6

Communicating the Change Vision

A great vision can serve a useful purpose even if it is understood by just a few key people. But the real power of a vision is unleashed only when most of those involved in an enterprise or activity have a common understanding of its goals and direction. That shared sense of a desirable future can help motivate and coordinate the kinds of actions that create transformations.

Gaining understanding and commitment to a new direction is never an easy task, especially in large enterprises. Smart people make mistakes here all the time, and outright failure is not uncommon, even in well-known firms. Managers undercommunicate, and often not by a small amount. Or they inadvertently send inconsistent messages. In either case, the net result is the same: a stalled transformation.

Two Cases of Failure to Communicate

A division-level general manager running a telecommunications business says that a group developed a vision for change last year and spent a great deal of time communicating it broadly. Go down a few levels in the hierarchy, and people say, “Vision? What vision?” Checking further, you find that the seeming inconsistency is quite explainable. Senior managers did expend what seemed to them like a lot of effort communicating the vision. They devoted precious time at the annual strategic planning meeting to that topic. They ran three or four articles in the company newspaper. One senior manager spent hours helping to produce a video for employees. And the general subject was on the executive committee agenda during at least a dozen meetings. Furthermore, if you push first-line managers a little harder, they admit to having heard something. But they honestly cannot remember much, mostly because they are overwhelmed with information, only a small fraction of which has to do with the new vision. “Something about customers and partnerships, wasn’t it?” And the more candid among them will say: “It was just a bunch of jaw movements. Two weeks after they announced the new vision, they promoted some jerk whose approach is totally inconsistent with that message.”

Another disastrous but not uncommon scenario: The vision is communicated often, but poorly. “Our goal is to become the first truly transnational firm at the conjunction of the converging communication/information industries to achieve both a boundaryless organization and a paradigm shift strategy.” As ridiculous as this may sound, some interesting ideas lurk in that sentence. But as communication, even if repeated often, the statement works very poorly.

Why does this happen? Failure in the first three phases of a transformation effort often contributes to problems here. When the urgency rate isn’t high enough, people don’t listen carefully to information about a new vision. If the guiding coalition isn’t the right group, it will have difficulty both creating and sending an appropriate message. If the vision itself is too blurry or just a bad idea, selling poor goods becomes a tough job. But even when the first three phases of change are handled well, people still often have difficulty because of the sheer magnitude of the task. Getting a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand people to understand and accept a particular vision is usually an enormously challenging undertaking.

For people who have been trained only to be managers, communication of vision can be particularly difficult. Managers tend to think in terms of their immediate subordinates and boss, not the broader constituencies that need to buy into a vision. They tend to be most comfortable with routine factual communication, not future-oriented strategizing and dreaming. Of course, they can learn. But that requires time, effort, and, perhaps most of all, a clear sense of what the problem is and how it can be solved.

The Magnitude of the Task

Failures to communicate vision are often attributed to either limited intellectual capabilities among lower-level employees or a general human resistance to change, and, hence, to acceptance of information about change. While both of these factors can be relevant, neither gets at the most basic problem.

The development of a transformational vision often requires those on the guiding coalition to spend a few hundred hours collecting information, digesting it, considering alternatives, and eventually making choices. I’ve seen more than a few cases in which after months of work some of the senior executives involved had great difficulty articulating the latest version of their vision. Not intelligent enough? Hardly. Resisting change? To some degree, yes. But more fundamentally, I think this problem reflects difficulties inherent to the process.

Accepting a vision of the future can be a challenging intellectual and emotional task. Our minds naturally generate dozens of questions. What will this mean for me? My friends? The organization? What other alternatives are there? Are any of the other options better? If I’m going to have to operate differently, can I do it? Will sacrifices from me be required in the process of achieving the vision? How do I feel about those sacrifices? Do I really believe what I’m hearing about a direction for the future? Or are others playing some game, perhaps to improve their positions at my expense?

