Transcript:
Hi there, Russell Stratton, President and Leadership Champion with Bluegem Learning. I work with organizations just like yours to help managers and leaders improve individual and team performance in your business to increase results.
In a recent vlog, I was talking about the four step process to put together a change message when you've got some significant change happening in your business. And this got me thinking how this links back to Kurt Lewin's force field analysis model.
So just to recap in terms of what force field analysis is about, Lewin talks about with any change that you have, you've got your current state of affairs and then you've got where you want to go. And what typically happens is you find all of the driving forces on one side, the reasons why the change would take place, the benefits as to why the change had happened, and you can list those out.
And then what we can do always look on the other side. So what's actually going to stop us from making that change happen? What other restraining forces, the reasons why things shouldn't change? And you can list those out.
Now, typically what people do when looking at that, all those drivers on this side and the restrainers on the other, is say okay, how can we load up more drivers to help push the change through? The problem with that is that the more drivers you identify automatically generates more restrainers and more reasons for not doing it, more objections that employees or customers may come up with.
So the secret to making this work is not to find more drivers, but actually look over this side, think of the objections and look to take these off the table.
So if you tackle those one at a time and pick them up and see why is this a restrainer, why is this going to be an objection, how could we mitigate this, you'll actually reduce the number of restraining forces over here. Your drivers still stay in place and then you'll find that your change moves over a lot quicker and a lot easier.
Really, it's the same approach that you might see when you're looking to buy something, and as a salesperson might use with you. For every reason you give them for why you won't buy it, if they're a really good salesperson they'll acknowledge that and they'll look to address your concerns. So taking that sort of sales approach really helps you in terms of putting together your change message and communicating that to people.
If you found that useful, please feel free to share with your colleagues. And if you're interested about some of the workshops that I do and how they could benefit your organization, then check out my website bluegemlearning.com. And I'll speak to you soon.