be realized if these virtues are not recognized by others. If we are misunderstood and treated with suspicion, our potential contribution is less likely to be realized, unless we are able to 'go it alone', which in large organizations is rarely possible, and not necessarily a good thing when it is.

The shared impression others have of us as individuals is our reputation. The shared impression others have for an organization is its brand. Both of these qualities are a facade. While they may reflect the true nature of what lies behind, equally they might not.

People and organizations may take pride in being ambitious, successful and having other competitive OD qualities, but they also know how important such ID virtues as honesty and cooperativeness are. The values statements of organizations reflect this. They want the outside world at least to believe they are motivated equally by these polar opposites, suggesting organizations are largely unaware of the conflict and the potential difficulties this can create for them.

Competitive people and organizations like to reassure those they deal with there is a limit to their desire for success; that they wouldn't lie to them, mislead them, take advantage of their trust or otherwise disadvantage them in their pursuit of it. ODs would like others to believe they are winners, but in winning they will make winners, not losers, of the people they deal with. The reality is win-win situations are far more likely to arise through cooperation not competition.

Words and deeds do not always go together, and corporate conduct is not always faithful to the brand. At least, for organizations such as online retailers, the power of the Internet is increasingly bringing corporate conduct and brand into line. Brand building advertisements and corporate statements are no match for 5 star ratings from thousands of customers.

For the individuals involved in the mechanisms of change there are no comparable indicators of performance, and therefore all too often people are involved or shut out on the basis of first impressions, misleading records of achievement or personal prejudice.

Self-awareness is key for organizations and individuals. If you think you are, or would like others to believe you are, something different from what others perceive you to be, you are unlikely to be trusted. If we do not trust others we are less likely to do what they want us to do, or believe what they tell us. If we are travelling together on a journey of change, such mistrust is likely to make the journey a difficult one.

The Emperor's new clothes

Self-awareness and awareness of others are two sides of the same coin. Knowing what one is doing and when one is being dishonest are all very well, but if you can't appreciate how you come over to others then your self-awareness is limited. In order to be perfectly self-aware you have to perfectly understand how others perceive and judge you. This is a big challenge.

In a perfect world full of perfect organizations and people we would be able to be entirely honest with each other. Perfect team performance demands perfect communication, and perfect communication demands perfect honesty, but that is rarely found in the world we live in.

Those most driven by the value of honesty will be honest pretty much all the time, but they have to be careful when they deal with people driven by an opposing value such as ambition. Ambition inclines people to tell others what they think will help them advance their cause. So when a particularly honest person tells a particularly ambitious person something, the latter may be inclined to think the teller has decided to say what they have for the same reasons they might have had had their situations been reversed. If the thing is hurtful to them, they will think the honest person is seeking to advance their cause by upsetting them. In reality, because honesty is a key component of benevolence, the honest person is more than likely trying to help. Such misunderstandings abound in human relationships.

Through DNA's needs and values analysis we can learn to become more aware of others and ourselves, and start to learn to code and decode the messages we send to and receive from each other.

Where hard facts are scarce and personal judgement is called upon, we find a person's ability to judge themselves and others accurately is governed by their needs and values, as is their enthusiasm to create a good impression with others.

There is a correlation between the level and range of interest exhibited by people in others and other things and the values as they are laid our in the spectrum from red to violet: from tradition to universalism and benevolence. The red/orange/yellow DNA values are those most concerned with accepting what you have, sticking with what you know and believing what you are told. This applies to people, things and concepts. At the other end of the spectrum the blue/violet values promote curiosity, a desire to question and investigate so as to expand one's horizons and knowledge, to connect with others, to find patterns and connections through which to extend one's understanding of all things: self, others and the world we share.

Consequently SDs face the greatest challenge in terms of becoming fully self-aware and understanding of others, and IDs are likely to be the most self-aware and best equipped to understand others. In keeping with the apparent evolutionary hierarchy in the values from tradition onwards, SDs are further disadvantaged when it comes to understanding others, because the needs associated with the values further along the spectrum are less easily understood as being needs at all; aspirations maybe, but needs no. Whereas, the further along the spectrum ones dominant values are placed the more likely it is one will be able to recognize, and therefore relate to, the needs of those more toward the red end.

When it comes to projecting the right image things are a little different. The competitive drive associated with the green OD values, and the associated need to make a good impression on, and win the respect of, others, give ODs the motivation to do that which seems the most likely to impress. Whether this results in ODs substantiating this with good deeds or by projecting a plausible facade will be down to environmental considerations past and present: upbringing and the circumstances in which they find themselves.

The 'ends justify the means' approach nurtured by the OD values is what gives ODs their enhanced ability to get the job done. Appropriately channelled, their motivational drive can provide the horsepower to push the change process forward. It is only when ODs become unconstrained by dint of their seniority, isolation or lack of a tried and tested structure that problems are most likely to arise. Then ODs have the potential to become loose canons.

IDs are less concerned with projecting an appropriate image, because they feel less need to impress others or conform to social norms. This can lead to IDs being perceived as oddballs, and to their being treated with suspicion, or even excluded, as a result.

Decision Making & Risk Assessment

Once we have gathered all the information available we need to process it and make some decisions. Even when deciding on our frame of reference and gaining awareness of ourselves, others and our environment we will have had to make some decisions, but perhaps the bigger decisions are those we make when setting our destination, plotting the various options for getting from A to B and putting our plans into action.

No decision is risk free. If a decision is required, it implies there is a choice to be made. If this requires more than a simple comparison of two certain outcomes then there is likely to be some uncertainty as to which of the alternatives will produce the best outcome. Uncertainty gives rise to risk, and therefore much of the decision-making in change entails risk assessment. The better able we are to accurately assess risk the greater our ability to lead through change.

Before we make a decision we take account of the relevant information available to us. This will be a combination of the knowledge we already have, the information we gather and are presented with. Then, based on this, we identify the options available to satisfy our needs, and work through the virtual journeys each option would take us on. Having done this, we can compare the likely costs, benefits and associated risks of each. The aim being to identify the option offering the highest overall return on investment at the lowest risk.

While this sounds like a simple process, implementing it successfully is not so easy. The principal reasons being: (1) our differing perceptions as to the reliability of the information available, (2) personal biases in the way we think and make judgments, (3) not all the costs and benefits share a common currency, and (4) people have different perceptions of risk; each of these being determined by our individual needs and values.

(1) Perceived Reliability of Information

Once the values driven effects of framing and awareness have done their work we are left with a pool of information for further analysis.

This information comes in three forms:

a) beliefs - things we believe to be true but for which we have no proof,

b) facts - things we know to be true because we have proof, and

c) opinions - things of which we are uncertain.

The problems we encounter spring from our inability to distinguish between these and weight them accordingly.

a) Beliefs

There are many things we accept to be true but for which we have no proof. They could be true or not, and we cannot prove either way. These could be things that have become the norm; customs and accepted practices that go unquestioned - 'the way things have always been done/are always done around here' - or things we intuitively believe to be true because they sit happily with the emotional programming of our brains - e.g. the halo effect, which suggests we are more likely to invest wide spread trust in people we find attractive, admirable or think are successful in some particular way; deferring to them even in areas where they have no track record of success.

Just because information isn't true or is unreliable doesn't mean this is how it will be perceived. The role played by one factor may not be fully understood because the overlapping roles played by other factors muddies the waters of perception.

For example, medical research indicates many cough remedies and health tonics are ineffective, yet people still take them when they have a cold or are feeling run down. These conditions pass by naturally, yet, if you have become accustomed to taking these remedies, personal experience may incline you to attribute the 'cure' to the medication.

Beliefs are potentially hazardous, especially in times of change. It may be that two people or processes have apparently worked together successfully in the past, and, as a consequence, it is believed both can be relied upon. When a major change comes along the interaction between the two may change, and then it becomes apparent that one was masking the failures of the other. The result being akin, for example, to the removal of a hard floor covering overlaying rotten floorboards that results in someone falling through them - the previous assumption having being that both the covering and the underlying floorboards were sound. Consequently, in change, even long-standing and inherited practices that seem to have worked OK in the past should always be reviewed and examined to ensure they will still be fit for purpose after the change.

SDs, as the group most reliant on faith, convention and tradition, are the most inclined to use belief based information as the foundation of their decision making process. IDs, at the other end of the motivational spectrum, motivated by curiosity and independently acquired wisdom, are the most likely to question and eliminate misplaced beliefs.

b) Facts

We establish fact objectively through experimentation and verifiable experience. If we do this properly we can rely completely on the information we gather. However, if we rely on a third party to separate fact from fiction, or we are subjective or biased in the evaluation of our experiences, facts are hard to come by. Everyone can improve their ability to be objective through a disciplined use of their rational capabilities, but it is difficult to overcome the values related biases in our thinking and judgement.

Whether differently motivated people rely on facts rather than beliefs in their decision making is likely to be highly dependent on the nature of their work and the environment in which they find themselves. However, as facts and beliefs are the opposite sides of the same coin, it follows that IDs, as the least likely to rely on misplaced beliefs, are the most likely to rely on facts and SDs the least.

c) Opinions

When we know we don't know we are saved from the worst consequences of misplaced belief. If we know we cannot be certain about the reliability of the information we have, or how it might apply to the situation at hand, then we are less likely to rely on it. Opinions are then subject to the values biased risk assessment considerations outlined below.

