In the 1999 film The Matrix, the protagonist, Neo, is offered a choice of two pills: one red, one blue. If he takes the red pill, it will show him that he’s living in an illusion. He’ll discover the painful truth that reality is far more complex and demands far more from him than he’d ever imagined. But if he chooses the blue pill, he’ll go back to his old life, in blissful ignorance of the illusion. After a moment’s thought, he takes the red pill—a choice that marks the beginning of an epic personal journey. In a series of heroic acts, Neo finally frees the human race from a prison: one it had created for itself through its dependence on intelligent machines that would ultimately turn against it.

We suspect that many leaders—perhaps you?—will be faced with a similar choice after reading this book. If you choose the red pill, you’re committing yourself to adopting the approach to making change happen in the way that we’ve outlined here, an approach that is equally balanced between performance and health. The catch is that if you take this path, it will be more challenging than others you could follow and will make more demands of you as a leader both in terms of “doing” and “being.” And despite the science that we’ve brought to bear, it’s still a path that leads you into unknown territory as you likely haven’t personally led or experienced the approach before—it’s a leap of faith, if you will.

The alternative is the blue pill. Put the book down or hand it to a friend or colleague and go about managing and leading in the same way you’ve always done. Chances are it’s served you reasonably well in the past, it keeps you within your comfort zone, and it fits in with what the people around you have come to expect. Maybe the change program you lead won’t be as fully successful as it could otherwise be (the “butterfly”), but at least things will move forward (“a bigger, fuzzier caterpillar”). As long as things don’t go south, you’ll move to a new role soon enough and a stronger foundation will be there for the next leader to build on.

This chapter is for those of you who choose the red pill. It’s for those who feel, as we do, that it’s simply not good enough to apply traditional approaches that yield 30 percent success rates. In the spirit of Einstein’s notion that, “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result,” these leaders want a better way to change. They now see clearly that the balancing of human and mechanistic approaches that comes from applying the Five Frames of Performance and Health is proven to be that better way. It’s also for those who want to deliver an impact that isn’t just part of their job, it’s part of their leadership legacy. Beyond the financial impact, they’ll expand what’s possible for individuals and the organization by building capability and reframing limiting mindsets. They’ll delight not just shareholders, but also customers and other stakeholders who will see and experience the change as a beacon for “doing things the right way.” They’ll have built the organization’s muscle for making change happen—leaving it more agile and able to shape a winning future in an ever-changing industry context.

In this chapter, we answer the top five most frequently asked questions we get from those who choose the red pill: What to do if you can’t get your senior leader on board? What does the program of work look like for putting the Five Frames into practice? How can you catch up to address weaknesses or close gaps when your change program is already in mid-flight? How should you measure health improvements over time? In the context that we’ve covered an extraordinary amount of ground in a lot of detail in this book, what do we see are the most important takeaways for change leaders? We’ll then close with a few parting thoughts to encourage you on your way!

What If I Can’t Get My Senior Leader on Board?

During the many Change Leader Forums we’ve held over the past few years, we’ve heard this question more often than any other. People say, “I have real conviction that putting an equal emphasis on performance and health and using Five Frames to do so is the way we should drive change, but my senior leader doesn’t get it and won’t support it—in particular, the health side of the equation. What can I do?” In response, we offer three pieces of advice.

First, a question for you: Have you applied the thinking behind the influence model to your boss? Let’s start with fostering understanding and conviction: have you discussed using a balanced performance and health approach with them directly, or are you assuming he or she won’t get it? Have you understood what your boss really cares about—the sources of meaning that motivate her or him (remember, contrary to what your logical mind might tell you, there’s an 80 percent chance it’s far more than just delivering the numbers)—and have you drawn on these passions to tell a compelling story about why this is the right way to approach the change?

Now let’s move to role modeling. Have you identified who your leader looks to for advice, and got these individuals on your side? Have you put your leader in contact with other senior leaders or advisers who’ve gone through performance and health transformations of their own and can share their battle-hardened wisdom and experience?

Moving to the next influence lever related to building skills and confidence, have you shared this book (or a summary tailored to your specific situation) with him or her? Or have you had an expert on the approach join a conversation with him or her? Would she or he be willing to attend a Change Leaders Forum?

