June 25 2012
Three pigs, goats, a wolf, a troll and the musketeers!
TweetI was recently thinking about fairy tales, legends and other
fantasy type stories. It crossed my mind that not only is the rule
of three very evident within their content time and again, but there
are parallels from their content with change management experience –
no surprises there then!
So what do the three little pigs, goats gruff or even musketeers
tell you about leading change. Well let's consider the little pigs
first. I hope you know enough of the story but to recap - 3 pigs
build 3 houses after their mother has sent them out into the world.
One house gets made of straw, one of sticks and one of bricks. Big
bad wolf huffs and puffs and blows down the first two houses but
fails on the final house. The wolf then tries to climb in through
the chimney but the pigs put a boiling pot over a fire and he either
gets boiled or burned and depending on if your Disney or darker the
wolf is scared off or killed by this.
So the 3 houses made me think of the way people take change.
Sometimes they build barriers to accept or even listen. But with
some effort these barriers can be broken down. However I have had
that experience where one group seem to be inboard only to connect
with another group with harder resolve to the change. Eventually
they get caught up with a group with such hardened resilience there
is no changing them. You then look to a different route into the
group only to find yourself heavily scorned and having to run away
and either totally regroup or abandon plans. Not a good outcome! Of
course they key here is perception as the big bad wolf. This happens
when you go to the people as their enemy with evil grins and
ulterior motives. Let yourself be seen as the big bad wolf and you
won’t get very far, but to use another wolf based fairy tale, try
being more red-riding hood!
So what about the Billy goats gruff? The story here is about 3 goats
that need to change where they currently pasture and move to a new
and better meadow. To get there they have to cross a bridge where an
evil troll lives. Each one goes to cross the bridge but persuades
him that the next goat is bigger and better and he should wait for
them. When the third and largest goat arrives on the bridge, he is
so big that he tosses the troll over the bridge and is never seen
again.
Where does this connect to change management you may ask? I see this
as demonstrating the power of clever communications. As you go to
make each change, if you can get adoption and acceptance on a
smaller scale, then increasing it with each new communications works
well. The audience is keen to hear more information and are often
open to being convinced that letting this change happen is worth it
and to save any challenges for the next one. Eventually, the size
and value of the change communications is so great it can have
energy of its own to achieve acceptance. Many stakeholder
communication plans have this principle at their heart. If you
engage little by little with the stakeholder, when you need to make
the big move, they are already sufficiently on board with the
smaller changes that it’s not such a big leap to the final large
change needed. So perhaps the change manager is more of a goat here,
and the troll is the evil organization resisting change. The goats
carry a message that convinces the troll to accept each movement
because the next one will reward their motives better. When he gets
to the third goat, it’s too big for him to deal with and he gets
pushed aside. Now I don’t recommend pushing aside the audience, but
the audience for your change communications will have to run with
the change if you build up to it in the right way. I also think
there is something in this tale that relates to organizational
culture, but that is probably a conversation for another blog post.
AS for the 3 musketeers, well the motto of one for all and all for
one, with the combination of multiple skill sets overlaps with team
building, leadership and all elements of organizational development.
Am sure there is more to this, perhaps you have some thoughts?