(2) The Way We Think And Make Judgements

Broadly we have two modes of thinking, sometimes known as system 1 and system 2.

System 1 involves the type of instantaneous reaction we associate with feelings and intuitions.

System 2 involves conscious and rational reflection.

Regardless of our values we are all mostly reliant on our system 1 feelings and intuitions; i.e. whatever the challenge we face we are likely to experience an emotional reaction that will strongly influence what we do next.

To give you as sense of how strongly influenced by system 1 you are, try to think of all of the times when you have done something, or made a decision, that you didn't feel comfortable with; that didn't feel right? My guess is, unless you are frequently blackmailed, you won't be able to think of many (or any). Quite often we have an intuitive feeling one option or the other is right. Even when we don't, once we have thought about things, we tend to go with the option that feels right.

System 2 kicks in when we are not railroaded by our intuitions, and consequently experience no or mixed feelings. We then think about things in a more considered and rational way. Once system 2 has had its say its findings are kicked back to system 1 for verification and action. If system 1 disagrees with system 2 then you are likely to experience cognitive dissonance; leaving you with a head and heart type conflict to resolve. How this is resolved will be influenced by our values. Self-directing individuals are more likely to give system 2 the upper hand, whereas those more reliant on following precedent (those driven more by the values from tradition to achievement) are more likely to defer to their system 1 intuitions.

This resonates with the habit politicians (who one suspects are, in the main, power and achievement driven) have of setting up enquiries by independent experts to help them decide what to do, and, when their findings are published, ignore them and do what they would have done in the first place.

IDs, motivated by values promoting curiosity and independent inquiry, are the most likely to engage system 2 and examine their feelings. This not only increases the likelihood of their making rational judgements, but, because of an increased likelihood they will be guided by these and then learn from the experience, they are more likely to develop their system 1 feelings and intuitions so as to make them more reliable.

"actually, this tastes pretty good"

At the other end of the motivational spectrum, SDs, with their preference for acceptance, belief and the continuity and reassurance provided by sticking with what they know, are the least likely to engage system 2, and therefore the most likely to be guided by irrational intuitions and feelings.

People who wholly rely on system 1 are people who trust their instincts; perhaps so much so that they may privately feel a touch of divine guidance is at work. This resonates with belief, and therefore promotes the likelihood that those most likely to favour belief over reason (SDs) are those most likely to put faith in intuitions and feelings that remain stubbornly constant in the face of mounting evidence they cannot be relied upon.

In Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahneman's excellent 'Thinking, Fast & Slow' he sets out evidence gathered from a lifetime's work studying the way people make decisions. In this he provides many example of how our emotions lead us astray. One of the many manifestations of the problems we encounter through allowing ourselves to be guided by our feelings is described as the planning fallacy. This occurs when we decide on the destination for our journey of change and effectively commit ourselves to making the journey before we have properly considered our starting point or the resources available to us. When this happens it is almost as if we make a wish and commit ourselves to fulfilling it on little more than a wing and a prayer. When evidence appears to suggest we have made a tremendous mistake, we bend and play with our plans in a bid to justify that all is well and we should push on to our intended destination.

One of the examples he cites is the development of the Scottish Parliament building. In 1997 this was approved on the basis of an estimated cost of £40m. Over the planning and development process this estimate proved inadequate. As costs escalated, successive ceilings were introduced to say 'this far and no further'. Despite each being broken, still the project continued. In 2004 it was completed at a cost of £431m.

This is a breathtaking example of what happens when people set a goal based on a feeling that something is right (an emotional desire), and then allow this to colour the planning process by viewing it through rose tinted spectacles. Blinkered thinking, poor research and working on the basis of best case scenarios all contributed to this epic failure to accurately assess the viability of the destination and the chosen route to it.

While few of us, as organizational leaders or individuals, could afford to make an error on this scale (a 1078% underestimation of costs) and still be allowed to press on to our destination, we should all be able to relate to an occasional tendency to bend the figures and ignore inconvenient truths in order to make it seem more likely that a desired goal is achievable.

(3) Lack of Common Currency - Weighting of Financial and Non Financial Considerations

The costs of implementing a major corporate change might be measured in terms of its financial cost (hardware, software, replaced technology, staff numbers, consultancy support and the impact on accommodation), but it is also likely to impact on less tangible but equally significant factors; for example: the happiness and engagement of staff, communication breakdowns and third party perceptions of the brand. While all changes will ultimately find expression through the bottom line, the emotional chain reaction change sets in motion, involving employees, commentators and customers, cannot be evaluated easily or directly in financial terms. DNA can help better assess the emotional impact of change, and therefore provide a better steer of the financial consequences. Certain aspects of change start a chain reaction that will be slow to leave a trace on the bottom line, and are therefore difficult to account for in these terms, but eventually their effects will be realized.

Emotional, moral and ethical considerations, to a large extent, have to be evaluated on their own terms, and since this evaluation will be different for people with different values, there is not going to be a single objective perspective from which they can be assessed and agreed upon. However, these are hugely important considerations.

The difference between (a) committed staff and loyal customers who continue to love the organization and what it stands for, and (b) staff and customers that become disenchanted with the clumsily delivered and inconsistent messages they receive during and after change, can be the difference between that organization succeeding against all odds and it being brought to its knees when everything was looking good.

Broadly speaking ODs are those most likely to place the least weight on emotional, moral and ethical considerations: giving them a poor rate of currency exchange. SDs and IDs are the most likely to give these considerations weight, although SDs are more likely to bias their considerations toward people like themselves, and thereby underestimate the likely impact of change on others, whether they are differently motivated, have different roles, are located elsewhere, etc.

(4) Attitudes to Risk

Lack of perfect information gives rise to uncertainty and uncertainty gives rise to risk. We are rarely able to instigate change on the basis of perfect information. This makes predicting exactly how future events will pan out difficult to do, and therefore open to risk. Even when we are able to accurately assess the risk, we do not always do so. This leads us to make irrational decisions. We do this because people with different values have different perceptions of risk.

When you toss a coin you cannot be certain which side will land face up. You know there is a 50% chance it will be heads and a 50% chance it will be tails. A 50% chance of success isn't usually very attractive. If this meant leaving one job to go for another, or staging a corporate takeover that would cost hundreds of millions of pounds, the potential upside of success would have to be considerably better than the cost of failure in order to justify taking the risk. Big, one off decisions like these may have to be decided on their particular merits. If the cost of failure would spell ruin then the perceived riskiness of the proposal is likely to be magnified.

However, most of the decisions we have to make, whether they are fundamental to a change, or just one of the many smaller considerations to be made along the way, are not like this.

Daniel Kahneman provides the example of how many people (who could afford to bear the loss) when faced with a choice of losing £100 or winning £200 on the toss of a coin, will decline the offer. Given the mathematical value of this offer is £50 ((-£100+£200)/2) this decision would seem to be the equivalent to turning down a gift of £50.

A certain £50 gain is a different proposition to one that may involve losing £100, and certainly when viewed in isolation it is. However, if we widen our frame of reference to see that, while this offer may be a one off, it is of a type we may face frequently in life, then we may see that it becomes increasingly like an offer of £50.

If I am offered and accept this proposition 10 times in a row the greatest likelihood is that I will emerge £500 better off ((5x-£100)+(5x£200)). I could afford to lose 6 times and win only 4 and still end up £200 better off. I would have to lose 7 times to end up out of pocket (by £100), and this outcome is equally probable to the one in which I win 7 times and end up £1,100 in pocket.

If we adopt a wide framed, universal approach to life, and see every journey as part of a greater journey, we will see that such propositions are not one-offs; they come up repeatedly in different forms. If we routinely turn them down because they don't feel right, we will lose out because of our narrow-framed, short-term perspective. Even if it is highly unlikely we will repeatedly encounter an identical offer, if we are able to recognise similarities in offers of all kinds, including ones that involve purely emotional costs and benefits, our assessment of risk will more closely agree with the cold statistical analysis that this offer is worth £50, and should therefore be accepted

While a host of other considerations will affect individual perceptions of risk, including past experience and current availability of resources, underlying all of these will be our personal values.

SDs are the least open to change of the DNA types, largely because they are the most risk averse. Letting go of an existing way of doing things inevitably necessitates the loss of whatever stability it provides and dealing with the uncertainty of what will replace it. SDs, being the least willing and able to imagine better ways of doing things, or to put their faith in theoretical models showing how things might turn out better (no matter how well researched they are), are therefore the most likely to be pessimistic as to the likely outcome of change. Retrograde changes to a previous arrangement are likely to be seen as more attractive than a journey into the unknown.

ODs are risk averse, to the extent they are highly attuned to: winning and not losing, making a good impression rather than making a fool of themselves, and working with known quantities they can rely on; but they will give serious consideration to anything they perceive has the potential to fast track their progress. ODs who deem themselves to be in losing position in particular may look more favourably on any change that promises to change their situation.

As a whole ODs are on the conservative side of change neutrality: assessing every opportunity in relation to the specific situation in which they find themselves.

TDs are the most open to change. Variety, novelty and adventure are at the heart of their motivational make up. Risk is therefore an occupational hazard.

IDs are broadly up for change. In fact they are the most likely instigators of change. While TDs seize upon opportunities for change, IDs examine the ways things are done and imagine ways they might be done better. While TDs are more likely to welcome change for change sake, IDs have no great appetite for this, and are quite happy to stick with things if they work.

