The Role of Change Agent

If you’re reading this, you probably either want or have experience being an agent of change: someone who brings about change within an organization.

If you are in this role you’ll need all your creativity and compassion to succeed, in my opinion. If you can envision a better way for your organization to work, that is great! That doesn’t actually mean you have the role of change agent. You might be better described as someone who speaks truth to authority, or someone who provides good feedback, or someone who likes things to work better or at least they way they think is best. Taking on the role of change agent is probably not in your job description if you are an engineer, unless your company has asked you to work on improving or evolving engineering infrastructure or processes.

Chances are good they haven’t assigned you this role; in the eyes of your management adopting this role by yourself is perhaps as risky as assigning yourself TODOs that have nothing to do with your project.

But evolution is natural. Things change -- they just don’t always change when we wish they would.

Change can be a messy process, so extra care must be taken to manage change from its very beginnings until they become the new, old process. Messy changes give good cause for teams to doubt the abilities of management. Rarely are management skills so on display as during a change of business processes. It can be done very well or very poorly. It is possible for a poor roll-out of a process change to undermine any possible hope of gaining the advantages for which it was designed. For example, engineering policies that so enrage engineers that they find other employment. Yep, that was me once a long time ago: giving notice because of unacceptable management policies.

A Change Lifecycle

Change has a lifecycle and it is good to understand it. There isn’t one lifecycle for all changes, but I do use something like this when I need to:

• Envision a better reality
• If you have the authority, collect feedback from others and then skip down to “Get stakeholder buy-in” and continue from there.
• Test whether others see the need for change
• Socialize the idea as a hypothetical with trusted colleagues and collect their ideas, wants and needs
• Find out who owns the process you are trying to change
• Contact the process owner and see if they are open to feedback on the process
• Provide feedback on the process to the process owner and ask if they would entertain hearing your ideas
• If they will, make your case compassionately and openly and reasonably and then listen to their feedback on it
• If they will not, you can assert that you have some concerns and you hope they will take a moment to hear them
• If they will not, you will have to decide how to deal with it. Some possibilities are: Letting it go, Contacting their Manager, Contacting their Peer, Contacting other users of the process who may have more influence over the process owner, anonymous submission
• If they will not hear your idea in any way, you probably are effectively disabled as a change agent.
• Once they have heard your idea you will need to decide whether to pursue it. They might discourage you or even oppose you. You decide if this is worth it or not.
• If you decide to pursue it you must engage in interest-based negotiation with them to help influence the change to include your interests while respecting their interests.
• Get stakeholder buy-in. You may need to broaden the negotiation to include more stakeholders. It may fall on you to collect their input. Or, the other stakeholders might refuse or you may need to negotiate separately with them and then represent their interests to others.
• When your and the interests of the stakeholders are met by a new proposal, that is “Yessable” and perhaps worth pursuing
• If you cannot achieve a Yessable proposal, and you push forward anyway, you are not a change agent: you are a revolutionary. It won’t end well.
• If you can achieve a Yessable proposal that may actually be all you were required to do to instigate change. In other cases you may end up being responsible for implementing the change. In either case, the change will take on a life of its own at that point.
• Educate yourself -- try to gain a complete understanding of all parts of the old process and the new process.
• Plan the transition from the old process to the new process, taking into account needed materials, information, training or education, infrastructure, configuration, deployment, testing, roll-out and subsequent support. Some changes have special contingencies, such as an interim process or a phased roll-out.
• Prepare the needed materials
• Schedule the change
• Roll-out the change
• Provide the training necessary for people to succeed with the new process
• Provide time for people to adopt the new process
• Management should clearly support the new process and announce its debut
• Track and address issues promptly and transparently

Positional Arguments

One of the main challenges of the above process is that it is hard to do so with compassion so that you do not alienate the very people in a position to make your dream a reality.
When you are a change agent, you don’t usually have the authority to make the change yourself (although I eschew resorting to authority, and may act as an agent of change even if I do have the authority to demand the change). You have an intrinsically weak position as a negotiator because the current process exists and works well enough for others in the eyes of the process owner. If the process owner does nothing at all, you will fail and they will take no harm. So, yes: we call that a weak negotiating position.

At the same time you are in this weak position, the information you will be sharing is very likely to stimulate a negative reaction from them. They are liable to feel bad, wrong, stupid, misguided, incompetent or embarrassed. They won’t like those feelings. If your ideas are associated with those feelings, it won’t help your efforts as a change agent. So, you must find ways to use constructive influence without triggering a negative reaction.

How can you avoid making the one person who may have the authority to make the change you want feel like they’d rather harm their company than agree with you? You’d think that would be funnier than it actually works out to be. :-/

Competition is natural and competing around ideas is natural. But, it can interfere with negotiations about process change in an organization. In these negotiations competition causes people to take sides. Sides get defended and eventually, entrenched. It is a losing strategy, and combined with your weak negotiating position, it is practically a nonstarter.

“People taking sides” is also called “people taking positional arguments”.

A positional argument is one based on taking a “position” and arguing for it. You know: what just about everyone does in arguments.

Avoiding Positional Arguments

Take a moment and ask yourself: What is the alternative to positional arguments?

What can you do to avoid positional arguments?

