Fear of change doesn’t just affect individuals — it can also influence entire organizations. But staying relevant and competitive demands that organizations be able to depart from convention and set precedents. But doing something for the first time, especially when the world is watching, is never easy for several key reasons.
1. You lack reference points. When something has never been done before, there are no existing examples or templates to follow. Without prior experiences to draw upon, it can be difficult to know where to start or how to proceed.
2. You face a higher risk of failure. Without historical data or past successes to guide you, there’s a higher risk of failure when attempting something unprecedented. Failure can be intimidating and discouraging, especially if there’s pressure to succeed or if the consequences of failure are significant.
3. You must overcome entrenched mental barriers. We are creatures of habit, and breaking away from established norms or routines can be psychologically challenging. It may require overcoming personal biases, fears, or doubts about one’s own capabilities. Any self-limiting beliefs or fear of risk will undoubtedly be intensified when breaking from familiar ground.
4. Time horizons are longer, but patience is shorter. Pioneering efforts often require patience and persistence, as breakthroughs may take years or even decades to achieve. Maintaining momentum and support over long time horizons can be challenging, especially when there are competitive or political pressures to produce results faster than what’s possible. Eagerness to achieve first-mover advantages can lead some to push ethical boundaries or cut corners on rigorous technical learning.
So, how do you prepare your team to do something vital and new for the first time? By presenting the change in an appropriate and informative manner, you can help relieve potential anxieties and get everyone onboard to make these important adjustments.
One valuable tactic is to draw on prior experiences when you have previously had to do something new. No organization that has been around for long has been able to operate with the exact same operations since it was first founded. For many, past successes become templates, or “playbooks.” In that case, it can be dangerous to draw from past successes blindly, because by definition, the goal is repeating past successes, not breaking from convention. But contextualizing past experiences – but successes and failures – can yield valuable wisdom that can inform new initiatives. It’s the difference between asking “How can I repeat that success in this endeavor” and asking, “What can I learn from that experience that, recontextualized, might apply here?”
Consider the case of Konami, a Japanese corporation that started as a jukebox rental and repair business. Today, the company is most famous internationally for its video games, but it also operates health and fitness clubs and casinos, distributes trading cards and more. Needless to say, plenty of organizations have found success by doing something dramatically new and different.
At the same time, there’s good reason why companies can be resistant to change — historically, 70% of change initiatives fail. Your business has likely experienced its fair share of failures in the past.
You can help your team by focusing on what Harvard Business School professor of leadership Amy C. Edmondson calls “intelligent failures.” By acknowledging and talking about past failures, your organization can learn from past mistakes (your own and others’) to make well-guided change attempts. Teach the organization to view setbacks and failures as opportunities for learning and improvement. Encourage a growth mindset within the organization, where failure is seen as a natural part of the learning process.
Of course, successful change initiatives must be tied to strategically relevant outcomes that have a direct impact on a key organizational goal, such as the appeal of your product portfolio, customer loyalty or market share.
An example of this comes from Maksim Sonin, a Sloan Fellow at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He explains, “My current goal is to facilitate a sustainable transition to a low-carbon economy. In undertaking pioneering projects to develop the world’s largest plants for humanitarian purposes and energy transition, my strategic objective was front and center. This approach is pivotal in creating innovative facilities with unprecedented capacities, offering cost-effective and energy-efficient solutions that set new standards and significantly raise the bar for the entire industry.”
As part of the process of preparing to do something new for the first time, your leadership team must consider strategies to narrow its risks. Identify potential risks and challenges associated with the initiative, and develop strategies to mitigate them. Even the best thought-out strategic changes aren’t immune to failure, and you should mitigate the potential negative impact of such a failure on your organization.
This requires implementing a threat reduction strategy. Start by conducting a risk analysis that evaluates possible negative outcomes from your new initiative. Look at factors within, and outside the organization. Based on this analysis, you can then identify customized strategies that will help you keep risk at a reasonable level — such as reducing the scope of a project to keep the budget under control, or backing up your data on a physical drive prior to switching to a new cloud services provider.
The principle of “intelligent failures” — looking for learning opportunities in previous unsuccessful change attempts — can also apply to new activities that you hope will be a success. Aside from having a strategically relevant outcome in mind, you should also develop a hypothesis about what your organization can learn from that change. For example, if the strategic goal is to improve customer loyalty, you will ideally learn which initiatives enhance customer engagement and satisfaction as part of your change efforts.
As Sonin notes, “In my field of sustainability, I enter every project with a hypothesis about what I’ll be able to achieve and what takeaways that will have for future endeavors on a global scale. Such a hypothesis is tied to my specific strategic goals. Working with this in mind and measuring outcomes throughout the execution helps me implement adjustments as needed and gain new insights to make additional improvements.”
Finally, you should always be honest with your team about what the new activity or initiative entails. It could be that not all parts of the project are brand new, and helping your team realize this will help alleviate concerns. Alternatively, successfully implementing the change will require capabilities that you don’t have, and will therefore require forming strategic partnerships with another organization.
Regardless of what the project will require, you must be honest and transparent with your team. Be forthright about how this will affect their responsibilities and day to day activities. Make it clear that this is a team effort, and don’t be afraid to talk about how the project will create changes for you, too. This level of transparency will invite trust and help team members realize that you’re all in this together.
You may not be able to completely eliminate organizational resistance to change. After all, breaking new ground can sometimes face resistance or opposition from others who are skeptical or fearful of change. But by taking these crucial steps to prepare your team, you will enable them to move forward with greater confidence and give them the resources to help them succeed. Change often isn’t easy, but after doing something that is vital to your future success, your team will experience the growth and learning necessary to get to keep pioneering when new opportunities arise.