I’m writing a series on organizational behavior change... Part 1 is Meaning.
I'm starting with Meaning because when Meaning does not get supported, almost everything that happens ends up getting interpreted as pressure.
Lets look a some elements of trying to build adoption in a change program. Usually the logic is to add more...
-more comms -more decks -more town halls -more training -more tracking
and for a moment it can look like it’s working because all those new things that MUST to get done - can seem like they are producing results....but not change.
See, when Meaning is weak, all of that turns into a pressure system. It's not that people are resisting, instead.. as I have done so myself and as I have seen in working in change from within... people do workarounds.
So in the end you get half-the change, which ends up slowing quite significantly the moment leaderships attention moves to the next thing.
Meaning is the sense-making mechanism that makes a change feel legitimate and self-endorsed in someone’s real context.
When it’s there, people start asking operational questions and integrating the change into work, however when it’s missing, the system defaults to informal narratives and defensive interpretations.
I think we have all heard the questions:
-Why is this happening to us? -Who decided? -What are they not telling us?
Change programs are notorious for telling us all we need is training and comms.. and those are necessary, but also incomplete. Those questions we ask are not gaps that happen because of comms, they are gaps in the arhitecture of behavior change.
Here is a quick set of 6 questions you can use before doing anything else:
1) Can people explain the change in one sentence? 2) Do they believe the rationale applies to their work, or only “the business”? 3) Can they name the specific friction removed for their role? 4) Do they have any agency (within constraints)? 5) Trade-off literacy: can they name what gets harder short-term without spiraling? 6) Voluntary uptake: does any adoption occur without incentives*, surveillance, or escalation?
*Contingent incentives can buy short-term action but often reduce internalization when they become the main adoption strategy.
If you’re mostly getting no's, then you should work on the the Meaning layer first.
I just published The Ultimate Guide to Organizational Change - Part 1: Meaning It includes tools and plays you can use right away... you can find it on my substack, Architecting Behavior...
This will be a long series in which I will be covering many areas of organizational behavior change.... hope you enjoy it,
Robert