When it comes to the final lever of reinforcement using formal mechanisms—incentives, structures, processes, and systems—you may have little control over how these levers affect your boss. At the same time, running the OHI survey can give you a fact base specific to your organization on which to have the conversation about current and desired alignment on internal direction, quality of execution, and capacity for renewal. From there, the conversation about applying the Five Frames becomes a natural next step.

We’re struck by how often the assumption that one’s leader won’t be comfortable with the idea of placing as much emphasis on health as on performance proves untrue. More often than not, it comes down to a misperception: it’s not that leaders actually reject the idea of working on health with equal rigor and discipline, but rather that they’re unaware of a scientific approach to do so that’s both practical and reliable.

If using the influence model in the manner described here isn’t enough to get your leader on board, our second piece of advice is to find a way to prove the power of the approach on a small scale. Along the same lines as our apple analogy in Chapter 6, talking about a successful change is different than providing a taste of its impact. If you can find a small-scale pilot in your organization that is less dependent on senior leader support to be successful, either because an appetite for change already exists (or can be developed quickly), or because your leader is willing to lend support on an experimental basis, then you have the opportunity for a “taste test.” That should be enough to prove the benefits of making an apple a day part of the management menu, so to speak.

Our third piece of advice is this: if none of these suggestions pans out, ask for forgiveness instead of permission. All the evidence we’ve found shows that even if you can’t adopt all our recommendations, every aspect of health that you pursue gives you a better chance of becoming and staying successful. It’s a bit like your own health: even if your favorite meal is burgers and chips, going to the gym three times a week still pays dividends. So, although you’d undoubtedly do better to have your senior leader on board, you’re not automatically doomed to failure if you don’t; it’s just that achieving the level of success you aspire to will be more difficult.

In everything we’ve said here, we’ve assumed that not having your senior leader on board simply means that she or he is unlikely to play the role we described in Chapter 8. That’s one thing. But if for some reason your senior leader is actively opposed to your performance and health efforts, that’s something else entirely. If you find yourself in this situation and even after following the steps described in this chapter, it remains, you’d be wise to consider investing your time and energy in another organization. Otherwise, research and experience are very clear that you’ll be banging your head against a wall with very low probability of breaking it down. In other words, when you can’t change your leader, it’s time to change your leader (by moving to another part of the organization or leaving it altogether)!

What Does It Look Like to Put the Five Frames into Practice?

In Part I of this book, we shared that when you put equal emphasis on performance and health, you’ll increase your odds of successfully leading large-scale change from 30 percent to 79 percent. In Part II of this book, we shared the Five Frames of Performance and Health approach that described all of the steps required to achieve the right balance in every stage of the change program. This approach is summarized in Exhibit 10.1.

This is the overall roadmap and work plan. The work is directional in that you shouldn’t move from one stage to the next until you’ve completed all of the needed steps. Bear in mind, however, that what you learn during one stage may prompt the need to refine decisions you’ve made in an earlier one—in that way, the process is iterative. Once you’ve addressed all of the elements in all of the stages, the odds are that your organization will be higher performing and healthier—able to continuously improve itself going forward.

One element that doesn’t jump off the page in Exhibit 10.1 is how and when the senior team convenes as a team to make decisions together. This is in part because the answer to the question is very context-dependent, whereas everything included in the exhibit can be applied to almost every change challenge and opportunity, as the examples in this book demonstrate. You will recall, however, that we did address this topic in part in Chapter 8, as we discussed using the “hold up the mirror” session technique to align the team and then described techniques to enable it to become a high-performing team over time.

That said, the pattern we observe most often is that the senior team convenes at the beginning of the effort to align on adopting the performance and health approach to making the change happen. This gives the team a common language and methodology to work with during the change process. They then convene again roughly halfway through each stage so as to generate hypotheses for the current stage based on an initial set of facts, and to make final decisions from the last stage having had their hypotheses road-tested by the working team. During the Act stage, which can often last for many months or even years, the senior team typically meets monthly in an Executive Steering Committee capacity to review progress on performance and health and adjust efforts as needed. Keep in mind that, all the while, as individuals, the team members will be involved in the work throughout the process—be it being interviewed in the Aspire and Assess stages, brainstormed with in the Architect stage, as initiative sponsors in the Act and Advance stages, and so on.

How Can We Catch Up in Areas We’ve Neglected?

