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  The Basic Strategy for Change by Will Phillips
Introduction:
In my work as a consultant, I continually find museum directors and top managers who struggle to make changes in their organizations and in other people. In many cases, their efforts meet with little success and frequently result in frustration with the museum and firing employees who refuse to change.
In my experience, many of these leaders use ineffective strategies for creating change. The following model has proved very useful in our Qm² work to help individuals better understand the paradoxical nature of change and to increase their effectiveness in leading both individual and organizational changes.
The Model:
Change occurs in at least three stages.
Since the change occurs only in the last step, it is easy to neglect the first two.
Awareness
If you ask everyone attending a meeting, in a loud and commanding voice, to stand up and run to the back of the room, most people will remain securely in their seats. Or, you might emphatically tell everyone on your management team that the museum needs to refocus its energy from research efforts to public programming. The vast majority of people will think, Is she serious? Or, This seems a little ridiculous... I think I'll wait and see what others do, or, That is a ridiculous request and I'm not moving!
On the other hand, if you command everyone in the meeting to run to the back of the room and a roaring tiger mysteriously appears from behind a secret door, you'll clear the space in a fraction of a second. When aware of the tiger, you don't need to order people; they'll act differently of their own self-interest. The situation itself sufficiently motivates everyone with even minimal native intelligence.
Seeing the System Strengthens the Solution
Unfortunately, in many museums we seek to change an individual or to change the organization by providing the solution without helping people become aware of the tiger. So making the tiger visible becomes the skill to develop.
Example: Tiny, the Pressman
Tiny ran a very complicated press that cut, shaped and printed cardboard boxes. My job as a consultant was to improve productivity and efficiency at the cardboard carton company. After meeting with Tiny several times he revealed he believed that the company was not interested in efficiency or productivity. In fact, he said the company wasted money.
His prime example was the purchasing agent's switch from buying one pound tins of printing ink to five pound tins. Whenever we use five pound tins of ink, we never use it all. So we carefully cover and store it. But it seems that every time we use some of this old ink, it causes pin holes which wastes a lot of time in clean up. Tiny meant that small specks of dust would somehow get into the ink, creating little spots in the print. In order to get rid of the spots, the pressman had to shut down the press, clean the rollers and start over.
Later, I learned from the purchasing agent that Tiny had walked into the agent's office, slammed a slimy tin of open printing ink on his desk and called him a dumb SOB! Tiny was doing his best to bring the tiger to the purchasing agent but his approach prevented the real tiger from appearing. Helping Tiny capture the tiger was a process of showing him how to track the time wasted in cleaning up when using five pound verses one pound tins of ink. After two months of data collection, and a little coaching which included " no swearing," Tiny walked into the purchasing agent's office and simply showed him a hand-sketched graph.
After studying the graph intently for several minutes and then asking a question or two for clarification, the purchasing agent said: It seems like it makes better sense to buy ink in one pound tins.
Tiny had successfully captured the tiger and made the purchasing agent aware of the problem. The purchasing agent now acted instantaneously to correct the situation.
Acceptance
In some situations, change fails to occur even though the tiger has been brought into the room. People say: It's only a paper tiger; don't let it scare you. The natural human reaction for the change agent is to quietly (or maybe not so quietly) consider those in the room of being blind, stupid, or lousy managers. Obviously, this reaction does not stimulate lasting or meaningful change.
When the tiger is visible but not accepted for what it is, resistance reigns. Resistance usually occurs because the participants fear that change will negatively affect them in some way. Since people in the normal, healthy range act in their own self-interest, their sense of fear leads them to deny the tiger and refuse to change.
When a well-presented tiger is ignored, you can bet that the issues causing resistance remain under the table. In order to get this hidden agenda on the agenda, you might say something like: It seems as if you will avoid making changes in this area, at all costs, even if you thought the tiger was real. Is that how you feel?
A beginning attempt to surface the hidden agenda will always fail unless the individual feels safe. If the resistance issues begin to appear, it is absolutely necessary that the leader respects it. Behaviors such as laughing, discounting, sarcasm, defensiveness will drive the issue underground and reinforce the resistance. The leader must respect the issue by saying something like: Ah, now I see why you are so concerned about making a change. Thank you for sharing that with me.
Once you have gone through several cycles of respecting the revelations and surfacing more, you will eventually see the resistance in full form. Only then can it be fully explored with the resisters. The exploration process invariably leads to a significantly better solution on how to handle a change without threatening the individual or the organization.
Example: Power Shift
The founder, collector, and board president of a flourishing local art museum expressed his interest many times in withdrawing from the presidency and passing the reigns over to the vice president he had groomed for the position. Many informal discussions over a number of years led to no real progress. Finally, the president, vice president, and I spent a long evening together with the expressed goal of taking action on the transfer of power. Eventually, the president's fears began to surface. We worked through the fears by developing a list of specific actions which should occur before the actual transfer occurred. By identifying actions to occur and discussing the strategy and critical nature of each, we were able to make the transfer within a few months.
Dealing with Resistance
The principles for dealing with resistance to build acceptance are:
Action
Action follows awareness and acceptance. In my experience action is fairly straightforward once awareness is complete and acceptance is achieved. When awareness and acceptance do not occur, a great deal of effort is required to sell, push, or force action. Undue effort goes into the details of implementation but change often fails to occur.
To achieve change, we must keep the goals clear but our methods flexible. Often, once a manger decides that a change is needed in someone or in some part of the organization, he often jumps to push for action. If resistance or reluctance to change occurs, he will push harder. When this happens, the fight is lost because the energy for change is always limited. In order to achieve action, the manager must back off action and return to the work of awareness and acceptance.
Example: Out of the Closet Action
The young supervisor of the interpretive staff got a call from the head docent who was in tears. She'd just been told that the board voted to require the interpretive staff to wear uniforms; this at the instigation of one board member. This board member knew there was no money in the budget for uniforms so she volunteered to pay for the fabric. The docents were expected to make their uniforms/costumes from that material. By the time the supervisor heard about it, the material had been purchased and distributed, and the docents were in an up roar.
Under duress, the docents made the uniforms and wore them without a smile in sight. It took the supervisor three weeks, through channels, to schedule an appointment with the board member. He discovered the board member was reacting to a docent who wasn't wearing the normal identification badge when the board member visited the museum. The docents didn't hear the tiger roar; didn't have a clue about the issue and would never have learned it had the supervisor accepted the initial story which told of only part of the system.
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