Their lack of unbridled enthusiasm for change and risk taking means that, like ODs, change is likely to be judged on its own merits. However, whereas ODs tend to evaluate costs and benefits on personal terms, IDs are more likely to assess change in terms of the costs and benefits to all those likely to be affected. Therefore their risk assessment is likely to be the most balanced, and in keeping with their increased capacity for wide framed thinking and their cooperative outlook, their risk assessment will take greater account of factors beyond short-term, personal and financial considerations.

Summary

In assessing every stage of the journey of change (starting point, journey and destination) allowances must be made for the value based biases of the foregoing sections under the chapter heading of 'Thinking'.

How accurate is the information gained from the self-assessment & assessment of others likely to be?

Has all the relevant information been gathered and appropriately weighted?

How factual (and therefore reliable) is the information?

How has this information been processed - rationally or intuitively?

How have financial and non-financial considerations been weighted in the decision making process?

How has risk been assessed?

The likelihood is that the net outcome of the above will cause you to reconsider the intuitive confidence you might have for the competing strategies you have deliberated upon, and contemplate how you might refine and improve your information gathering and processing.

In keeping with the previous thought that all journeys are little journeys within other greater journeys, the assessment of competing virtual journeys becomes a journey in itself, complete with its own start, journey, destination, action and review cycle.

Learning

In that information gathering and review are key aspects of the change cycle, and these both involve learning, it should be clear how important the ability to learn is in leading and managing change successfully.

Once again our values play a very significant role in determining how we learn, and the extent of our abilities to learn.

While all motivational types have similar abilities to learn by rote, to memorise and re-enact learned processes through repeated experience, in dynamic change environments this is not always possible.

The ability of those involved in change to: pick things up quickly, relate one thing to another, make effective decisions on the fly and then learn from their mistakes, all with minimum supervision and instruction are key considerations when assessing the ability of people to successfully negotiate dynamic processes of change, and all values related.

SDs face the greatest challenges in these areas. In situations where they are not able to apply specialist knowledge in a manner they are familiar with, they are likely to need the highest levels of guidance and support.

ODs can be enthusiastic learners if the learning process is properly structured, and the goal at the end of it is clearly defined and attractive to them; e.g. higher status, more money or improved opportunities for these. However, ODs' lack of general inquisitiveness and their tendency to allow their opinions to become self-defining beliefs are barriers to learning. These can lead them to develop inflexible and dogmatic approaches to thinking and conduct. Combining these with an unwillingness to admit failure, or do things where they are more likely to make mistakes (in fear of diminishing their status), and a desire to take control and assume positions of leadership, means the OD makeup has the potential to shake up a hazardous motivational cocktail in dynamic change environments.

TDs sit somewhere between ODs and IDs on the learning curve. Assisted by a willingness to take risks and try new things, they have greater learning potential than ODs, but how this is realised in rather dependent on whether power and achievement or self-direction and universalism are the values playing the key supportive roles.

IDs' wide framing curiosity, independent viewpoint and desire to seek out deeper levels of understanding, when coupled with their reduced status related concerns about what others think about their successes and failures, give them the greatest learning potential of all the DNA types. Flexible, adaptive and with an enhanced ability to recognize patterns and think laterally IDs, are capable of learning lessons where others are not.

Chapter 7: Roles In Change

General

All of the above should provide some pointers as to how differently motivated people can be deployed so as to make the most of their assets, align their needs with a programmed change and maximise organizational efficiency and effectiveness.

Large organizations tend to adopt management strategies that aim to achieve high levels of consistency, through the application of rules, regulations and preferred procedures. These are usually governed by hierarchical command and control systems, whose effectiveness is judged in reference to performance metrics. It follows that their cultures tend to be dominated by the values on the left hand side of the DNA motivational map: particularly conformity, security, power and achievement.

This gives rise to a predominantly OD culture (or a mix of 'hierarchy' and 'market' culture in OCAI* terms), in which board level corporate decision making is inclined toward pursuing a short-term performance agenda in a competitive environment. This is a set up best suited to managing well established processes in slow changing environments, where the frequency and level of organizational change requires little more than a trimming of the sails. In such environments the OD assets of being able to focus on delivery in relation to well-defined targets, using tried and tested practices, comes to the fore. In these circumstances the greater difficulties ODs experience in coming up with creative solutions, enthusiastically embracing change, thinking around unfamiliar challenges, communicating and working cooperatively are less significant.

*Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument - a means of assessing four distinct elements in the culture of organizations developed by Professors Kim Cameron & Robert Quinn

As the pace of change picks up and its challenges become greater, the less fit for purpose an OD based business culture becomes. OD leaders are likely to feel threatened and reach for certainty where there is none. The old tried and tested solutions become less and less effective, and, as leading and managing others through the stormy waters of change becomes more challenging, they are increasingly drawn to strategies aimed at protecting their personal interests rather than those of the organization.

In times of change it is becoming increasingly important for organizations to maximise the potential contribution of all their differently motivated people, and, if there is insufficient breadth and depth of differently motivated talent, to enlist additional support.

Ideally IDs should be distributed through an organization and occupy the key positions of leadership demanding high transformational potential: i.e. those in which wide ranging sources of information have to be gathered and processed, a wide range of different specializations need to coordinated and high levels of forward looking and creative thinking are required.

ODs, while potentially excellent leaders, are most effective when their influence is moderated and channelled by those with a greater capacity to see the bigger picture. This can be something of a challenge, since ODs want to lead not follow, particularly in situations where the leadership is already dominated by incumbent ODs unwilling to cede authority. However, for the health of an organization, it is important that the OD influence is moderated.

OD leaders are likely to take the view that, whatever virtues an ID colleague has, they lack the decisiveness and authority to lead an organization. OD leaders are likely to see an ID's more conciliatory and inclusive style as a recipe for prevarication and loss of direction.

IDs & ODs in conflict will often end up thinking the other unreasonable in wanting to set the agenda. While the ID may see the OD as a simple control freak who doesn't see the bigger picture, the OD is more likely to see the ID as being detached from reality. The solution being to de-personalise conflicts and let the facts and rational arguments speak for themselves.

The effective, strongly self-directed ID leader is more likely to have a willingness to elicit contributions from the widest range of sources and then, independently, come to a decision in the best interests of the organization.

This approach contrasts with the OD approach, which is more likely to involve either making a decision before consulting with others, and then contrive to use the consultation process as a means by which to reinforce this, or to allow the consultation process to become something of a political event or popularity contest. Either way decisions are more likely to be made in the interests of personal or political expediency more than the wider interests of the organization.

In the perfect scenario IDs and ODs work together: IDs taking overall responsibility for innovation, strategy and development with ODs making contributions to the above and taking direct responsibility for implementing clearly defined strategies.

While IDs are more likely to be happy working side by side in shared leadership roles, in such situations it is likely ODs would seek to assume control. Therefore more effective partnerships are likely to arise when the ID is given the CEO role and the OD (or ODs) occupies the senior managerial role (or roles) beneath them.

The simpler and more linear an organization's hierarchical structure is, and the more narrowly defined individual roles are, the less immediate operational need there is for IDs outside the boardroom. Conversely, the more dynamic and flexible the organization, and the less tightly defined individual roles are, the greater the number of IDs required will be.

In any large organization there are likely to be benefits to be gained from increased ID representation at all levels. Their higher levels of curiosity, greater information gathering capacity and desire to come up with and share creative solutions to perceived problems, are likely to increase an organization's sensitivity to the effects of change at all levels, and its ability to react accordingly.

As the pace of external change increases, it will become clear that individual change strategies are, in reality, just parts of an ongoing, continuous process of change. Faced with the challenge of evolving to cope with this type of environment it is increasingly important for organizations to develop future transformational leadership potential by bringing more IDs up through the ranks.

Since the ID value of self-direction and the OD value of power are the two drivers of leadership, it is likely that most leadership roles will be suited to people significantly driven by these values. However, the lower the demands of leadership become, and the more managerial a role is, the less important these values will become.

If the leadership required is more concerned with leading by example, through the demonstration of skills and the relaying of experience, then the role played by an individual's values will relate more to the specifics of that role than to more general leadership qualities.

Leading DNA types through change

**SDs** \- higher representations of which are likely to found in public sector, traditional or heritage organizations and highly regulated and process driven roles

keep it safe and controlled

Broadly speaking SDs are likely to be best suited to roles in which there is a very well defined process to be followed, and the challenges require limited lateral thinking or creative problem solving. The more exposure they have to uncertainty, risk taking and having to take responsibility for instigating or implementing change, the more stress they are likely to experience and the less effective they are likely to become.

Consequently SDs should not be relied upon to be either the leaders or agents of change. Wherever possible SDs should be shielded from the immediate impacts of change. Messages intended to broadcast a vision of a brave new future across an entire organization are as likely to generate panic and alarm as excitement.

If the prevailing systems seem to be working well from the perspective of SDs then changes should, ideally, be introduced slowly in the manner of the boiling frog analogy; i.e. gradually so no change is apparent. If change can be drip fed so that consistency with what went before is more apparent than innovation, it may be easier to keep SDs on a conveyer belt of change in which continuous low-level change becomes something one takes for granted. If this is not possible, a short sharp shock in a metaphorical padded and secure container followed by a long period of stability may be preferable.

