The model above was developed by educators and consultants Mary Lippitt and Delorese Ambrose [1], and I first encountered it thanks to Noah Brier and James Gross. [2] (Here's a larger version.) I find it a useful tool in my work with clients, almost all of whom are leaders seeking to drive organizational change. This obviously includes CEOs brought in to turn around an under-performing business, but it also includes startup founders who must transform their company at regular intervals in response to technological advances, market conditions, runway, team size, and any number of other factors. So if you're a leader in a similar situation, here are some considerations to bear in mind:
1. Vision
A vision is an idea, of course, but it's not sufficient for a leader seeking change to merely have a vision. It must be communicated to stakeholders in a way that allows for individual integration and collective action. In this sense a vision is a story, a narrative, and as I've written before,
We rely upon narratives to "make sense" of ambiguous situations and pursue a plan of action in coordination with others. But our reliance on narratives means that in the absence of a coherent story we will feel lost and ungrounded. This poses a risk when we face rapid change that may overtake our existing narrative and render it out of date... When disruptive events occur in organizational life, we require a shared narrative to re-orient ourselves and restore our understanding of the world around us. [3]
So your first task as a would-be change agent is to clarify and communicate your vision, which rests upon your effectiveness as a storyteller. Many leaders are natural storytellers, but it's an eminently learnable skill. Improving as a storyteller entails repetition, which is necessary for people to grasp and internalize your vision. I regularly advise clients, "When you're tired of hearing yourself, it's starting to sink in." The key here is finding the balance between variation and consistency. Core themes and concepts must be illustrated with novel anecdotes and language that suits the situation. [4]
2. Skills
One of a leader's primary responsibilities is assessing their team and determining whether they have the skills necessary to initiate and sustain desired change. If you're seeking to turnaround or transform your organization, it's likely that you'll need to make some structural moves and invest in training to ensure that your team's collective skillset is up to the task. But in many situations such efforts can't be enacted immediately, and sometimes, as the saying goes, "You don't go to war with the army you want. You go to war with the army you have." [5]
Whether or not you intend to pursue "the army you want," you can certainly improve "the army you have," and one avenue is by addressing your team's mindset--how they think about their abilities, and whether they view the challenges they face as learning opportunities or threats. This doesn't mean that your team can overcome any gaps in fundamental competence with willpower and enthusiasm, but the cultivation of a "growth mindset" in which people believe their abilities can be developed through persistent effort has been shown to yield results. [6] As the Roman poet Virgil wrote in The Aeneid, "They can, because they think they can." [7]
3. Incentives
It's essential to be aware that the status quo benefits someone, and change will generate resistance on their part. It may be possible to win their support by understanding what they value and determining how those needs might be met under new circumstances or what other "currencies" could be substituted. [8] That said, merely promising rewards is unlikely to yield sustained support, in part because the most readily available ones will likely lose their efficacy and more scarce or expensive resources will be required in the future. [9]
So it's also important to attend to how people feel about the prospect of change, and how those emotions foster or inhibit incentives to pursue change. Management theorist and longtime MIT professor Edgar Schein had a relevant theory of change that I've discussed previously:
A key driving force is known as "survival anxiety": We must change in order to accomplish our goals, and failure to change will threaten our existence. A key restraining force is known as "learning anxiety": Our identity and sense of worth are connected to our current behavior, and change will result in a new (and uncertain) identity or a loss of self-esteem... Change occurs when survival anxiety is greater than learning anxiety under conditions of psychological safety. Only when these elements come together will we be truly open to taking risks and experimenting with new behaviors, the necessary precursors to learning and growth. [10]
4. Resources
The most important resources are self-evident: talented people and the capital to retain them. And yet countless change efforts undertaken by well-compensated all-star teams have failed. So what else do you need? Psychological resources. Talent and capital are necessary but not sufficient, and a key differentiating factor is how a team feels--how they feel about the talent and capital at their disposal, how they feel about working together, how they feel about the team itself. The concept of the "emotionally intelligent group" has been explored by psychologists Vanessa Urch Druskatt and Steven Wolff:
Study after study has shown that teams are more creative and productive when they can achieve high levels of participation, cooperation, and collaboration among members. But interactive behaviors like these aren't easy to legislate. Our work shows that three basic conditions need to be present before such behaviors can occur: mutual trust among members, a sense of group identity (a feeling among members that they belong to a unique and worthwhile group), and a sense of group efficacy (the belief that the team can perform well and that group members are more effective working together than apart)... At the heart of these three conditions are emotions. Trust, a sense of identity, and a feeling of efficacy arise in environments where emotion is well handled, so groups stand to benefit by building their emotional intelligence. [11]
A related resource is noted above: psychological safety. This concept is often misunderstood as the absence of distress, a state in which "no one's feelings can get hurt," which, paradoxically, leads to a less safe environment. What psychological safety really means is that people feel free to speak up and be direct without fear of punishment. [12]
5. Action Plan
The absence of a plan clearly poses a risk, making it difficult for leaders and teams to prioritize the various steps to be taken and sequence them appropriately. But in my experience the opposite problem is just as risky: Change efforts can get bogged down and fail to achieve momentum because too much time and energy are devoted to perfecting the plan rather than launching and iterating. General George Patton had a clear point of view on planning: "A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week." [13] Legendary entrepreneur Herb Kelleher felt similarly: "We have a strategic plan. It's called doing things." [14]
Footnotes
[1] The model's precise origins are unclear, and I haven't been able to locate its first appearance, although I can find references that date to 1987. My research has led me to conclude that Mary Lippitt and the late Delorese Ambrose should be credited as its creators. Lippitt is a consultant and educator based in Florida, as well as the niece and daughter, respectively, of Gordon and Ron Lippitt, two major figures in 20th century social psychology. Ambrose was an author and management consultant based in Pittsburgh who served as a dean at Carnegie Mellon University. Lippitt holds the copyright on the model (and has taken legal action to maintain it), but there are also references that credit Ambrose, and it's possible that Lippitt and Ambrose were active collaborators in the 1980s. Tim Knoster, a professor of education in Pennsylvania, is sometimes given shared or even sole credit for the model, but it appears that he merely included it in a book and subsequent presentations in the 1990s that helped to popularize it. There's no evidence that Knoster was connected to Lippitt or Ambrose, and the earliest references linking Knoster to the model appear several years after those that credit Lippitt and Ambrose.
[2] In 2019 entrepreneurs Noah Brier and James Gross, who at the time were co-founders of Variance, included this model in one of their newsletters. Noah and James recently co-founded Alephic, an AI-driven marketing consultancy.
[3] The Importance of Shared Narrative
[4] For more on storytelling:
- Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories and Why Uncertainty Is the Crucible of Creativity (Maria Popova, The Marginalian, 2012)
- Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories [5-minute video]
- Every story in the world has one of these six basic plots (Miriam Quick, BBC, 2018)
- Structure Your Presentation Like a Story (Nancy Duarte, Harvard Business Review, 2012)
- The Secret Structure of Great Talks (Nancy Duarte, TEDxEast, 2011 [18 min video])
[5] Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said this at a press conference in 2004: "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." As an astute Redditor later noted, however, "Rumsfeld's got some great quotes, most of which were delivered in the context of explaining how the Iraq war turned into such a clusterfuck, and boy could that whole situation have used the kind of leadership Donald Rumsfeld's quotes would lead you to believe the man could've provided."
[7] The Aeneid (Virgil, translated by Joseph Trapp, 1718). A version of this line is often mistakenly attributed to the American industrialist Henry Ford. I haven't read Trapp's 18th century edition of The Aeneid, but I have read Robert Fagles' contemporary version, which I highly recommend.
[8] Currencies (On Motivating Different People)
[9] Compliance vs. Commitment (On Behavior Change)
[10] Why Change Is Hard
[11] Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups, page 83 (Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven Wolff, Harvard Business Review, March 2001)
[12] Safety Is a Resource, Not a Destination
[13] War As I Knew It (George S. Patton, 1947)
[14] Kelleher was co-founder and longtime CEO of Southwest Airlines, and this line is widely attributed to him. I haven't been able to find definitive proof that he said or wrote it, but it seems consistent with his legacy.