One of the main reasons that vision creation is such a challenging exercise is that those on the guiding coalition have to answer all these questions for themselves, and that takes time and a lot of communication. The purely intellectual task, the part that could be done by a strategy consultant, is difficult enough, but that often is a minor part of the overall exercise. The emotional work is even tougher: letting go of the status quo, letting go of other future options, coming to grips with the sacrifices, coming to trust others, etc. Yet after they are done with this most difficult work, those on a guiding coalition often act as if everyone else in the organization should become clear and comfortable with the resulting vision in a fraction of that time. So a gallon of information is dumped into a river of routine communication, where it is quickly diluted, lost, and forgotten (see, for example, figure 6–1).

So why do smart people behave this way? Partly, the culprit is old-fashioned condescension. “I’m management. You’re labor. I don’t expect you to understand anyway.” But more important, we undercommunicate because we can’t figure out a practical alternative: Put all 10,000 employees through the same exercise as the guiding coalition? Not likely.

The magnitude of the task unnerves people. If the guiding coalition spends a total of 150 hours working on the vision, and if we allow only 20 percent of that for communication to others, that’s still 30 hours per person times (let’s say) 10,000 people. At $14 an hour for wages and another $6 for benefits, that’s $20 × 30 × 10,000 = $6 million. Few firms have room for an additional expense of $6 million in their budgets.

FIGURE 6-1

A failure to communicate: How a change vision gets lost in the clutter

So how do you deal with this problem? Seven principles appear to be closely associated with this stage in a successful transformation (as summarized in table 6–1).

Keep It Simple

The time and energy required for effective vision communication are directly related to the clarity and simplicity of the message. Focused, jargon-free information can be disseminated to large groups of people at a fraction of the cost of clumsy, complicated communication. Technobabble and MBA-speak just get in the way, creating confusion, suspicion, and alienation. Communication seems to work best when it is so direct and so simple that it has a sort of elegance.

TABLE 6-1

Key elements in the effective communication of vision

The challenge of simple and direct communication is that it requires great clarity of thought plus more than a little courage. Remember the old saw: If I had more time, I’d write you a shorter letter. It’s much harder to be clear and concise than overcomplicated and wordy. Simple also means no bamboozling. Technobabble is a shield. If the ideas are dumb, others will recognize them as dumb. Dropping the armor makes us more vulnerable in the short term, which is why we are often reluctant to do so.

A few examples:

VERSION #1: Our goal is to reduce our mean time to repair parameters so that they are perceptually lower than all major competitors inside the United States and out. In a similar vein, we have targeted new-product development cycle times, order process times, and other customer-relevant processes for change.

VERSION #2: We are going to become faster than anyone in our industry at satisfying customer needs.

All professions develop a specialized vocabulary, partly out of necessity when needed language doesn’t exist, partly as a means of differentiating themselves. Using specialized language helps when you are talking to a brother or sister professional. Similar speech is confusing when you are talking to someone outside the profession. Because most organizations have employees and external constituencies (such as customers and suppliers) that belong to dozens of professions (mechanical engineers, accountants, market researchers, managers), whenever jargon is used, some people will understand and feel included while most of the audience will feel confused and left out. Consequently, all widespread communication in a change effort must be jargon free. When accountants talk only to other accountants, that’s a different matter.

Consider two more examples:

VERSION #1: Through a process of debureaucratization, we will empower our frontline employees to better serve idiosyncratic customer requirements.

VERSION #2: We are going to throw out some of the rule books and give employees more discretion to do the right thing for our customers.

Use Metaphors, Analogies, Examples

I’ve often heard people say: Because our company is big and complex, we cannot communicate a sensible vision in a short time using simple language. What these individuals don’t understand is the power of metaphor, analogy, example, or just plain colorful language to communicate complicated ideas quickly and effectively.

For example:

VERSION #1: We need to retain the advantages of economies of great scale and yet become much less bureaucratic and slow in decision making in order to help ourselves retain and win customers in a very competitive and tough business environment (thirty-nine words).

VERSION #2: We need to become less like an elephant and more like a customer-friendly Tyrannosaurus rex (sixteen words).

The image of a vicious dinosaur may seem odd, but for the electronics company that chose it, that idea accurately communicated a great deal. The industry had experienced an explosion of new competition. Small firms were failing each month, and many of the big firms were losing money. The T-rex company decided that it needed to become much more aggressive if it was to survive. The idea of a tiger came to mind, but the company was too big for that to be credible. Besides, size had its advantages if the firm could become fast and tough in the service of customers. Hence, the idea of a customer-friendly Tyrannosaurus rex.