SDs can adapt happily to change, especially when its benefits have been proven and are being enjoyed by others. Therefore, if possible, they should be the last group to be brought into line.

The worst possible scenario for SDs would involve frequent step changes that maximise uncertainty and instability, and for these to have not have been thoroughly thought through. In these circumstances SDs cannot be expected to join the dots, and make good the deficiencies. They are far more likely to want to reject the changes and carry on as before or lose motivation. Apart from causing short-term confusion and consequent losses in productivity, more significant may be a loss of trust in the leadership and disengagement from the organization.

SDs are at their best when faith in their employer's ability to create and sustain a strong and stable organization is strong. Once things start going wrong and leadership doesn't seem to have the answers, or their answers aren't believed, trust and loyalty break down and may be difficult to repair.

SDs are likely to be less tolerant than others with their leader's inability to predict and plan for future changes. Genuine mistakes and unavoidable events that have a negative impact are more likely to be seen as breaches of trust and lead to a loss of confidence. Therefore leaders must be particularly careful in managing the messages they send out, so as to avoid being seen to make promises they later break.

**ODs** \- higher representations of which are likely to found in executive roles throughout commercial organizations, particularly in target driven environments and in leadership roles.

create potential for personal ascent

ODs are the most likely to engage with change on a highly personal basis. Given their competitive outlook, news of impending change will set alarm bells ringing: the established order may change and this may have repercussions for them: either creating new opportunities for advancement or undermining their current status, control or the rewards available to them.

Given their higher propensity to narrow-frame propositions, they are likely to focus their attention on short-term and personal considerations, rather than embrace wider organizational concerns. Consequently they are likely to treat the process of change as if it were a strategic war game, in which they must take care as to how they martial their resources, with whom they form alliances and when they should mount their attack.

Those ODs who sense there are immediate opportunities for gain, whether as individuals or as members of a group likely to benefit from the change, will move quickly to take maximum advantage of these. This may manifest itself by designing or pushing the change process to suit themselves (if they are in positions of leadership) or by throwing themselves into supporting it (if they are not).

However, for those who perceive a proposed change as a potential threat, they may immediately mobilize their resources to protect their position, mount a counter attack or bail out.

When a major change is proposed it may not be clear whether it will present an opportunity or a threat. Doubt in the mind of the OD will lead to a hedging of bets and a desire to keep all options open. In these circumstances they are likely to try to say and do the things they think others want to hear and see, while steadfastly refraining from doing anything that might undermine their position should things not turn out the way they want.

In order to maximise the potential contribution of ODs to driving the process of change forward it is important to remove all unnecessary uncertainty from their minds. In the implementation of change ODs with the potential to make gains need to understand the opportunities available to them and the means by which they can capitalize on these. All ODs likely to have their situation undermined, or see peers and subordinates make relative gains, should not be relied upon to play an active, constructive role in bringing change about.

Since ODs are motivated by opportunities to raise their status and de-motivated by the sense they are going backward, it may be preferable for ODs likely to receive a set back to receive a short sharp shock accompanied by an advancement programme, than be given a highly managed soft landing. The logic being that once the impact of a loss of status has been absorbed, the individual will have before them opportunities for advancement, either within the organization or with a new employer. In most circumstances this is likely to be preferable to sustaining a situation the individual may perceive as being the equivalent of standing in quicksand or under siege. The worst case scenario being to retain an individual who harbours a grudge and lacks motivation, but chooses to stay where they are to avoid accepting an alternative position with lower status or lower pay, all the while casting a motivational pall over those working with and around them.

While, for the reasons given before, it is better if ODs are not given complete discretion in shaping overall change policy, or responsibility for leading change at the highest level, once an effective change strategy has been decided upon, and a succession of clear short-term goals have been defined, the input of ODs, both in terms of refining the design and means of delivery and actually making things happen, is invaluable. In this respect ODs are the engines of change.

This is why it is vital to provide early reassurance to the ODs whose active participation is required that they stand to gain from making a cooperative contribution to the change process. Failure to do increases the likelihood ODs will respond to uncertainty by making life more difficult for those they think could stand to gain from their assistance.

**TDs** \- higher representations of which are likely to found in human resources and other people centred roles and in dynamic, fast changing environments offering variety, adventure and excitement

new challenges, variety and excitement

Being the most change friendly of all the motivational types TDs can be an asset in the process of change. Where SDs are more likely to perceive change of any kind as emotionally draining, TDs are likely to find it exciting and life affirming.

The distinctive TD characteristics of a greater willingness to engage with others and experience new things give them the greatest potential to be the champions of change.

TDs' supporting qualities are less generic, and are defined by the values supporting hedonism and stimulation. Dependent on the nature of these values they will either become OD/TD or TD/ID hybrids, and their response to and usefulness in the change process will be informed by the characteristics described earlier (in the case of OD/TDs) and in the following section (in the case of ID/TDs).

TDs lacking strong support from either the OD or ID values are likely to lack the organizational qualities of either, and therefore are more likely to make their contribution through an enhanced ability to energise the process of change and introduce a sense of fun to proceedings, rather than performing roles requiring more organizational initiative.

**IDs** \- higher representations of which are likely to found in highly creative and intellectually demanding roles, in organizations built around innovation or making contributions to the public good, or as leaders of their own organizations

problem solving and creativity

IDs can be found (prospering even) at all levels in large organizations, but the propensity for high levels of conformity, short-term, narrow-framed thinking and the command and control power structures to dominate the culture often make it difficult for IDs to fit in, let alone prosper.

If the circumstances have allowed, and the passions of an ID align with the activities of the organization, it is possible for IDs to build levels of respect and admiration from their peers that enable them to rise to positions of leadership, even in the context of narrower targets than they might otherwise advocate. It may be that such an organization will benefit from the ID's greater potential for transformational leadership, however, this is not a given. Given that IDs are often more interested in thought leadership (ideas and better ways of doing things) than leading others, in circumstances where the ID leader's principle interest lies in a particular function of the organization, it may be difficult for them to find the motivation to provide conventional leadership for others.

Other IDs in organizations will range from those who would like to make a greater contribution than they are allowed, who are frustrated by the constraints of the organization, to those who simply do a job to earn the money to pay the bills. The latter will satisfy themselves by getting their kicks elsewhere, and neither expect or want a great deal more from their employment, either in terms of making a contribution or extracting a reward. While IDs in this situation are likely to lack the passionate zeal of some of their colleagues, unless their level of detachment from the organization is particularly great, they are likely to be diligent, competent and cooperative. These IDs are likely to represent a great, untapped resource of an organization. They are likely to see what goes on and understand the operation better than many of their more engaged peers, but do nothing with this information, seeing any effort to do so as a waste of energy.

the corporate body

If one could liken the contribution made by the various DNA types inside the corporate body to those made by different parts of the human body, SDs are the heart and lungs (quietly taking care of the basic, life-sustaining functions), ODs are the muscles (taking care of all the heavy lifting and movement), TDs are the nervous system (communicating messages and stirring various body parts into action) and IDs are the brain (processing information and making decisions for the collective benefit of all body parts).

One difference between corporate bodies and human bodies is that their internal decision-making systems and communication systems are rarely set up so that one central information-processing hub is sufficient. Organizations are more like insects in this regard. Like dinosaurs are once thought to have had, insects have numerous ganglions (or mini-brains) distributed around their bodies, to take care of local functions. So just as a fly has a mini-brain that deals with flight, organizations have mini-brains dealing with HR, marketing and finance. Consequently IDs have key roles to play wherever there are significant demands on local or departmental decision-making.

Unlike ODs, who often turn a blind eye to long-term goals and focus on the short-term targets, trusting that achieving a succession of short-term objectives will serve the best interests of the organization, IDs see short-term goals merely as stepping-stones toward achieving long-term goals. Therefore they do not respond well to instructions predicated solely on hitting short-term targets. They want to understand the bigger picture and the long-term objectives, and then figure out the best means of getting there.

A potential weakness for IDs is that they see less need for setting short-term goals. Just like a camel can travel a long way in the desert without needing frequent water stops, IDs will keep going as long as they feel good progress is being made toward the end destination.

This presents two problems. Firstly, in a competitive environment it may be that businesses pursuing short-term strategies will put those pursuing long-term strategies out of business before they reach their destination. Secondly, ODs who are asked to work toward a long-term objective may struggle to see this as being achievable or desirable, and are likely to lose motivation if asked to endure long periods without the satisfaction of hitting targets and achieving goals.

Therefore in order to achieve the best possible outcome for an organization it will be necessary to ensure ID initiatives: (1) have sufficient resources in place to allow long-term goals to be realized, with protective measures and allowances to ensure competitors are not able to inflict fatal damages through the inability of the organization to compete in the short-term, and (2) ODs are given a succession of short-term targets that align with the greater goal.

Summary

The pace of change affects the relative advantages of thinking short-term and long-term. As the pace increases the view of the future becomes compressed: what was on the horizon comes upon us before we know it, so we need to look further and further into the future if we are to be prepared for it. The long-term forecasts that allowed for a number of future step changes have to be actioned more quickly, and the short-term planning that sought merely to keep up soon fails to do this.

