Leaders in London: Staying the course for change
Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone feels he failed as a leader
when the TalkTalk broadband campaign became a victim of its own
success; instant demand exceeded the organisation's ability to
immediately supply free broadband access,
At Leaders in London, Dunstone said he took his company to a place it ‘couldn't cope with'; and he recognised it would take a huge amount of work to deal with the fallout from the situation.
Would he do the same again if he knew then what he knows now?
‘I should say ‘no' but if I didn't say ‘yes' nothing would change. You have to be bold to create change,' Dunstone said. And he admitted: ‘Life will never be the same again for us; we will have to be a bit more considered, and less buccaneering.'
Dunstone committed himself and his company to a vision for change; he wanted to revolutionise the broadband marketplace but as the man admits in his blog, TalkTalk was unprepared for just how many people wanted to join the revolution.
This situation makes me wonder afresh: how able we are to identify and accept the need to change how we do things once we've plotted a course? (Put hindsight aside for a moment; as they say, it is a wonderful thing but even Dunstone maintains he would do the same all over again.)
There are some aspects of the TalkTalk scenario that remind me of ‘CFIT' - Controlled Flying Into Terrain. Professor Marvin Zonas explained CFIT at LiL in 2005; he revealed a frightening statistic. In the US, 40% of all commercial flight crashes are caused by ‘CFIT'. So two out of every five crashes occur when pilots deny the information they are being presented with... that there's a mountain up ahead, or their instruments aren't registering a problem. And they just keep on flying, in a controlled manner, into the ground.
Flying a plane into terrain is an extreme example of change resistance, and I'm not for a moment suggesting that Dunstone is a leader in denial of a difficult business challenge. But having set the free broadband bandwagon in motion, Dunstone could hardly choose to jump off. If you have a plan, a vision, if you're committed to a course of action, for some it can be too difficult to change. Perhaps sometimes things have just gone too far, too fast to be able to make a necessary diversion in time to avert failure.
Change - personal, business, organisational - is a challenge each of us has: move forward and make progress; stand still and decline. Spencer Johnson, author of ‘Who Moved My Cheese?' and another speaker at LiL in 2005, said that it's often a painful situation, or the need to escape from it, that prompts change.
President Gorbachev, another former speaker at LiL was also concise: ‘Perestroika happened when we realised we couldn't go on living the way we were'.
It's interesting to think about our role as change leaders. If like me, you're very comfortable at initiating change - whether it's your idea or one you've bought into - you have a clear view of the end point or purpose. All you have to do now is get people to do what you need them to do. But when change is imposed, it's a different story. Whoever said, ‘when faced with the need to change, most people get busy on the proof for why it doesn't apply to them', got it about right! We get resistant, we find at least 22 ways to kill off the idea, we stall, ask for more data ... and in the end, with a not very good grace, we maybe, just maybe, give in.
A senior executive's job is often a lonely one, with few people to rely on who don't have an axe to grind, and for whom the habits of behaviour are very comfortable, thank you. Our clients find coaching very effective as a confidential resource with no other objective than to see the executive achieve his or her goals - and inevitably, these imply leading people in a direction they find unattractive. Perhaps personal change is perestroika for the beleaguered spirit?
Isn't it interesting that so often we need an outsider - coach, consultant, teacher - to help us see things more clearly? Allan Leighton, Royal Mail and BHS supremo, tells a delightful story about his early experience in a Maltesers sweet factory; don't try to sweep up many tiny, uncontrollable balls; squash them first!. The anecdote emphasises the need to find out the better way to do things. (Leighton's advice was ‘ask the operators'. Think about the basics, don't try to be too clever, and keep ‘strategy' to only 20% of the firm's business).
Much of my work when coaching senior people is to help them find a route to change, or cope with personal transition. Most of us tend to make things much more complicated than they need to be, in order to protect the status quo - so the coach's job is to ask the simple, ‘dumb' questions. What we are doing, again in Marvin Zonas' words, is finding a way to ‘bend the mind frame'.
A bit like the occasion when, on a long-haul flight, that had been boarded but then severely delayed, the passenger next to me called over the attendant. We were all getting very fed up with waiting, and anticipated a tetchy conversation, which would have reflected everyone's frustrations. In a very calm Southern drawl, this gentleman asked: ‘Excuse me ma'am, is this delay technical or administrative?' The attendant replied that it was technical. While all around him there were sighs and tutting, my fellow passenger nodded, and said: ‘Then please take all the time you need, ma'am!'