If most of the management and employee base in this company liked the image of an elephant or were disgusted by the notion of becoming a T-rex, this communication would have failed. But just the opposite was true. At some hard-to-explain emotional level, most people loved the king-of-dinosaurs idea. It helped them to come to grips with their concerns about change.

Another example:

VERSION #1: We want to begin designing and manufacturing more products that are perceived by the customer base as different, highly recognizable, and prestigious. Such products will have significantly higher prices and margins (thirty-one words).

VERSION #2: We are going to be making fewer Fiats and more Mercedes (eleven words).

Again, if the employees valued Fiats more than Mercedes, this communication would fail. Or if they were in some isolated mountain village in Asia and had little experience with these cars, the message would mean little. But neither was the case for the actual company. This simple, eleven-word sentence delivered a great deal of information in an emotionally appealing way.

Well-chosen words can make a message memorable, even if it has to compete with hundreds of other communications for people’s attention. Really good advertising people are skilled at this sort of word/image selection. Those of us with degrees in engineering, economics, physical science, or finance are often not. Nevertheless, anyone can draw on the expertise of others. And most people, at least in my experience, can with practice become better at finding imaginative ways to get across their ideas.

Use Many Different Forums

Vision is usually communicated most effectively when many different vehicles are used: large group meetings, memos, newspapers, posters, informal one-on-one talks. When the same message comes at people from six different directions, it stands a better chance of being heard and remembered, on both intellectual and emotional levels. So channel A helps answer some of the questions people have, channel B addresses others, and so on.

The cost conscious among us will correctly point out that communication is not free. Although firms occasionally spend a great deal of money on vision communication, most of the successful transformation efforts I’ve seen exploit the fact that much useless information typically clogs expensive channels of communication. One-third or more of the agenda at the annual management meeting is often dictated by tradition but no longer relevant, or is there to prop up someone’s ego, or is in some other way a waste of time. Much of the company newspaper is filler, or ego booster, or propaganda so shameless that it would make the former editors of Pravda blush. At least 10 percent of one-on-one conversations every day are about the NBA, a new movie, or golf. Clearing away even some of this talk creates room for important information at no additional cost.

Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

The most carefully crafted messages rarely sink deeply into the recipient’s consciousness after only one pronouncement. Our minds are too cluttered, and any communication has to fight hundreds of other ideas for attention. In addition, a single airing won’t address all the questions we have. As a result, effective information transferral almost always relies on repetition.

Contrast these two scenarios: In case A, the new vision is introduced as part of three speeches at the annual management meeting and is the subject of three articles in the company newspaper, for a grand total of six repeats over a six-month period. In case B, each of the firm’s twenty-five executives pledges to find four opportunities per day to tie conversations back to the big picture. So when Hiro is meeting with his top twenty people to review monthly results versus plan, he asks that all decisions be evaluated in light of the new vision, which he repeats. When Gloria does performance evaluations for her employees, she ties her assessments to major change initiatives. When Jan conducts a Q and A at a plant, he answers the first inquiry by saying: “I think yes, but let me explain why. The vision directing our change efforts is . . .” The net result: twenty-five executives, four times a day, over six months equals more than 12,000 repeats. Six versus 12,000.

All successful cases of major change seem to include tens of thousands of communications that help employees to grapple with difficult intellectual and emotional issues. This happens not because the public relations department takes on “vision distribution” as a “project.” This happens because dozens of managers, supervisors, and executives look at all of their daily activities through the lens of the new vision. When people do this, they can easily find many meaningful ways to talk about the direction of change, communications that can always be tailored to the specific person or group with whom they are talking.

Willie and three of his people are walking to a meeting when they pass a new poster on the wall about the quality program. Willie points and asks them, “What do you think? Does this get the point across? What does this say to you?” Frances and fifteen of her people are in a conference room listening to a request for funds. When the formal presentation is over, she asks: “How does this relate to all the reengineering work? As I understand it, the vision guiding those efforts is . . .” Todd is in a cafeteria addressing 200 employees. He is asked: “Do you think the number of people we employ here might ever go up?” His response: “If we are successful in implementing our vision, the answer will surely be yes. Is that vision clear to you? Is it credible?”

