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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

A vice president once asked me how I was able to get effective change in large organizations when no amount of exhortation on the part of senior management had been successful. I pointed out to him that the people who resist the change the hardest are the ones who cannot see what their job would be post change. As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change because of that. This is the Shirky Principle embodied in individuals, and small groups some times too.

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This is very true across all businesses layers. I remember some years ago implementing a CRM system for a small training company. The result was great and they successfully use it even today, however at the time we needed one the junior administrators in some of the discovery sessions so we better understand the processes they do,etc. She was absolutely petrified. Even though the system was meant to make her life much easier,instead she only saw it as her replacement. It took quite a bit of effort to convince her that she's staying. I had similar reactions in my team too when I announced that some processes could be completely automated. Instead of excitement,I received ' what will my job be like then?'.

> I had similar reactions in my team too when I announced that some processes could be completely automated. Instead of excitement,I received ' what will my job be like then?'.

That seems like a perfectly rational response. I think the problem is that we think of process improvements in abstract, aggregate, terms; but on the ground they affect real individual people and they are often forgotten in the excitement of saving the company money.

We are seeing this now in the large in the tech sector with the AI explosion.

One of my first tasks at Equipmentshare was automating invoice generation, and we did a lot of that basically pair programming with one of the back office specialists that did that work manually - it was super, super fun, we made really good friends, and now, ten years or something later, she’s a manager overseeing whatever systems replaced what we built.

But it was driven by both sides being made clear from the beginning: nobody is losing any jobs here, the goal is to 10x the number of accounts we could do per back office person; their new jobs will be overseeing the software and dealing with edge cases.

I’m not sure this would’ve been possible to do in such a way if the company wasn’t rapidly growing though.

Makes me wonder: what are things that are easier like this in orgs that aren’t in growth phases?

That is a great example. And yes, if you're in an org where things are "tight" it gets much harder because people will assume the worst outcome is most likely. I've always been a fan of being honest with people, not everyone I've worked for or with shared that point of view. But being consistently honest helps when you're explaining things because it is more likely someone trust you enough to try the change you're proposing. Sometimes that means having the conversation of "Once we're done with this change, the thing you're currently doing won't need to be done. But since we want everyone to have a place after this change, these are the areas that will need help once the change is in place, and we're hoping you would help in one of them ..."

I had an engineer tell me once that the reason they wrote really obtuse code was because "when the layoffs come I'll be the only one who understands it so I won't get laid off!" They were quite pleased with that strategy. I pointed out that they would also never get promoted if their manager couldn't get anyone else to learn their code. This was something they hadn't really considered.

People do in fact like being able to put food on the table.

> how I was able to get effective change in large organizations

You only told us the problem I think. What is the solution? Tell the resisting people what their job will look like after?

Yes. In many situations that has resulted in me having additional conversations with the folks who are asking for the change to be clear about headcount goals.

If they are trying to reduce staff (usually coded as 'increase operational efficiency') I want them to be up front about that in their messaging because I will be up front with that with the people who will feel that impact. It is often possible to actually increase efficiency without laying anyone off, to make sure that senior staff understands that you need to have a common way of evaluating efficiency (what's the baseline, what's the goal, what are the indicators, Etc.) because getting more done with the same people is often better than laying people off because of the latent effect of loosing institutional memory about things.

Your experience is one thing but the narrative is management absolutely don't care about losing institutional memory, they want somethong to put on their resume before they jump ship to the next gig

>exhortation

I assumed you were talking about Sun, and I read that as "extortion".

It reminds me of the vicious intimidation tactics that Sun executives made their poor sysadmin enforcers perform on their behalf, to ruthlessly coerce other reluctant executives and employees to run Solaris instead of SunOS!

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/slowlaris/worst-...

I remember an all-hands meeting where Scott McNealy told everybody, "You're going to have to stop hugging your tree!"

After the meeting I went to my manager and demanded a tree: I never knew about any trees! Why did everybody get a tree but me? I want my tree! I promise I will not hug it.

