as easy as... boiling water

A watched pot never boils?

The truth is, once you turn the heat up, change is inevitable. The real question is, will you get the results you need? Under your careful watch, the answer is yes—when you apply your energy to the right requirements for effective and lasting change.

Research shows us that the vast majority of change initiatives fail (they don’t produce the desired outcomes, take too long, cost too much, etc.). The failure rate has hovered around 70% for years. You can ask people from all over, "Why does change fail so often?" and you’ll get consistently similar answers.

They’ll tell you they’ve seen change fail because of unclear or nonexistent rationale, a general lack of communication, competing priorities, and a host of other preventable causes. I imagine that you’ve seen all of this, too. After all, the modern workplace is practically defined by its unprecedented pace and volume of change.

As an organizational development professional, I’ve had a front row seat to my share of change. And I’ve witnessed one common problem: right when the change starts to take effect, the company (senior leaders, change champions, what-have-you) seems to pull back, and the effort stalls. For a long time, I thought of this as “the crisis point,” and wondered how to help leaders and teams get through this critical moment and reach the end of the change initiative. And then I got a physics lesson from my husband.

Nate spent 6 years in the U.S. Navy as a submariner. He served as a nuclear reactor operator during this time, meaning that he was part of the team managing the submarine’s power plant. I’ve heard him describe this by saying he boiled water for the Navy. Obviously, it was much more complex than that and involved detailed and careful procedures. Part of operating a nuclear reactor that serves as a steam plant is paying close attention to the state of water. All of this to say that, when we’re cooking, it’s not uncommon for my husband to check on a pot of water and state, “We have reached the departure from nucleate boiling.”

Naturally, I asked what in the world he meant by this. In lay terms, it’s the point when you’re boiling water and you start to see the tiny bubbles form, telling you that the full boil is coming and—beyond that—steam production will follow. This is an oversimplification. I am not a physicist, but I am curious, and I can read a chart.

See, when Nate found this chart to help explain things to me, I realized that I was looking at the change process. Not just the process of water moving from one phase to another, but how we experience change at work. Let me explain.

It takes heat (energy) to take water from 0℃ to 100℃. That is an investment of time and resources. And while small bubbles may begin to form, true boiling and steam production haven’t begun. In fact, it takes three times as much energy to move from that threshold (100℃) to the boiling point.

What the physics of "reaching the boiling point" shows us is that the first signs of change are not the actual change. The big lesson here? Change requires energy!

This is the fundamental problem when leading change: Getting from the point where the need to change is identified to the threshold for change takes a lot of energy, and we often see the first signs of change. And then stop. Because we mistake these first indicators for the change itself, we fail. The threshold is where the work truly begins—and it takes more energy to accomplish real, lasting change.

Where does all this energy come from, you may ask? The leader.

A leader’s energy makes change possible—when it’s applied in the right ways, to the right areas. In the coming weeks, I’ll cover these areas, what I call the four requirements of change, in more detail:

1)      Direction = Vision in the form of a shared destination + Trust grown from clear expectations

2)      Engagement = Connection through respectful communication + Compassion in the face of resistance

3)      Choice = Results in line with responsibilities + Pride from personal decision-making

4)      Clarity = Agility at all levels of the organization + Efficiency through organized teamwork

Look for the next installment of as easy as…, where I’ll explain how Direction helps teams take the first steps to successful change.