Motivating People Who Hate Change If you don’t like change, it’s better to preach the disadvantages of not changing than to preach the advantages of change to those who don’t like change.
ysk_motoyama For those of you who are having trouble conquering the resistance to your best proposals. I have a book that is one of the best 5 books that came out last year, so I’ll give you a gut introduction (it’s a long one).
“I don’t want to change my current work, so I resist for now” “It’s a very reasonable and effective proposal, but I’m more concerned about the effort to change it, so I resist” “If the work is automated, the effort will be zero, but we’ll lose our jobs, so we resist” “If Mr. A is the leader, I don’t like it, so I resist” “I don’t like it”. “If Mr. A is the leader, I don’t like it, so I resist.
・・・・・I guess there are those who were resisted and those who tried to resist, respectively.
I often encounter this kind of resistance, partly because I have many opportunities to promote DX and business reform.
Whenever we tried to introduce a new system, we were accused of “having trouble learning how to operate it.
Then, to get rid of the hassle, I tried to automate the sending of e-mails, but was accused of “it is important to write each e-mail by hand with sincerity.
Then, when another Mr. B talks about the exact same thing as I do, he is easily convinced.
If you think you don’t know what’s what anymore… I recommend this book, “Motivating People Who Hate Change”.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ What kind of book is “Motivating People Who Hate Change”? ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ This book was named a bestseller by the Wall Street Journal, the world’s leading economic newspaper.
What’s more, on the obi of this book, there was a recommendation from Philip Kotler, the marketing guruof the right.
Mr. Kotler writes, “If you are starting something new, you must read this book. So if you are starting something new, read it.
If you are an old-schooler of the year who doesn’t do anything new, please gently close the screen.
The book discusses ideas that can greatly help those who are eager to push for change.
Usually, when we want to get some proposal through, we tend to talk about the “attractiveness of the proposal”. However, that alone will not move people.
Then what to do… we need to look at the reason why they don’t want to accept it = “resistance”. That is what this book tells us.
According to this book, there are four types of “resistance”
- Inertia: Desire to stay with what one is accustomed to
- Effort: effort and cost required for change (I’m more concerned about effort than value) ③ Emotions: Negative feelings toward change (reaction to the idea itself)
- Psychological rebellion: rebellion against being changed (reaction to idea proponent/method)
Knowing these four cut-off points also explains what I mentioned at the beginning.
・Do not want to change current operations, so resist for now. ← Inertia
- It’s a great and reasonable proposal that seems to work, but I’m resisting it because I’m more concerned about the effort to change it. ← effort ・If operations are automated, labor will be reduced to zero, but we will resist because we are likely to lose our own jobs as well. ← Emotion ・If Mr. A is the leader, I don’t like something about him, so I resist. ← Psychological rebellion
This book will help you understand every inch of each case and how to deal with inertia, effort, emotion, and psychological rebellion. When you read about the case studies and such, you will definitely stop nodding your head.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ “Crisis Override,” a special technique for mobilizing resistance ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ In addition to the lessons learned in this book, I would like to write about a “special technique for silencing resistance with a single blow,” which I learned during my consulting days.
It is a “crisis override”.
As this book described, when you try to change something, there will always be resistance. This is not the fault of that person who is becoming a resistant force, but it is already the fault of human DNA or instinct. Why the resistance is resisting, which feels right to me personally. It is the “instinct of self-preservation. This phrase is from the book “Marketing is an Organizational Revolution” by Takeshi Morioka, who is famous as the person who rebuilt USJ.
After all, any change is a threat to human survival, not a small one. For example, in converting a seal to an electronic signature, everyone thinks to a greater or lesser extent, “What if I can’t master the new system…?
So first, when you are stranded by the resistance, think of it this way. “Oh, their survival as individuals is threatened, so they are resisting desperately. These guys.” When I think about it, the resistance guys start to look cute.
However, simply staring at the resistance as “cute” will not change anything. Then what do we do? “Crisis override”, let them eat this up.
What is the overriding sense of urgency? > What is the overriding of the sense of urgency? It is easy to appeal to the “attractiveness and benefits of change” when attacking resistance. However, this doesn’t stick with them very well, as was mentioned in this book.
I have also done several projects to automate manual tasks. But even if you just explain, “If you do this, it will cut 100 hours off your work time every month. “But I have to learn how to use the new system, don’t I? I’m also afraid that the system won’t work as planned.
On the other hand, if you appeal to the “disadvantages of not changing,” it often hits them right in the face. “I’ve already automated this kind of work for that team and that team has already automated this kind of work. It’s only your team that hasn’t been able to automate. Well, I don’t mind. ・・・ I will talk to them and give them an override to “a sense of urgency to be left behind”. Then, to your surprise, it will be easier for them to accept your proposal.
What I just described is one of the methods that I have struggled to grasp throughout my years of consulting to DXing in business companies.
However, when you read the book I introduced here, “Moving People Who Hate Change,” you will find one strategy after another to attack the resistant forces.
We were playing a game and this one had a hard time, got hit many times and spent hours leveling up to beat the mid-boss, but my friend who read the strategy book cleared the mid-boss in 10 minutes. I heartily recommend this book as it gives such useful strategies.
ysk_motoyama I will also include a link to the book. He also explains the mysterious phenomenon that the more he talks about the attractiveness and benefits of his proposal, the more he is resisted for some reason. As a person who promotes business improvement and introduction of new tools, I refer to this book often.
This page is auto-translated from /nishio/「変化を嫌う人」を動かす using DeepL. If you looks something interesting but the auto-translated English is not good enough to understand it, feel free to let me know at @nishio_en. I’m very happy to spread my thought to non-Japanese readers.