A sentence here, a paragraph there, two minutes in the middle of a meeting, five minutes at the end of a conversation, three quick references in a speech—collectively, these brief mentions can add up to a massive amount of useful communication, which is generally what is needed to win over both hearts and minds.

Walk the Talk, or Lead by Example

Often the most powerful way to communicate a new direction is through behavior. When the top five or fifty people all live the change vision, employees will usually grasp it better than if there had been a hundred stories in the in-house newsletter. When they see top management acting out the vision, a whole set of troublesome questions about credibility and game playing tends to evaporate.

Consider this example: The central element in a new transformation effort at a major airline relates to customer service. Whenever the CEO receives a letter of complaint from a customer, he personally sends a response back within forty-eight hours. After a while, stories about his letters circulate throughout the company. The net result: An outside research firm finds that 90 percent of the employees can describe the change vision when asked and nearly 80 percent say that they believe senior management is committed to making it a reality.

Another example: The change effort at a huge European manufacturing company focuses on creating a flatter, leaner firm. At about the same time that the new direction is first communicated to employees, senior management eliminates one level at the top of the hierarchy—executive vice presidents—and announces that headquarters staff will be reduced by 50 percent over a period of eighteen months through attrition, early retirements, and job cutting. Soon afterward, a consulting firm finds that a high percentage of lower-level employees can correctly describe the direction of change in the company.

Another example: A general is trying to communicate to a gigantic organization that defense budgets are shrinking and that everyone must become more frugal. So when he travels, instead of climbing into a U.S. Army Blackhawk helicopter outside the Pentagon and then onto a dedicated USAF C-12 jet at Andrews Air Force Base, he does the following as often as possible: He descends to the basement of the Pentagon, boards the subway for 80 cents to Washington National Airport, takes a shuttle to the terminal, and then rides coach on a commercial airline. The word of his travels spreads fast.

We often call such behavior “leadership by example.” The concept is simple. Words are cheap, but action is not. The cynical among us, in particular, tend not to believe words but will be impressed by action.

In a similar vein, telling people one thing and then behaving differently is a great way to undermine the communication of a change vision. Division head Sally O’Rourke tells her 1,200 employees that speed, speed, speed should become the hallmark of their organization. Then she takes nine months to approve a capital request from one of her product managers, allowing the competition to grab the lion’s share of the market in a new and expanding segment. CEO John Jones preaches lower costs, lower costs, lower costs. Then he has his office remodeled for $150,000. Executive vice president Harold Rose talks endlessly about customer service, but when complaints about a new product flood in and an inquiring reporter from the Wall Street Journal calls, he defends his product instead of his customers.

In short: Nothing undermines the communication of a change vision more than behavior on the part of key players that seems inconsistent with the vision. The implications are powerful: (1) Trying to sell a vision before top management can embody it is tough; and (2) even under the best of circumstances, carefully monitoring senior management behavior is a good idea so that you can identify and address inconsistencies between words and deeds.

Explicitly Address Seeming Inconsistencies

I recently visited a bank that was undergoing major cost-cutting initiatives as a part of a broader transformation effort. Employees were feeling the pain and were understandably sensitive to any sign that management wasn’t doing its share. Unfortunately, those signs were everywhere.

While productivity task forces seemed to be slashing costs twenty-four hours a day, the corporation continued to lease six jets for executive use. While a hundred employees were laid off here, another hundred there, top management presided in regal quarters. While Christmas parties were being cancelled at some locations to save money, the CEO flew his entire board first class to London for one of its meetings.

When I point out such inconsistencies, executives either roll their eyes or become extremely defensive. “What are you saying? You want us to pry the wood off the walls and make this place (headquarters) look shabby?” “We’ve done the analysis six times, and the jets keep looking like a good deal. Without them, there’s no way to get to some remote plants. You really think it’s a good use of a busy person’s time to go to an airport, wait for a commercial jet, transfer at the other end to a commuter jet, and then drive two hours?” “A part of our vision is to internationalize the business, so we have got to globalize the board. That’s why we’re meeting in London. Do you want a board that thinks only in terms of the U.S.?”