So he gave me an old set of SunOS manuals.

One of my mentors was Steve K. at Sun who I consulted with about how badly Sun did changes. It really pissed me off that Sun wouldn't put NIS+ into SunOS because they were allegedly worried it would "reduce the incentive to migrate to Solaris."

I would say I was not particularly successful at being a 'change agent' there.

It's not just changing badly, but changing to the wrong thing.

They'd beaten AT&T in the Unix marketplace, then celebrated by getting in bed with them.

And what was the rest of your response? How could you get effective change based on this understanding?

I think it is implied that they showed people what the change would look like and that it did not threaten their jobs.

I think my problem is that the people that have little enough imagination that they cannot see what their job might look like after are maybe better replaced?

Fear cuts in before the rational mind can process, and it conditions subsequent actions - including the ability to visualise and appropriately weight potential positive outcomes. You need to apply energy to boot people out of the local minimum they've fallen into so that they can end up in the right place.

It doesn't really matter how well you can imagine your job afterwards, if the powers that be are more likely than not primarily imagining reduced labor costs.

Here is a fun book for you, if you want: "Who Moved my Cheese?"[1] An HR person shared it with me in the dot.com era as things were exploding around us and I found it pretty informative. Basically it seems humans see "bad outcomes" as more likely than "good outcomes". It could be an evolved survival trait or it could just be a tendency to be pessimists, but even WHEN you explain how someone's job will exist/improve/change with the change, they will not actually fully believe you.

For reasons I'm not entirely sure I understand, I tend to be pretty analytic about this sort of thing and until my role started including the need to help people understand change it had not occurred to me that fear would overwhelm some folks rationality. But once you can see it, it is really clear that that is where their head is and the anxiety is consuming them.

[1] "Who Moved my Cheese" by Dr. Spencer Johnson -- https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004CR6AM4/

In the US where healthcare is tied to employment, the possibility of being replaced can literally be life or death.

Especially with efficiency culture where labor is often the first to be cut in the name of profit.

The fear is perfectly rational because managerial and C levels have made it clear that the person does not matter in the slightest. It would be foolish to outright trust management and is often how people are taken advantage of.

Guess you'll have to illustrate the vision to them, probably using pictures. Like slides in a presentation.

But the point would be to change their job so that they can produce more value? Otherwise nothing is won. It's supposedly hard to convince people that they will have a fit in the new organisation if they have been doing things the same way for ten years; or that there is magically other valuable things to do when their job becomes more efficient.

The easier solution to is remove them.

Sure, and the best optimization of any bottleneck is to cut the feature, doing nothing is O(1) after all.

As you can imagine, it's a solution that kills the product (or the company) in the long term.

A company is like a rose bush, keeping it civilised means constant aggressive prunning.

Surely the bush itself cannot be responsible for its own pruning, that would be a conflict of interest. Anyway, it's always best to start pruning at the top.

What if the top's singing "Feed Me, Seymour!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNHrzZUascE

At the tips actually.

It's always easier to assume that the fault lies with the listener rather than the speaker. That doesn't mean it's the most effective bias to hold.

If the speaker can convince the listener they should find a job where they don't need to speak as part of the job description. Dishwashers and janitors give pletnly of job stability for people like those.

I was too abstract. I meant that when a message is misunderstood by a large enough chunk of the audience it's the speaker's fault for not knowing their audience and their needs.

To be clear, you demonstrated the bias I was referring to by casting doubt on the intelligence or job-worthiness of the listeners rather than recognizing what I said about effectiveness being improved if you can get your message to more people.

> As a result the change is perceived as an existential risk to their own job and they will go to great lengths to sabotage the change because of that.

It applies in some personal relationships too. Foster dependence, sabotage and discourage growth, maintain control. Yeah, ditch those people.

For organizations, you'd think that explaining the benefits for everyone, and making sure that everyone is on-board and can see themselves thriving under the new conditions (…or isolating and removing those who can't), would be the obvious first step, though.

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