Empathizing
Are we mostly doing Empathy Theatre in our change programs?
Working on organizational behavior change, I have heard things like.. let's listen to the people, let's do town halls, surveys, focus groups, let's capture how employees feel about the change, what their concerns are, what they need from us.
Now we have listened!! Let's go and design the change approach.... and then...
The change initiative didn't quite go as planned... the adoption was low, and the people went back to the old way of working.
So why did things not work? We listened and we gave people everything they asked for.
Lets revisit that
In the project, you captured sentiment (in our own biased way)...we took data like: people are resistant to the new system, and we assumed it was a communication issue, these people lack understanding, let's do more town halls, more emails from leadership, more FAQs.
However when they say they're resistant, it could also mean they don't trust the people driving the change, they don't know the meaning of the change and that is not a communication issue, that is a trust issue and the way you design for that is totally different.
Or it could mean their performance metrics still reward the old way of working - so adopting the new approach actually puts them at risk.
See, no amount of town halls fixes a system that punishes the behavior you're asking for.
Nowhere in the listening phase do we take our data and then do an actual behavioral diagnosis to classify it, instead we just jump into designing initiatives.
We are talking about real people and we are meant to be enabling them to adopt new ways of working that actually make sense for them, yet we use no diagnostic models to take that empathy data and figure out whether we're looking at a knowledge gap, a belief issue, a motivation conflict, a trust deficit, or a system barrier.
We just confirm to ourselves that we know what people need (yes, I have had change leads tell me those exact words) - and yes, there is nothing wrong with the change team representing the employee voice, but they need to do so with the right approach to back it up.
And here's what makes this worse in change than anywhere else - you usually only get one or two good tries, if you misclassify the problem and roll out the wrong initiative, you burn credibility.
People learn that the company listened but nothing changed and next time they won't engage honestly at all.
The empathy theatre becomes self-reinforcing...
Do you agree that we could be doing empathy theatre in our change programs, and that we are missing vital pieces between listening and designing?