The need for competence is a constant when leading and managing change. However, within the definition of competence there are two components: experience (learned skills and knowledge) and motivational mindset (needs and values), and the balancing point between these is shifting the weight from the former to the latter. While skills and knowledge will remain vital at the sharp end of delivery, given that these can be acquired relatively quickly, while an individual's motivational mindset is very much more difficult to change, a greater awareness of personal needs and values and their impact on people's ability to drive forward the process of change is becoming increasingly important.

The OD led organizational culture and model of change was always deeply flawed, but when the pace of change was slower it was easier to apply skills and knowledge learned from previous changes to help address new challenges. We are now at a tipping point, and from here on the OD leadership model will increasingly spell trouble for all organizations abiding with it.

In order to successfully manage change the more one is able to lead it through an ID based decision-making process the better. Not only does this decrease the likelihood that short-term strategies and narrow-framed perspectives will be allowed to derail pursuit of long-term objectives, but it increases the likelihood that the needs of all those involved in the process will be taken into consideration.

### Improving Our Ability To Deal With Change

### Something That Caught My Eye

As I conclude this book before me is an article summarising Think Like A Freak by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, the authors of the hugely successful Freakonomics, which illustrated the weaknesses of conventional wisdom. It suggests a number of means by which to improve the quality of our decision-making, and, since these resonate so strongly with the foregoing, I thought I would relay them here.

" **Don't be embarrassed by how much you don't know**. Until you can admit what you don't yet know, it's virtually impossible to learn what you need to."

" **Think like a child**. Kids don't carry around the preconceptions that often stop people from seeing things as they are ... they are not afraid to share their wildest ideas. It all starts with thinking small. Small questions are less often asked. Big problems are usually a mass of intertwined small problems. Any kind of change is hard, but the chances of triggering change on a small problem are much greater than on a big one. Don't be afraid to confront the obvious ... you will end up asking a lot of questions others don't."

Both of the above echo the virtues of self-direction and universalism over power and achievement. Self-direction is fuelled by the question 'why?' A precondition for asking this question is the admission that one doesn't already know the answer. The curiosity of self-direction and the unconditional openness of universalism turn every answer into further questions and an enhanced ability to find the answers to these questions; so creating a humility fuelled cycle of enlightenment. Whereas power and achievement incline us to believe that as we learn we are elevating our status, shutting the door to uncertainty and building ourselves an impregnable fortress. Once we have built ourselves such a stronghold we lose the motivation to venture out and expose ourselves to the potentially diminishing affects of having to deal with uncertainties.

" **Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life**." Incentivizing people involves promising and delivering to them what they most need; i.e. that which their values demand.

" **Think like a Rock Star** ". This references rock star David Lee Roth's tour rider specification that his band Van Halen be supplied with M&Ms with all the brown ones taken out. The practical purpose this served was to introduce one simple, easy to verify requirement in a complex 53 page rider that mainly comprised serious technical and safety requirements. It provides an example of wide-framed lateral thinking. The premise being that if this simple item had not been attended to by the venue staff then there might be good reason to suspect more serious requirements had also not received the required attention. Wide-framing and lateral thinking being other ID virtues.

" **Don't let emotion get in the way**." This urges people to be more rational, and not let their feelings get in the way. While we are all guided by our emotions, intuitions and feelings, IDs are advantageously predisposed to challenge preconceptions, seek to override unhelpful emotions and thereby develop intuitions and feelings capable of being justified rationally.

" **Redefine the problem**." The article references the extraordinary success of a gentleman named Kobi in the arena of competitive eating. By deconstructing the challenge he faced in consuming as many hot dogs as he could in 12 minutes he managed to double the previous record despite being a newcomer to the 'sport'. Rather than simply do the conventional thing (cram hot dogs one after the other into his mouth) faster, he broke the hot dogs into pieces, ate the sausage first while dipping the bun into water they were given to wash the hot dogs down, compress this and then eat it in pieces. By making deconstructing the hot dogs into their component parts he made them easier to get down, and so was able to eat them faster than anyone else.

Again this demonstrates the advantages afforded by taking an ID perspective on a challenge. Where the power and achievement values of ODs encourage the adoption of the tried and tested methodologies and concentrate an individual's energy on making these work harder, the self-direction and universalism values of IDs encourage the challenging of convention and the stripping back of information to reveal root connections that offer a deeper understanding of the nature of the challenge and the range of options available to overcome it.

The usefulness of the needs and values approach to change is reaffirmed to me daily, and chance encounters with well researched economic commentary such as that provided by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, never fail to raise a pleasing smile.

Whatever the challenge, whatever successes or failures may arise, the profound importance of our needs and values, and the effect they have on our ability to make the right decisions and take the right action, enable us to use them to better understand the nature of these challenges, how we might better learn from our mistakes and how we can vastly improve our chances of achieving successful outcomes.

Chapter 8: Case Studies

The following case studies illustrate some of the difficulties that can arise in change management. Those featuring company names are drawn from the public arena, where issues of confidentiality are absent, details of the others have been changed to maintain confidentiality.

These case studies have been chosen to illustrate Mckinsey's 'inconvenient truths of change management' mentioned at the outset.

CS1 - inconvenient truth #1 - What motivates you doesn't motivate (most of) your employees

A large manufacturing company founded by a highly creative individual grew rapidly on the back of a ground breaking innovations that he, personally, had been significantly responsible for. In the early growth phase of the business he not only recruited similarly creative people to support his work, but a range of people capable of dealing with managing the production process, sales and administration.

In the early phase of growth the excitement generated by the organization's rapid growth and the huge success of and approval for the company's products provided an energy that helped the organization achieve a good sense of a shared culture, with everyone pulling together toward achieving shared goals. Ten years on the business had become fully established, and while still very successful, the pace of growth had slowed and the size of the organization and its dispersed manufacturing base to the extent that the energy driven cultural unity that existed at the outset had dispersed.

While still very much the figurehead of the organization, the founder repeatedly sought to bring in a CEO that would enable him to devote less time to running the company and more time on driving forward further innovations. These attempts always ran into difficulty, as a consequence of personal conflicts and failures to achieve the desired levels of cultural unity.

This seems a familiar problem, and relates to the age old adage concerning the inability of founders to pass on the reigns of the business they have built. However, there is more to it than that.

The type of highly creative individuals that come up with groundbreaking new products and services tend to be IDs. They are motivated by the desire to things in wholly different ways, to work independently and cooperatively, without a need to stick to the rules or long established procedure, which they are prone to question and find fault with. In the early growth phase of their businesses there is so much excitement and energy that people of all motivations are forced to make it up as they go along, and any organizational deficiencies are covered up by sheer demand for the product. When this phase ends, these deficiencies are not so easy to pass over.

The default solution is to recruit people with a track record for leading and managing large organizations. However, for reasons explained previously these people are most likely to be ODs. This presents two significant problems. Firstly the CEO and the founder are likely to experience all the symptoms of an ID/OD values clash, and the CEO will seek to create a more OD friendly corporate culture, which is likely to cause difficulties for a great many staff who have grown used to the more indirect management approach preferred by IDs, as well as for the founder, who sees the organization he has built being changed in ways he is likely to feel uncomfortable about.

IDs tend to be very challenging. ODs find being challenged uncomfortable. ODs trust and apply tried and tested 'off the rack' methodologies, IDs prefer made to measure. IDs think long-term. ODs think short-term. ODs like prescriptive processes that ensure order. IDs prefer order to arise from rational consensus. ODs like the rewards innovative end products bring but don't understand the process by which they are borne, which they seek to make more efficient, and thereby destroy. Their default mode is to divert investment away from innovation into improvement and into efficiency savings and sales initiatives. IDs default mode pushes them in the opposite direction.

In order to achieve the type of transition the founder desires, he needs to find a CEO more aligned with his ID values, whose creative urges are more aligned with optimising organizational design. Not only would such a person have a greater capacity to understand and align the needs of the founder, the organization and its different departments, critically, they would be able to communicate more effectively with the founder. IDs are able to challenge each other free of the status related issues that affect ODs.

The above scenario appears to have many similarities with the experience of Apple. Steve Jobs, having set up the company and spearheaded its early innovations, found himself at odds with the leaders brought in to take it forward into maturity, which eventually led to his being ousted from the company. The consequences for Apple were disastrous, and when Jobs was invited back the event was something of a second coming, and paved the way for Apple's ascent to the top of the global corporate pile.

Failures in the journey of change:

starting point & journey - the failure to properly assess the starting point relates chiefly to a lack of awareness as to the role played by values, and this leads to a failure to assess the resources required to make the journey (the type of CEO and the change programme such a CEO would be capable of instigating)

CS2 - inconvenient truth #2 - You're better off letting them write their own story

There are elements of CS3 that also illustrate this point, but I will give you the example of a not for profit organization with local and regional representatives across the UK that had recently undergone a major structural reform. This had effectively localised many of centralised administrative functions and replaced certain linear, local reporting structures with regional matrices, in which certain specialists operated across projects and reported to senior staff from other specializations or central and regional head offices.

While many parts of the change had been relatively warmly received certain significant aspects had either not been understood or ignored; either way they had not been implemented properly. The consequence being that interpersonal difficulties at local team level were arising. On a superficial level this could have been seen as evidence of teething problems, but these were a result of poor planning or, in keeping with the 'inconvenient truth', the provision of an incomplete story that people couldn't follow.

