The Formula for Change
Change in a business is not a matter of how badly the owner wants it. It is a contest between three things pushing and one thing pushing back, and the three that push multiply rather than add.
The formula is usually credited to Richard Beckhard and Reuben Harris, building on earlier work by David Gleicher. Dissatisfaction with how things are now, times a vision of what good looks like, times concrete first steps, must be greater than the resistance to change. Miss any one of the three and the product is zero, however hard you push the other two.
Why multiplication is the whole point
If the three factors added up, you could compensate. A weak vision could be carried by strong dissatisfaction. That is not how it works, and everyone who has tried to force a change through on frustration alone already knows it.
Dissatisfaction with no vision produces anxiety. People agree that the current state is bad, have no picture of the alternative, and conclude that things are about to get worse. That is what a stressed owner sounds like when they have been telling the team for six weeks that this cannot go on.
Vision with no dissatisfaction produces polite indifference. You paint a picture of a business with proper systems and a management team, and everyone nods, because the current arrangement suits them fine. Nothing in the picture answers the question they are actually asking, which is why bother.
Dissatisfaction and vision with no first step produces a very good meeting and no change. This is the most common of the three by a distance. Everyone leaves fired up, nobody knows what to do on Monday morning, and by Wednesday it has been absorbed into the week.
Resistance is not stupidity
The right-hand side of the formula gets treated as an obstacle to be overcome. It is more useful to treat it as information. Resistance is the honest sum of what the change costs the people being asked to make it: relearning something they were good at, losing a bit of status, an extra twenty minutes a day, the risk of looking incompetent in front of colleagues, and the entirely rational memory of the last three initiatives that were dropped.
That last one matters more than owners think. In a business that has started and abandoned several things, resistance carries a large fixed cost that has nothing to do with the current idea. You are not arguing against the change, you are arguing against your own track record.
Working it through with numbers
Score each factor out of ten and multiply. The scores are invented and always will be. The arithmetic is the useful part, because it shows you which lever is worth pulling.
Take an owner of a nine-person surveying practice trying to move the team off paper job sheets onto a proper system. Illustrative figures throughout.
Dissatisfaction sits at about 3. The paper system is annoying but it works, and the people using it are not the people who suffer from it. Vision is 7, because the owner has explained the destination well and it is genuinely attractive. First steps are 2: the plan is "we are moving to the new system in the autumn," which is not a step, it is a season. Three times seven times two is 42.
Resistance, on the same rough scale, is high. Nine people, each facing a fortnight of feeling slow at something they are currently fast at, plus two previous systems that were bought and quietly dropped. Call it 200 on the same made-up scale. The change does not happen, and no amount of enthusiasm at the Monday meeting alters that.
Now change two things. The owner spends twenty minutes pulling the actual cost of the paper system out of last year: the three jobs where variations were done and never invoiced, worth around £11,400 between them, and the fortnight of admin time spent chasing sheets at year end. Dissatisfaction moves from 3 to 8, and it moves for the team rather than just for the owner, because now they can see it too. Then the first step is redefined from "we are moving in the autumn" to "on Tuesday morning, each of you records one job on the new system with me sitting next to you, and it will take ten minutes." First steps go from 2 to 8.
Eight times seven times eight is 448, against resistance of 200. The same vision, the same people, the same system. What changed was the evidence and the size of the first step.
Notice which lever did nothing. Vision stayed at 7 throughout, and lifting it to 9 would have taken the first version from 42 to 54. Still nowhere. Owners who are natural communicators reach for vision every time, because it is the factor they are best at, and it is very often the one with the least room left in it.
The mistake most owners make
Trying to overcome resistance by increasing pressure. Pressure does not appear anywhere in the formula. It usually raises resistance, because it adds the cost of arguing with you to everything else on the list.
The other one is manufacturing dissatisfaction rather than surfacing it. There is a real difference between showing people the £11,400 and telling people they should be unhappy. The first is evidence and it survives scrutiny. The second is theatre, and people who feel managed rather than informed remember it.
And the quiet one: mistaking agreement for change. Everyone nodding is a measure of vision, not of first steps. The test of a change is not what happens in the meeting, it is what a specific person does before eleven o'clock on Tuesday.
How to apply it this week
- Take the change that has stalled and score all four factors out of ten. Do it honestly, and do it from the team's point of view rather than your own. Your dissatisfaction score is irrelevant.
- Find the lowest of D, V and F. That is where your effort goes. Not the one you enjoy, the one that is lowest.
- Put a real number on the status quo. What did the current way cost last year, in pounds, hours or lost jobs? Go and find it. Evidence moves dissatisfaction, opinion does not.
- Shrink the first step until it is almost insulting. One job, ten minutes, on Tuesday, with you sitting there. If the first step takes longer than an hour, it is not a first step.
- List the resistance out loud with the team. Ask what this costs them. Write it up. Half of what you hear will be fixable and the other half will be worth knowing.
- Deal with the graveyard. Name the last initiative you dropped, say why it was dropped, and say what is different this time. If nothing is different, do not start.
The questions to sit with
- Out of 10, how dissatisfied is your team with the current way, as opposed to how dissatisfied you are?
- What is the first step in your current change, and could someone start it before lunch tomorrow without asking anyone a question?
- How many things have you started and quietly dropped in the last three years? What does that number do to the resistance side of the formula?
- Which factor do you always reach for first, and what does that tell you about the changes that have failed?
This is the sum that sits underneath Leading Change. Most stalled changes in small businesses are not people problems. They are arithmetic problems, and the missing factor is almost always the first step.