Executives become frustrated when asked to defend the jets, the mahogany, and the overseas trips because they can see no easy way to deal with these issues. They don’t want to encourage cynicism among employees, but selling headquarters, cancelling the leases, and forgetting London doesn’t make sense to them. “We really did look into selling the building, but the disruption and relocation costs are significant. So what do we do?” In some cases, the answer is ditch the offices, jets, and trips. But in other instances, that won’t be practical or sensible. Then the answer is to explicitly address the issues in honest communication. For example:

With all the cost cutting that is going on out of necessity throughout the company, it is inexcusable for any of us to be wasting money, especially on unneeded luxuries. Within this context, we have decided that the offices and furnishings for our executives are not justifiable. At present, selling headquarters and moving to less luxurious surroundings would cost more than it would save. But we will continue to look for a cost-effective and practical way to reduce this sign of excess.

Straightforward and honest messages are often laughed at by cynics. If most employees are highly suspicious of management, then such messages won’t help. But for the employee who wants to believe in his or her company, such a communication is usually much appreciated. Credibility and trust increase, which in turn contribute to communicating the change vision.

Q: Why don’t people do this sort of thing more often?

A: They are doing it more and more often.

Imperial, feed-the-mushrooms-manure styles of management are dying out. In a fast-moving world, where there’s a need to engage employees’ hearts and minds, uncommunicative executives will not be able to transform their firms into tough competitors. Because we’ve all seen situations in which withholding information or just plain telling lies seemed to help someone win, we are all somewhat skeptical of this observation. But it’s the truth.

In successful transformations, important inconsistencies in the messages employees are getting are almost always addressed explicitly. If mixed signals can’t be eliminated, they are usually explained, simply and honestly.

Listen and Be Listened To

Because the communication of vision is often such a difficult activity, it can easily turn into a screeching, one-way broadcast in which useful feedback is ignored and employees are inadvertently made to feel unimportant. In highly successful change efforts, this rarely happens, because communication always becomes a two-way endeavor.

I’ve seen more than a few cases in which guiding coalitions didn’t get the vision exactly right and some employees figured this out or could have solved the problems had they been well informed. Yet because feedback wasn’t solicited, the errors were never corrected until late in the process. In one instance in particular, this problem proved to be enormously costly in terms of unnecessary information technology expenses. A half-dozen computerwise young sales reps would have seen immediately, had they been briefed, that the basic concept guiding new hardware and software purchases for the sales force was flawed. But they were never briefed until after the new equipment arrived. By then, after a less computer-literate middle management had accepted and implemented a faulty vision, course corrections were very costly.

Even more fundamentally, two-way discussions are an essential method of helping people answer all the questions that occur to them in a transformation effort. Clear, simple, memorable, often repeated, consistent communication from multiple sources, modeled by executive behavior, helps enormously. But most human beings, especially well-educated ones, buy into something only after they have had a chance to wrestle with it. Wrestling means asking questions, challenging, and arguing. This, of course, is precisely what happens when the vision is first created by the guiding coalition.

Change initiators sometimes avoid two-way communication because of concerns over cost. Their logic is straightforward; whatever the expense for one-way information flow, double that—at a minimum—for two-way. They correctly point out that everyone can’t be put through the same experience as the guiding coalition. But here again they overlook the usefulness of getting as many managers as possible to view hourly events through the lens of the new vision. When people do so, they invariably find dozens of inexpensive ways to generate dialogue around the vision. Five minutes in a product launch meeting, two minutes in a hallway conversation, ten minutes at the end of a speech—the minutes can add up to thousands of hours.

As change initiators, we sometimes also avoid this activity because we are afraid our visions won’t survive two rounds in a ring. Such behavior is understandable, but regrettable.

If people don’t accept a vision, the next two steps in the transformation process—empowering individuals for broad-based action and creating short-term wins—will fail. Employees will neither take advantage of their empowerment nor put in the effort to guarantee the wins. Worse yet, if they accept and then attempt to implement a poorly formulated vision, as in the information technology example, precious time and resources will be wasted and many people will suffer the consequences.

The downside of two-way communication is that feedback may suggest that we are on the wrong course and that the vision needs to be reformulated. But in the long run, swallowing our pride and reworking the vision is far more productive than heading off in the wrong direction—or in a direction that others won’t follow.