As management consultants, we often receive calls from leaders whose change programs have somehow gotten stuck. On inspection, we typically find that the reason they can’t move forward is that they haven’t paid sufficient attention to some aspect of health or performance at an earlier stage of their change efforts. The question is then how to get the program back on track. Can the organization make up for what it has neglected? Does it need to start all over again? Is it better off staying on the horse it’s already riding? Or should it change horses midway through the race?

We find that the point of failure most often comes in the fourth stage of the change program—Act, when organizations find that plans don’t get implemented as quickly as expected or achieve the desired impact. The reason is often hard to swallow: It’s the result of a lack of discipline and rigor in tackling the health frames and applying the master strokes in the first three stages of the change program. When this is the case, most of the work already done related to performance is likely to stand, and the way forward is to invest time and resources in making good the missing health elements. In practical terms, this means completing the OHI, developing a health aspiration that targets a shortlist of management practices, digging into the mindsets that matter, and using the influence model levers to bring about any needed mindset shifts, taking care to build these actions into the implementation of the portfolio of performance initiatives in addition to other broad-based performance and health-related actions (e.g., interactively cascading the change story, mobilizing influence leaders, making it personal for a critical mass, and maintaining high-impact two-way communications).

More generally, the answer is to go back to the earliest moment of failure in the journey and start over at that point. For example, a company that didn’t set clear medium-term “tough but doable” performance aspirations would do well to go back to the first performance frame (“strategic objectives”) and start again, even if it has already gone a long way on its change journey. A company that’s suffering from waning commitment and low energy levels but has laid a solid foundation in the first three stages may simply need to fine-tune the “ownership and energy” elements in the Act stage. And so on.

Most often it’s health rather than performance factors that have been neglected. If that’s the case, we’d emphasize that the right time to make a start—as would also be true in the personal health analogy—is always right now . Just as with personal health, every day you push forward on maximizing performance without tending to your health takes away from your longevity, so too with every day you push your change program forward with less than healthy practices, you are reducing the probability that your efforts will lead to sustainable impact.

How Do We Measure Health Improvements Over Time?

We’ve talked about the OHI as the most robust diagnostic tool available to measure your health holistically. In Chapter 3, we likened it to the equivalent of getting a physical at the Mayo Clinic, widely regarded as one of the best hospitals in the world. Like a visit to the Mayo Clinic, however, it requires a meaningful investment of time. In the OHI’s case, it’s a 20-minute, 98-question survey. Given its intensity, most companies choose to use the full OHI annually, much like a human gets an annual physical.

In the interim, organizations typically employ a “pulse survey” approach to keep tabs on their health. This method asks a shortlist of questions related to the specific shifts being targeted. More specifically, a pulse survey typically consists of two questions per management practice priority, one being a question from the initial OHI survey so that the absolute change can be measured, and one that asks employees to say whether they feel they are seeing real progress on the topic. The survey then asks four questions related to the extent employees see positive role modeling, reinforcement mechanisms, storytelling, and an increase in their skills and confidence vis-à-vis the target mindset and behavior shifts. Two final, self-reflective questions are then typically asked: do the employees feel they are proactively leading the desired changes in their area? What interference is getting in the way of them doing even more? For an organization focused on three management practices, the pulse survey would be 12 questions in total (6 covering the management practices, 4 related to the influence levers, and the 2 open-ended questions), and it would take only a minute or two to complete.

Pulse surveys have benefits beyond helping change leaders gauge progress. They also reinforce the importance of the health priorities in the minds of the respondents (in the spirit of John Doer’s best-seller, Measure What Matters). It spotlights areas of best practice (and trouble areas) to be learned from. It can be deployed in targeted ways to test the efficacy of specific interventions (comparing the results of where an intervention has happened to the results of an area where it hasn’t yet). It also reinforces personal accountability through the reflective questions at the end—and can be analyzed to create self-awareness where leaders have misconceptions of themselves. For example, if one’s reports indicate they are experiencing tepid role modeling from their leaders, yet their leader feels they are a 10 on a 10 scale in proactively leading the desired changes, an insight to move a leader from being “unconsciously incompetent” to “consciously incompetent” awaits.

Another approach to monitoring health available to leaders that is becoming increasingly popular is what we call the OHI Live survey. OHI Live provides a reliable real-time read on health by asking employees just one randomized question a day on a rotating basis. Sampling is such that change leaders have a statistically valid read on organizational health on a daily basis—providing maximum visibility into what’s working and where early intervention may be helpful.