One specific problem related to the differentiation of new titles and associated responsibilities in the new reporting structure. Where previously there had been loosely constructed teams under the direction of a local manager, the new system divided staff into suppliers and clients, yet did not specify how this new system would work. Difficulties arose because the same people as before would be sat around the table managing projects, but the titles and assumed responsibilities they now had were at odds with the dynamics of the team. The consequence was an increase in tension, frustration and emotional trauma (where there had previously been none) as team members felt they had to compete with each other over areas of specific responsibility that had only been partially defined.

A solution to this difficulty came from redesigning the operation and reporting of local teams to better reflect the supplier and client roles that had been assigned to them; thereby clarifying boundaries, creating more efficient working cells and enabling these cells to work together cooperatively.

While this solution was not 'written' by the local teams, it was written for them in consultation. Had they been given the freedom to come up with their own 'story' in the first place they would likely have achieved a similar outcome. It highlights the challenge (mentioned in Chapter 3) of designing rigid systems of change: if these are not perfectly thought out and aligned with the needs of the people affected, there will be friction in the machinery. If the process is prescriptive (as it was in this instance) staff will not feel encouraged to redesign it; instead they will implement what they can and carry on regardless where they can't.

In order to enable staff to 'write their own story' and incorporate and implement these as parts of a cohesive change programme requires the involvement of IDs in localised parts of the organization (as described in Chapter 6). In the above, this was achieved by an external consultant.

Failures in the journey of change:

journey & destination - the destination was appropriate, in that it was both achievable and would satisfy the needs of the organization (improved efficiency) but lack of definition, both in what it should look like and how one should get there, created unnecessary difficulties

CS2a

A more literal example of letting employee's write their own story is given by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn in Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, and involves Toyota taking over the management of the General Motors plant in 1985 in Fremont California. One of the many initiatives it took in transforming engagement and the productivity at the plant was to give workers their own business cards featuring job titles they had come up with themselves. In the example cited a guy checking machine welding had given himself the title of Director of Welding Improvement. He is reported to have been transformed from someone who had previously delighted in sabotaging GM products, by such antics as sealing meat sandwiches into door panels so they would rot and disturb future car owners, into someone who put his card under the windscreen wipers of GM cars he saw out advising owners to contact him if they ever experienced problems with the car.

Without more background it is impossible to weigh the significance of this act against the wider initiatives taken by Toyota. Also while the employee was allowed to write his this part of the story one can be confident the Toyota management laid down the greater narrative. Nevertheless it provides a nice illustration of what research the research tells us; i.e. the more people are encouraged to own what they do, the more engaged and productive they are likely to be.

All aspects of this story relate to the value of power. Before Toyota's enlightened handling of staff this guy's conduct reflected a power struggle between employee and employer. Rebelling against their control he asserted his status and ability to exert some control over GM by taking action intended to harm its reputation. Being encouraged to write his own story allowed him to give himself the status he wanted and be applauded by the organization, turning his desire for status and control into an outward facing positive rather than an inward facing negative.

CS3 - inconvenient truth #3 - It takes both "+" and "–" to create real energy

A large manufacturing and service based organization had recently acquired smaller competitors and was seeking to unify the business and create a unified culture in the interests of improving efficiency and the service provided to customers. The approach decided upon was concentrate on the positives, and get employees behind the idea of a brave new future for the organization.

Rather than achieve this aim, the outcome was continued disaffection between the merged components of the business and no discernable improvement in customer satisfaction or staff engagement.

In concentrating on the positives the business fell into the OD trap of not wanting to concentrate on failures as these reflect badly on the leadership, and trusting that success could be achieved by a combination of improving on what the company was already good at and aspiration.

The two principal problems this created arose from: (1) the company values exercise it instigated to find out what sort of organization the employees wanted to work for, (2) how change was rolled out.

The consultancy process the company instigated to engage with its workforce was very warmly received. Staff saw it as a great opportunity to get the company to listen to the many concerns they had about the way they were managed and the poor service they felt the company provided to its customers.

The instructions from the CEO to concentrate on the positives meant that few of the real concerns expressed by the workers were heard by the board. The positive messages that were distilled from this exercise were further distilled by the CEO to fit with the mission statement he had already drawn up (another example of inconvenient truth #4). Therefore when staff concerns expressed were not addressed it became apparent that the company (contrary to what it had promised) either didn't listen or care.

While the above had a corrosive effect on the ability of the business to roll out its change programme, there was a more subtle negative effect that arose as a consequence of the SD culture in large parts of the organization's service delivery. In attempting to sell what the business felt was a positive vision of the future to an SD audience, it inadvertently achieved the opposite of what it intended - SDs don't buy into brave new visions of the future. A better approach would have been to concentrate on correcting the negatives. In so doing the company would have been seen to directly address the fears of its staff, and rather than introducing something new, the changes would have been perceived as winding the clock back to deal with things that have gone wrong, thereby improving the stability of the business.

In the above case, while there was a desire to convey a positive story, there was actually no passionate vision to which this could be attached. Ironically the whole change initiative was predicated on a perceived 'burning platform', yet there was no acknowledgement that there was a problem to be dealt with. In the absence of a 'burning ambition' the change was predicated on nothing more than a desire to build a higher structure on the already burning platform to get away from the flames.

It is said transactional leadership tends to be motivated by burning platforms (i.e. fear of failure) rather than burning ambition (the desire to do better), which is, in this context, attributed to transformational leadership. However, ambition (in technical terms) is an OD value concerned with status related competition. It is the ID values that give rise to the type of vision that the authors of the 'burning ambition' had in mind. In this instance the ambition involved no more than pursuing short strategies to promote the continued growth of the company.

Failures in the journey of change:

starting point & journey - while it could be argued that there was nothing wrong with the intended destination, the significant failures in ascertaining where the starting point for change was and the absence of effective journey planning, made the destination something of abstract goal.

CS4 - inconvenient truth #4 - Your leaders believe they already "are the change"

A sales orientated business wanted to consolidate its executive board in order to prepare the business for a period of further expansion, having grown rapidly in recent years. One of the stars (Simon) responsible for driving the business forward, having secured a large percentage of its new business and proved himself highly popular with clients, had been promoted to the executive board and given responsibility for a regional operation. At this stage problems began to surface. The performance of the regional operation fell below expectations, reports began surfacing that its staff felt they weren't being led as much as befriended and shouted at alternately, and relationships between Simon and the board, particularly the CEO, began to deteriorate; the former believing his ideas weren't being given serious consideration, that he had been cut adrift from head office and wasn't receiving the support he required. The response of the CEO was to instigate a coaching programme for Simon aimed at correcting his behaviour.

After a period of apparent improvement an impasse was reached, at which both the CEO and Simon independently reached the conclusion their futures lay in separate directions. Simon left the business, and once contractual limitations had been observed, so did the company's largest client.

OD CEOs tend to think they have the answers and best represent their business's future interests. This CEO responded to the issues being created by Simon's elevation by treating him as a problem to be solved, and, when this proved impossible, felt he had done all he could. Simon had entered into the coaching programme with gusto, but soon found he was being coached in a bubble. Outside the bubble nothing changed. While he liked the idea of leading and managing people, he found the reality more stressful than he imagined, especially as he felt he received little in the way of practical support.

The reality was that Simon was an ace salesman but a novice at leadership and management. He was promoted for achievements in one area into a role for which he was unprepared and probably unsuited. In rewarding Simon for his achievements the CEO made the mistake of tying raised status to increased management responsibility. A better alternative would have been to allow Simon to develop his previous sales role at a more senior level and honour his raised status by giving his ideas a greater hearing at board level. It would then have been possible to develop his leadership skills with the support of other board members.

However, this would have required a change of culture. In a highly competitive, 'every man/woman for him/herself' OD culture there was little in the way of mutual support. While both the CEO and Simon had complex motivational make-ups both were driven by the OD values of power and achievement. Consequently, rather than exploring issues openly and seeking solutions collaboratively, the two tended to end up confronting each other: Simon becoming agitated and angry, the CEO putting up barriers and closing himself off. Simon's preparedness to accede to the CEO's suggestion of coaching was in part facilitated by his desire to appease his superior in a bid to aid his advancement, but when it became clear that many of the difficulties being experienced were the responsibility of the CEO, it also became clear the CEO took the view that change revolved around him but did not include him.

The lack of cooperation between the two meant the business achieved the equivalent of adding two 5s together to end up with a 6 rather than a 10. The business lost an extraordinarily good salesman and he lost the organization he needed to flourish.

Failures in the journey of change:

starting point, journey & destination - a failure to understand the needs of Simon and of the organization led the CEO to set a wholly inappropriate destination and condemned the journey of change to failure

CS5 - inconvenient truth #5 - leaders aren't that influential

The premise here is that while leaders and early adopters may be influential in gaining buy in and motivating staff, more significant is whether the proposed change is attractive to the audience: whether it fits with their needs and values.

A fast growing new-media company headed by a charismatic young entrepreneur with a highly motivated and engaged workforce acquired a relatively long established and rather more pedestrian web orientated business. The aim was to inject some of the cultural magic from the parent, re-energise the organization and build on the strengths of its established brand.

The perception before acquisition was that the freewheeling 'just do it' culture of the buyer, as personified by its CEO, would be welcomed and embraced by the staff of the established organization as if they were being liberated from enforced occupation by a foreign power. What ensued was the opposite of this. For the first time in the company's history it experienced staff handing in their resignations.

