I had a client this week with one of his customers, actually a group of customers, who he perceived had really great ideas but just didn't get around to implementing those ideas. He was frustrated and wanted to get my view regarding how to resolve this. Rather than respond with the general "do a force field and see what it suggests," I decided to share some theory on change management. As it turned out, he went with the force field idea, but my email to him made me realize that we try to change people with little or no idea about the theory behind change, so here it is!
The theory that makes sense to me is the theory of planned behavior (TPB; Azjen, 1991) where he suggested that our behavior that creates a specific change (to reduce our alcohol consumption, stop smoking, or to implement change in our business) is driven directly by our change intentions. In other words if we intend to change something we have a good probability of doing it. So what drives our change intention? According to Azjen there are three things; our attitude to the issue (do we think that the change is a good thing), the subjective norm (what our peers think about the issue), and finally our behavioral control (the degree of difficulty we think we are facing).
In my client's change situation the variables based on Azjen's (1991) TPB he needed to decide where the problem was; their personal atttitude towards change, the groups'attitude to the change, and the perceived degree of difficulty in the task. Once he decided where the blockage was it would be a simple task to develop some specific actions to resolve the situation. For example, if the subjective norm is the issue I would pick a couple of the early adopter members of the group and engineer some change success and get them to talk about it (and publically reward and recognize them for doing so). If the problem was in behavioral control I would give them a coach to help them create and maintain the change.
If all that sounds like too much theory of course you can just do a force field on it (see this link of me doing one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCPlKHuYwRY ) but why not use the TPB and then do a force field on the specific issue that is blocking your change.
Great post, Chris. As usual, you've got me thinking.
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