• Use interest-based negotiation techniques
• Don’t take a position and you won’t force them to take a position either
• Approach it from a neutral position, open-minded and willing to listen to their interests
• They may express their interests as demands or inviolable aspects of the process; hear them as interests.
• Keep asking “why” until you reach their business needs. There are sometimes more than one way to meet those needs, but understanding them and meeting them is required for success.
• Don’t say “I see it this way but you see it that way”… say “One approach is this way and another is that way.”
• Decompose approaches into plusses and minuses.
• If possible, adopt terminology they offer.
• Recognize when their ideas that align with yours and build the connection between the old and new processes in their minds.
• Speak using terms like “process evolution” to signal a desire to retain process continuity and ownership across time
• Think about ways of augmenting and not replacing what exist
• Be self-deprecating, humble and don’t even attempt to feel or be invulnerable
• Use brainstorming to separate analysis from idea formation
• Use a softer voice, as if you are talking in a hospital
• Disambiguate terms if necessary so that what you want can be understood. Invent and define new terms if needed.
• Listen, also, listen. And, listen. If that fails, try listening for a while. You know, the part where you aren’t talking?
• Do not repeat yourself unless asked to do so. If they didn’t understand, find another way to say it.
• Don’t get frustrated with them if it isn’t going your way
• Take time to process the things they say fully. Ask for a moment to absorb what they say if necessary.
• Chances are your change isn’t that urgent, so if negotiations aren’t going your way, ask to reconvene another day

There are lots more ways, I am sure.

It isn’t Enough to be Right

It isn’t enough to be right. In fact, the more “right” you are the weirder it gets. If there really is an immense imbalance in your organization and you are really so outspoken in your vision of a better way… think about what that really means: this part of your organization is really fucked up. Do you really want to engage with people who would allow such an imbalance to occur and who aren’t already doing something about it? Be very careful because you may find that they are more than happy with how things are and are deeply threatened by the notion of change.

They say that honor dies where interest lies: all the more reason to understand interests. Perhaps what you perceive as “the problem” is their “crowning jewel” and the main reason for the process.

But, being right is really a judgement we make according to our own values. We decide we’re right. That is already a position and it is the worst way to begin as a change agent.

Instead, we must abandon the notion that we are right. We have ideas. We see opportunities. We like our company to be prosperous and efficient. We like our systems to make our jobs easier and help us maintain quality. We like collaboration and peer review. We like transparency. We believe that healthy processes evolve as needs change, and nobody should be required to know the future, only what can be anticipated. We bring lots of positive things to the table when we negotiate about change. None of these things are very likely to make our negotiation partner uncomfortable.

As soon as we think we are right… positional arguments follow and the negotiations may collapse.

It isn’t Fair

Sadly, the people with whom you are negotiating don’t necessarily play by the same rules. Why should they? The status quo is on their side. You are probably stepping outside your role to bring up your belief that they need to make a change, and they have the authority to flatly refuse if they wish. They have a very strong negotiating position. In fact, they have all the power. All you have is your ability to influence them. Why would they behave the same way that you would? If you were in their shoes, how would you behave?

When negotiations are between unequal partners (one strong, one weak) it is very different that with peers. You know you have friends whose opinions you respect on certain topics much more than other topics. If what they know little about happens to be something you know a great deal about, you can imagine how you’d feel if they tried to “fix” the way you think about what you know.

So, the sad truth is that you may encounter a wide variety of abysmal human behavior. At the same time, if you indulge in the same thing, your chances of success dwindle or vanish.

There you are being reasonable and rational and the other person isn’t. They’re defensive or angry or embarrassed or outraged or just about any reaction people can have when threatened. Few are fun when aimed at us. But, we have to know going in that it is a possibility. The better we know it, the more circumspect we are when we finally meet the process owner and the lower are the chances that we manifest that kind of behavior in them. They probably would like to at least believe they are open to ideas, even if this notion cannot be inferred from their behavior or any action they ever take.

Inside every bureaucrat is someone who longs to draw outside the lines because they know that sometimes that is the only way to create something beautiful. Unfortunately, that mythical someone can’t breathe in there and quickly dies, so don’t count on any help from that inside someone. Instead, don’t think of your negotiating partner as a bureaucrat. Think of them as the All Powerful Wizard of Oz, spewing fire and sounding impressive. Don’t forget: it wasn’t the scarecrow that pulled back to curtains to see who it was. It was Dorothy. She already had her ruby slippers. Her escape was predestined.

Unless you wear ruby slippers too, you are better described as being made of straw.

Being an agent of change is not easy, it isn’t a fair competition by any conceivable measure, it carries a risk unless it is your main role, and the rewards are sometimes no more than the change you sought, if even that. But, the techniques of which I write are useful in many contexts, especially with negotiating partners of unequal strengths. So why do we do it? Because we want our companies to succeed and we see a problem or solution that management hasn’t. It isn’t fair and the risk we take in trying is even less fair.

So, many people refuse ever to be an agent of change. Perhaps they would not refuse if they felt they stood a chance of making things better without suffering harm.

If you are a change agent, best of luck. I hope you find this helpful.

If you are a process owner and you don’t already have a mechanism for regular review and revision of your process that would obviate the need for someone to take the risk of being a change agent just to get you to listen, why don’t you begin one?