Reports started coming in to suggest that the new arrivals were perceived more like lunatics taking over the asylum than liberating heroes. While there were good arguments, supported by evidence of previous acquisitions, to suggest the takeover would be good for the established brand, the ID/TD culture of the buyer proved too difficult a pill to swallow for those used to the more conventional OD culture of the longer established organization.

One man's meat is another man's poison!

Failures in the journey of change:

starting point & journey - a failure to understand the culture of the established company represented getting the starting point of the journey wrong. Having made this mistake the bearing taken to the desired destination was bound to be wrong and any journey based on this was bound to end in failure.

CS6 - inconvenient truth #6 - Money is the most expensive way to motivate people

Money is important to everyone. It pays the bills and buys us the things we need. For ODs it is particularly important because the amount they earn and the things they spend their money provide reassurance as to their value to others and serve as advertise their status to others. Because most businesses exist to make money, it seems a no brainer, to OD leaders at least, that money is the best way to motivate people. However, for all other types, and for many ODs, there are things more important than money, that provide greater motivation and are cheaper to provide. To understand what these are simply look at your people's values.

A fast expanding creative IT services based business decided to reward its staff by paying according to the hours employees put in. By providing the type of comfortable, supportive and flexible working environment condusive to encouraging staff to stay on site and put in long hours, and then rewarding those hours with more money, it assumed it would reap the benefit in increased productivity.

However, what transpired was that while overall productivity increased, the innovative quality of the product and the rate at which big ideas emerged fell. This coincided with a period in which some of the company's most creative people left to set up there own businesses.

The most creative people tend to be IDs. While they are passionate about their creative pursuits, they are frequently not the sort of people who want to commit themselves to long hours doing one thing. Their creativity is energised by doing a variety of different things in different environments, interacting with different people and doing their own thing away from others. Unlike ODs, who live to work, they work to live. Consequently, IDs are less likely to want to consistently put in long hours at work, or be motivated by short-term financial rewards or the promise of the greater status and even greater longer term financial rewards that may come the way of the longest/hardest workers.

The unintended consequence of this strategy was to increase the weighting of less creative ODs at the expense of more creative IDs, thereby increasing the wage bill, reducing the quality of the creative work and losing some creative staff to competing businesses. The impact of the changes were masked by improved quantitive productivity as ODs put in longer hours.

This is a common occurrence when ID led businesses become fully established and experienced OD leaders are brought in to grow the company further.

Failures in the journey of change:

starting point, journey & destination - a failure to appreciate the different roles played by differently motivated people in making the company successful, causing the company to misjudge where it was, what conditions would need to met to achieve the desired destination of improved productivity and the impact the changes would have on certain key employees

CS7 - inconvenient truth #7 - A fair process is as important as a fair outcome

A multinational financial organization was seeking to reduce its costs and improve efficiency against the backdrop of the global financial crisis. Therefore not only was it faced with the difficult task of letting staff go but had to do so at a time when institutions like itself were under intense scrutiny for their alleged 'lack of values'.

As a part of a wider restructuring, a mechanism was chosen by which to institute redundancies in relation to a 'transparent' performance grading system, against which all staff could be judged on 'a level playing field'. The statement accompanying the new grading system informed staff that those who worked hard and performed well would receive the required grades to be safe from the unavoidable redundancy programme.

However, when staff began receiving their grades, the perception was that grades were anything but fair, and, instead of one level playing field, there appeared to be many playing fields with their own very different playing conditions. It quickly became apparent that, regardless of how hard one worked and how successful one had been in terms of hitting ones targets, if you worked in a more troubled, less profitable area of the business you were much less likely to receive the grades required to ensure your continued employment. Meanwhile, people in other, higher priority, areas of the business were seen to receive markedly higher grades across the board.

The threat and reality of redundancy is difficult to take in the best of times. In a deep recession it becomes even more difficult. When your effective dismissal is triggered by a transparent misuse or misrepresentation of the mechanism through which you fought for survival, the bitterness and disillusionment caused is magnified.

The bad atmosphere created by this process, which emanated not just from those who had failed to make the grade but also those who had witnessed it first hand, badly damaged staff morale and confidence in the leadership. The fact that this whole episode had unfolded at a time when the company was investing heavily in a new 'values based' leadership programme trading heavily on 'unconditional integrity' only added fuel to the fires of contempt burning in various parts of the organization.

All the above bears the hallmarks of poorly thought out, OD driven, narrow framed strategies in which objectives and the means by which to achieve them are dislocated. ODs, motivated by the need to appear to be doing the 'right' thing and yet do what needs to be done, often miscalculate the consequences of their actions. Level playing fields and integrity are the stuff of the values of social justice and honesty and administering systems to satisfy these conditions requires high levels of responsibility. All of these are ID values (associated with universalism and benevolence). The commercial needs of the bank in this instance related to money, ambition and success, all of which relate to OD values that diametrically oppose the ID values.

In its desire to appear honest and fair the organization's leadership decided to advertise itself as such, and then failed to join the dots when designing and delivering the mechanism for the necessary redundancy programme. As a consequence it gained a reputation with its staff for being the very opposite of being honest and fair.

The irony of the above is that, at an organizational level, there was nothing inherently unfair about the selection of people to be made redundant. Had the mechanism that was actually used been advertised the leadership would have been seen to have taken a difficult decision fairly, advertised it honestly and administered it transparently.

Failures in the journey of change:

journey - the principal failures here involved the means by which to achieve an end - while there may have been failures is assessing the starting point and destination, the failures in making the journey dwarfed these

CS8 - inconvenient truth #8 - Employees are what they think &

CS9 - inconvenient truth #9 - Good intentions aren't enough

#8 acknowledges the important link between behaviour and performance, and the relationship between behaviour and the underlying motivation of the individuals involved, and #9 adds to this by stating that despite the best intentions of staff, they will tend to revert to behaviours they are most comfortable with.

The mistake organizations often make is to ignore underlying drivers of behaviour and adopt the 'route 1' approach of directly training staff to manifest what the organization deems 'desirable' behaviours.

In a spectrum ranging from: the surly shop assistant bidding you to "have a nice day", to the ambitious young director of a multi-national who presents the softer, more collegiate, "I am listening and genuinely open to your concerns" face the organization has decided it should present to staff and the outside world, only to have that face harden at the first hint of personal criticism, examples of these inconvenient truths are so commonplace, yet so under the radar as far as major change strategy is concerned, to warrant a specific corporate case study. Reinforcement exercise will help, but unless they address the underlying drivers they may amount to little more than trying to push water up hill.

Staff are most likely to exhibit desirable behaviours when these behaviours are the natural product of the reaction between their values and the environment in which they are placed. While it may be possible to encourage people of all motivational types to perform a repertoire of learned desirable behaviours, if they don't align with their values, these will be limited in their range, difficult to sustain and vulnerable to changes in the environment.

IDs will find it difficult to stick to a script in the pursuit of sales targets. ODs will find it difficult to listen to constructive feedback and share their problems. SDs will find it difficult to adapt to flexible working arrangements lacking structure. TDs will find it difficult to repeatedly work through a process with mechanical precision.

Appendix: The Evolution of Values

Our values give us our sense of purpose and are at the heart of the processes that gather, store and act upon the information we receive from our environment. In many ways, they are the brain's equivalent of a computer's operating system. But, whereas computer operating systems have been designed for a purpose, our brains have evolved through a process of trial and error. Computers are perfectly logical. We are not. We are guided by our emotions. Sometimes they serve us well. Sometimes they do not.

We are programmed to experience positive emotions like love and happiness when we encounter things with a track record for contributing to our well being; making them seem attractive. We experience negative emotions when we experience things with a track record for harming or endangering us; making us want to avoid them. The intuitions and feelings we experience when faced with new and familiar challenges are emotional responses governed by our needs and values, and we find it very difficult not to do what they tell us.

People interested in change, and wanting to better understand the behavioural aspects of it, are increasingly attracted to the idea of referring to neuroscience. Neuroscience can be hugely illuminating, however, it is not best placed to serve change management. In order to gain a better understanding of the fundamentals of human nature as they affect people in change, one is better off looking to evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology. These provide the big picture view neuroscience is slowly filling in. The picture they paint is already largely complete and fully comprehensible. All it lacks is definition. While high definition is extremely useful when it comes to neurosurgery and the treatment of certain mental conditions, for change management and other big picture concerns, an understanding of evolutionary psychology, and the needs and values theory that is a part of it, is more useful.

Evolution works like this..

The light green worm on the left represents any life form, and the leaf on which it sits represents its environment.

Normally the worm will mate with other similar worms and have offspring very much like itself. However, very occasionally, one of the genes in the first cell created by its parents' loving union - in this example the one that sets out the part of the code that normally reads 'make the worm light green in colour' - mutates and says something different.

This is a copying mistake. It happens rarely and randomly, and is usually disastrous. If it mutates to say 'make the worm right rreen in colour' the worm making instructions will not be understood and the embryo is unlikely to develop into a full grown worm. However, if by chance it says 'make the worm 'dark green' (or 'yellowy green') in colour', the instructions to make a worm will be complete and it should make it to the leaf.

Predators presented with a choice of three worms are likely to be attracted to the ones they can see most easily. Yellowy green worms are more likely to be seen against a dark green leaf and are therefore more likely to be eaten. Dark green worms, meanwhile, are better camouflaged than their light green ancestors, so are less likely to be eaten. Consequently, in the competitive world of worms and their predators, the relative population of dark green worms should grow, while that of light green worms will fall. Yellowy green worms will likely come off worst. If competition between worms for leaves, and between predators and worms, is fierce, it is the yellowy green worms that are the most likely to become extinct first.

