organizational change

Great Organizations: Permanent change

How do you get a group of people -- 10, 1000, 100 000 -- to simultaneously and permanently change their behavior, even when nobody's "watching"? That's the challenge of organizational change. Herding cats might seem easy by comparison.

In our experience, most organizational change efforts don't reach their goals because the people who want the change (leaders, politicians, parents, etc.) haven't figured out what will motivate everyone else (employees, citizens, kids, etc.) to permanently change their behavior. So if change happens at all, it very quickly falls back to the status quo.

We believe that people change their behaviors when they think the results are desirable (congruent intentions), and believe the change is consistent with their own beliefs (congruent values). Traditional change levers, like role and responsibility descriptions, top-down directives, compensation incentives -- frequently fail to address underlying employee intentions and values.

The key to successful organizational change, in our experience, is to align employees' (citizens', kids', etc.) intentions with the organization's intentions, within a framework of shared values. This takes place in a sophisticated, dynamic dialogue between "organization" and individuals. FT helps organizations plan and execute this dialogue, so that change succeeds.