Step by Step

E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the away. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.^[*]

Relieve your frustration at the enormous task of changing an organization by taking one small step at a time toward your goal.

You are an Evangelist(144). After applying Test the Waters(237) and Time for Reflection(240), you realize that there is interest in the new idea in your organization.

You wonder what your plan should be for introducing the new idea into your organization.

“If we can see the path ahead laid out for us, there is a good chance it is not our path; it is probably someone else’s we have substituted for our own. Our own path must be deciphered every step of the way.”^[*] There are no shortcuts to anyplace worth going.

It is impossible to instantly convert everyone to your way of thinking. An attempt to create a master plan for the change initiative is probably setting yourself up for failure because there are too many unknowns in any organization. The very nature of a complex problem can bring you to your knees and cause you to make no progress at all. Yet, to climb a ladder, you don’t leap from the ground to the top. Rather, you climb slowly and surely, one step at a time. Similarly, organizational change happens, not with a giant leap, but in small, sometimes hardly noticeable steps. People are less resistant to small changes than large ones, but lots of small changes will ultimately create major shifts.

We can become discouraged and find it difficult to maintain enthusiasm for a single goal that is so far out it’s hard to imagine you can ever reach it. There’s an advantage to setting short-term goals and seeing clear progress. It’s definitely more exciting to identify small steps and celebrate when you reach each one than it is to outline an overpowering vision that will take months or years to achieve.

The most common mistake change agents make is to take on too much, too soon. They are often like anxious gardeners standing over their plants, imploring them: “Grow! Try harder! You can do it!” But good gardeners don’t try to convince a plant to grow.^[**] Instead, they realize that significant change starts slowly and evolves steadily over time. In organizational change, as in nature, new developments should spread quietly at first, so that the leaders can learn from the failures and build on the successes.

Therefore:

Use an incremental approach in the change initiative, with short-term goals, while keeping your long-term vision.

Focus on a few meaningful problems. Create a compelling vision, but keep it broad enough to increase your chance of success. You may wish to list the things that need to happen in order to achieve your vision, but you don’t need an exact plan for how you will make these things happen. Rather, set a few short-term goals and be prepared to adjust your expectations as you learn what works and what doesn’t.

Identify things you can achieve quickly, then implement some small portion of the initiative. Work toward early wins that bring about any change. Use your initial successes as stepping-stones to increasingly ambitious gains. Remind yourself each time you achieve a short-term goal to celebrate the Small Successes(216).

Encourage people to experiment using a Trial Run(245) even for a small part of the new idea. Make small changes that don’t disrupt the system and trust that the collection of small changes will result in big change. Before you go tearing in to change something, step way back, calm down, and think about the least perturbation you can introduce and still get the result you want. Over time, with enough little efforts, a new order emerges—one you could not have planned no matter how many flip charts you hauled out. Help what wants to happen, happen. Rather than attempting a complete system overhaul, remove just one little obstacle or add one little ingredient. Launch your first step and then take Time for Reflection(240) to decide what to do next.

As new Evangelists(144) come on board, let them plan their own part of the journey. They’ll have more success by doing what’s appropriate for their part of the world and you won’t have to know everything there is to know about every part. The change is bigger than you and it’s not important that you travel each path to the goal. The important outcome is that the goal is reached, and that will happen as a result of a coalition, not one person’s efforts.

Be wary of promising specific times in which goals can be achieved. Cultural change tends to be organic and hard to predict. Be suspicious of people who promise big changes on a cultural level in some specific time frame—they’re blowing smoke.

Remain optimistic even if you take one step forward and two steps back. Find a Shoulder to Cry On(213). As pointed out in Brian Foote and Joe Yoder’s Piecemeal Growth pattern, mistakes are inevitable and growth is a slow and continuous process that cannot be achieved in a single leap.

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This pattern builds an incremental approach to your change initiative. Because you can’t possibly know everything that could happen, this approach gives you the chance to learn as you go. You can take advantage of what you learn along the way to adjust your plans accordingly.

But people might think you don’t know where you’re going. Help them understand that the goal and the path to get there are not the same thing. Even though you don’t know the exact path, devise a clear goal and continually communicate it with your current plans. This pattern doesn’t suggest you shouldn’t plan ahead at all. After all, Noah didn’t wait until it started raining to build the ark.

From 1992 to 2001, the University Hospital of North Norway gradually introduced a digitized radiology system. This was successful because the system “grew” into place. First it was a small, customer-built image managing system, then a patient flow handling system, and, finally, an upgraded common version in all 11 hospitals in northern Norway. The gradual approach let developers alter the system based on user feedback without spending large sums and involving too many users. A more robust and well-tested system could then be introduced to a wider user group.

The leaders of RiverLink started with a 10-year plan to revive the French Broad River into a place where people can live, work, and play. But after many unexpected challenges, such as a fire in one of their central buildings and the loss of some land, their plan had to be altered many times. So they began constructing strategies with shorter time frames. As a result of the short-term plans, “people are more likely to believe that this can happen.” In addition, the Executive Director noticed that the ability to readjust “has, I think, ended in a better place than our original plan.”