What Are the Most Important Takeaways for Change Leaders?

We have indeed covered a lot in this book, both in terms of breadth and depth. Beneath it all, we see three fundamental principles that sit behind everything you’ve read. They are right at the heart of our findings, and we’d encourage you to keep them in mind so that you stay grounded in the fundamentals of performance and health as you embark on and progress through your journey of leading change at scale.

The first principle is that performance and health matter equally—and can be measured and managed with equal rigor. As we’ve said previously, the most important word in the phrase performance and health is “and.” In all the decisions you make and actions you take as a change leader, we encourage you to address both dimensions at once whenever you can. Bearing in mind that it’s the health aspects that are most often neglected, we suggest you put extra emphasis on that side of the equation. We’ve seen time and time again that the more change leaders push themselves out of their comfort zone to address the health aspects, the further those zones expand such that, ultimately, they are equally comfortable with both sides of the equation. And we’d be remiss not to bring back a lesson we shared in Chapter 1: the better things are going on the performance-side of things, the more likely it is leaders will become complacent about organizational health. Change leaders need to guard against this tendency, and deal with it quickly should it arise.

The second principle is that nothing changes unless people do. In the end, improving an organization’s performance and health comes down to getting people to do things in a different way. That requires us to understand why we behave the way we do both organizationally and individually (our underlying mindsets), and to take proactive steps to expand or outgrow any limiting beliefs that are present. We also need to accept and work with the “predictably irrational” inherent biases that are part of the human condition, no matter how silly they may seem in the cold light of logic. The approaches and tools we use should always be viewed through the lens of “How does this help us to understand and influence people in the organization to adopt the mindsets and behaviors we need to achieve our aspirations?” When our actions are guided by this principle, we are in the business of transforming human systems. Back to our analogy to the natural world, which we introduced in Chapter 4: by this we mean we’re achieving the “can’t go back” transformational effect of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly—not just creating a bigger, fatter, and fuzzier caterpillar.

The third principle we underscore is that there is always choice . As a change leader, we’ve done our best to equip you with insights and tools you need to influence employees to choose to change—both in terms of leading the proverbial horse to water (e.g., the influence model), as well as helping it become aware of its thirst (e.g., making it personal). At the end of the day, however, there can be no guarantees the horse will drink from the well. Even though it’s not perfect, however, the approach we offer is certainly the best one out there as far as we’re aware.

The concept of choice doesn’t just apply to those you’re looking to influence, but also to you as a change leader. This brings us back to the “red pill or blue pill” question. If we were having a conversation with you, we’d bet good money we could read what pill you’ll choose by the language you use. We’ll either hear the language of doubt such as, “I’d like to put what I’ve read into practice”; “I want to put it into practice”; or, “I will try to put it into practice.” Or, we’ll hear the language of mastery such as, “I will put what I’ve read into practice”; “I can be counted on to put it into practice”; or, “I am going to put it into practice.”

The language of doubt comes from leaders who are very likely to become a statistic, reinforcing that 70 percent of change programs fail. Why? Their language betrays their inner doubt. At the first sign of resistance they back down, reverting to the approaches they are comfortable with and that others won’t challenge. The language of mastery, on the other hand, reveals an inner commitment and conviction that indicates they’ll follow things through even in the face of initial resistance and expect to be judged on what they achieve.

So, where are you in relation to performance and health? Would you like to, do you want to, will you try to? Or will you, can you be counted on to, are you going to? In the spirit of a good Hollywood ending, we turn to another cinematic classic to offer you encouragement. To quote Star Wars Jedi Master Yoda, “Do or do not. There is no ‘try.’”

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David Whyte once wrote, “Work, paradoxically, does not ask enough of us, yet exhausts the narrow part of us we bring to the door.”¹ The Five Frames approach addresses this paradox by tapping into our highest aspirations and deepest motivations at work. It does this by working directly with the human side of change with the same level of rigor and discipline as the technical side of change. When put into practice, it unleashes tremendous energy for change across large groups of people. Having witnessed the impact on many occasions, we can confidently say that leaders who use the Five Frames to pursue large-scale change will find that the work is among the most—if not the most—fulfilling of their careers. We look forward to profiling the success of your change program in our third edition!