However, if the local environment should change, such that leaves become yellowy green, roles will be reversed. Now it is the dark green worms that will tend to fade away, while the population of yellowy green worms grows.

This is how natural selection works. The genes best equipping an organism to survive and breed in its environment will spread out over every generation, while others fade away toward extinction. The most important things to understand from this is are:

(1) genes (and therefore organisms) evolve by random mutation (not design)

(2) organisms and genes do not adapt to their environment; natural selection simply sieves out those least well suited to their environment.

While worms are oblivious to their needs, in the sense they don't know they have to be camouflaged if they don't want to be eaten, we can see that natural selection picks those genes most capable of creating organisms able to survive in the environment in which they find themselves. Therefore, when viewed from a worm's perspective, natural selection appears to select those worms equipped with genes best able to satisfy their survival related needs.

These needs start with maintaining a supply of oxygen, water and energy, and continue into more refined needs, such as avoiding getting eaten. These other needs are directly related to the primary needs because if, for instance, a worm is eaten it will not be able to consume sufficient oxygen, water and energy to enable it to grow to reproductive maturity, and its genes will be snuffed out.

This process of genetic evolution has been going on for over 4 billion years. All life on this planet originated from one single celled life form, from which all our genetic ancestry can be traced.

The process of evolution as it affected my green worm has affected every living organism on Earth: from that first single celled life form, through every organism that has since come and gone, to every bacteria, fungus, plant and creature alive today.

Evolutionary family tree showing the number of years we have to go back to find our common ancestors with plants, jellyfish, insects and birds. You may not be directly related to Brad Pitt, so may have to go back a few hundred years before you come across a common ancestor. This being the case, the '0' under Brad is just intended to mark humanity as it currently is on the family tree.

The process of genetic evolution affects every aspect of a living organism, its behaviour included. Plants don't have a brain but they can still sense what is going on in their environment and respond accordingly. Sunflowers sense the sun and turn to face it throughout the day as it tracks across the sky. Jellyfish sense the amount of oxygen in the water and the direction of the sun and use this information to steer themselves so as to make the most of these, and feed upon the other organisms doing the same.

Sunflowers and jellyfish do not have brains, but, as I have just described, they are still able to process information, make decisions and act accordingly. These are all geared toward the satisfaction of their survival and reproductive needs, and are based upon the relative values they attach to various life sustaining resources. Their values are physiological, in that they relate directly to satisfying their physical needs. For sunflowers and jellyfish light is more highly valued, and therefore more attractive, than the dark, and they behave accordingly.

Around 700m years ago the branch of our shared family tree that led to creatures with brains separated from the others. 100m years on from this we would find our last common ancestor with insects and worms, both of which have brains.

An insect such as a bee has a brain. This enables it to sense more things and make more complex decisions than a jellyfish. It can fly from its hive, find a source of nectar, map out where this is in relation to its hive, fly back to the hive and then convey information to other bees about where this nectar supply can be found. While seemingly extraordinary for such a little creature, bees do not achieve this through consciousness, as we might understand it. They do not reflect on information and come up with creative solutions; they are just running more complex genetic programmes. If sunflowers and jellyfish are soft machines programmed by their genes to behave in the way they do, so are bees.

Brain function adds another layer of values to the process of need satisfaction. While bees, like sunflowers and jellyfish, satisfy their needs by directly valuing that which sustains them, e.g. sunlight and food, bees also value the waggle dance. While the waggle dance may seem a bizarre way for a bee to behave, it is their way of telling each other where food can be found. The bee's urges to perform and observe the waggle dance are driven by a more complex system of values. This serves the same purpose as the simpler value systems of sunflowers and jellyfish, i.e. need satisfaction, but allows the bee much greater flexibility in how it goes about it.

The brain, and the additional layer of 'psychological' values it creates, opens up greater opportunities for cooperation and dealing with change. In bees this enables them to specialise in different tasks and work together for the collective benefit of the greater organism that is the hive, much as the individual cells do in a single sunflower, jellyfish, bee, bird or human.

Brains are just an evolved form of the type of information processing systems owned by all other life forms. They are more complex, therefore they can do more things, but they still perform the same basic function of helping the organism satisfy its needs, and they evolved by the same process of natural selection acting on mutated genes.

Any mutation that increases an organism's ability to survive and reproduce changes the relative values of the things it relies on. The evolution of the brain not only changed this existing pattern of values, it created a new tier of secondary values. Each subsequent genetic mutation affecting the brain impacted directly on this set of values, causing it to evolve.

By the time we reach our common ancestor with birds, just 300m years ago, brain development had reached a level of sophistication that opened up the way for the evolution of independent thinking; i.e. the ability to do more than follow a process strictly prescribed by our genes. Blue tits had never encountered milk bottles or their foil caps until mankind invented them, and therefore were genetically unprepared to know what to do with them. However, blue tits have both learned they can peck through the caps and get at the milk below, and to spread the word. This suggests bird brains are capable of generating memes, i.e. ideas and behaviours that can evolve independently of genes.

Around 100,000-70,000 years ago our ancestors experienced The Great Leap Forward. This marks the appearance of cave art and, we think, evidence of the evolution of complex language and human culture. This is when our memes really took flight, evolving quickly away from our genes. While still dependent on our genes, memes evolve with ever higher levels of gearing. So just as each turn of a bicycle's pedals generates more revolutions of the rear wheel the higher the gear used, memes can evolve ever more quickly than the genes that initially gave birth to them.

From this point on humanity began to innovate: to bring about change and react to changes in our environment at will. Our memetic evolution mimicked genetic evolution inasmuch as individuals and groups of people were able to explore means of improving their abilities to survive and reproduce in ways that had previously only been possible to the species over many generations. By replacing random mutation with conscious experimentation and learning, successful adaptations that might have previously have taken thousands or hundreds of thousands of years, could be achieved in an instant. The development of language enabled these adaptations to spread through the population as quickly as people were able to meet. Previously successful mutations could only spread outward through the gene pool when parents passed them onto their children.

The superior need satisfying potential of consciously driven change (innovation) over genetic evolution (through meiosis and random mutation) might be compared to the superior information spreading potential of the Internet over a single message in a bottle. That memes also offered the ability to spread information immediately through language rather than over millennia through genes came as something a double whammy. This explains why mankind came from savannah scrounging apes to space exploration in a period in which our physical appearance hardly changed at all.

The increasing importance of change and of shared and competing cultures in our environment vastly increased the relative importance of our psychological values. These are the values that came to populate the DNA Motivational Map.

Just as our capacity for language is hard wired into genes, but the exact form of our language is down to our memes/our upbringing, while our propensities to develop a particular set of values are hard wired into our genes, how these manifest themselves and develop are expressed through, and influenced by, our memes in relation to our environment.

Today memes are the dominant driving force behind mankind's cultural evolution. Our abilities to fly to the moon, create the Internet and build artificial intelligence in machines, as well as just about every conceivable aspect of the modern world, are all the product of our memes. However, underneath it all, we are the same soft machines we ever were, and remain heavily dependent on emotions programmed by our genes.

We are not perfect. Mankind does not represent the end destination of evolution any more than the dinosaurs did 100 million years ago. We are work in progress. We are not perfectly adapted to our environment, even though we are increasingly responsible for designing and changing it. The cities we are building, the global warming we are contributing to and the global economic and political systems upon which we depend are all the product of our memes and the needs and values they serve.

The problem for us is that our memes, like our genes, are not perfect. We are not perfectly attuned to satisfy our needs. We may have some advantages over the light green worm when faced with change, but we should be under no illusion we are very far from ridding ourselves of its handicaps. We are not yet able to reprogram our genes on any significant scale, and, for the time being at least, have to work with what we've got. The genetic makeup of our heirs, and the environment around them, will continue to evolve, but this does not necessarily mean they will be able to adapt to changes in their environment.

The perceptions, thoughts and behaviours that are our memes, are still generated by the genetically programmed soft machine 'designed' by natural selection: a process of trial, error and elimination. The feelings and intuitions on which we base the vast majority of our decisions are governed by needs and values that have been programmed into our brains with the help of our genes.

While we may have some ability to adapt to our environment, our genetic programming still hugely restricts us. Sure, the reliability of our programming is based on lengthy trials, but these were conducted in the past, and in very different environments to those now presenting themselves. The faster we change the world around us the less adapted to our environment we become. In order to appreciate how restricted we are, how these restrictions work, and how we may learn to free ourselves from them so as to overcome the challenges change will continue to bring our way, it is imperative we really get a handle on our needs and values and how they affect us.

At present, as a collective, we are almost entirely ignorant of the role they play. If we were not we would have been far better able to avoid all manner of calamities. On the domestic scale, many people would have been able to avoid conflict and unhappiness. In the corporate world, the vast majority the 70% of organizations who make a hash of large scale change would not. On the global front, we would not have had to endure the financial meltdown, and we would have already taken appropriate steps to avert the environmental meltdown now beginning to unfold.

Come gather 'round people Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters Around you have grown

And accept it that soon You'll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you Is worth savin'

Then you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin'

Bob Dylan

The Times They Are A Changin'

