The vast majority of industrial era style top-down change efforts fail. They violate all the science and research we have now about how people and teams actually make meaningful and sustainable change possible, from the inside out rather than colonistic change by imposition.
The old model was based in a very costly and unproductive set of questions:
- What’s wrong and where are the performance deficiencies?
- How do we want to change people?
- How can we muster leadership sponsorship to overpower expected resistance?
- How can we motivate change with rewards and punishments?
- How can we measure results so we know where to assign responsibility?
- How can we get leaders to hold people more accountable who are not buying into the change effort?
Only new questions have the power to make change possible.