How to Manage Change
- Company X wants to improve their entire culture.
- Krrrrraaazy consultants tell they need a complete overhaul to running their company to improve profits by 5%.
- Company X enacts changes.
Company X fails like a freak as people can't respond to changes.
You + Favorite Website
- You go to your favorite website.
- You see its new design.
- You hate it and wish they could revert the design to the old.
HAPPENS EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE THIS SEC OH YEAH
People hate change because unfamiliarity breeds contempt.
- You feel more comfortable with your friends because you've developed relationships with them.
- You don't respond to your friends' friends as much because you're unfamiliar with them.
Enacting change in a company is similar to forcing little kids to make brand new friends:
- Team X isn't used to the newly-created low-base-high-bonus pay system so they hate it.
- Productivity tumbles.
- Company dies.
How do you enact change?
Introduce it.
Give a preview.
How did a multi-billion-dollar website incorporate change to its homepage?
- Yahoo gave people a preview of their new homepage.
- Yahoo let people gradually get more familiar with the new look.
- With increasing familiarity to the new look, people became more responsive to the new look.
Then, BAM, they accepted it when the new look went full-time.
To get peeps familiar with change, instead of having the why-do-we-have-to-make-new-friends when-our-old-friends-were-so-much-better feelings, give a preview:
- "You're getting a preview of our new bonus system. You'll start getting a teeny-tiny bonus for every X thing you do next week. This bonus will increase as we progress."
SHABAMDIZZZLE.
Change gradually.
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Posted on November 05