BBH Senior Advisor Dr. Lynn Kelley is a renowned thought leader in change management who specializes in helping organizations sustain change to cultivate a high-performance culture. Her new book, “Change Questions: A Playbook for Effective and Lasting Organizational Change,” serves as a powerful tool for individuals and organizations alike, enabling them to experiment with and devise highly effective change management strategies.

We recently sat down with Dr. Kelley to discuss her process for implementing change, how we can overcome change resistance, and the importance of failure in change implementations.

Your work and your new book, "Change Questions: A Playbook for Effective and Lasting Organizational Change,” focuses on implementing and sustaining organizational change. How often is a change implementation successful, and what are common reasons for failure?

Change implementation is only successful 30% to 40% of the time. Many organizations set a goal for change, but sometimes the change doesn’t meet the objective, or the changes disappear altogether and are not sustained in the long run.

If your definition of success for your change is that you want it to deliver certain sustained results, the probability of success is only 30% to 40%.

So why do changes fail? People often don’t recognize how difficult sustainable organizational change is, so they don’t take a bit of extra time beforehand to think about how to mitigate the risk of failure.

Throughout “Change Questions,” you use Union Pacific (UP) as a case study. Share with us what you were hired to do at UP.

I spent 20 years of my career implementing and leading groups in employing lean manufacturing – primarily in the automotive sector. Eventually, I moved up to implement all kinds of change.

A recruiter called me about a job at UP to look at lean manufacturing for the railroad. UP had 42,000 operating employees who weren’t in an office and who sometimes would go six weeks without seeing a supervisor. These were people running the trains and repairing the tracks. It seemed like a fun challenge to determine what it would look like to implement lean with that workforce.

In “Change Questions,” you outline 11 questions that help improve the likelihood of success for a change. Are these the right questions for every change? How should readers use these questions?

Most of the change methodologies that are out there are good, but they typically have five to eight steps. Each time I failed over the course of 40 years of implementing change, I researched why that specific implementation failed and how the risk could be mitigated. Those learnings helped me come up with the 11 questions in the book.

When you’re thinking of implementing change, ask yourself: Which of these questions are appropriate for my change? Answering those questions will create a customized approach for each specific situation and how to address potential failure, instead of following a step-by-step model that is always the same.

Sometimes existing metrics can work against your change initiative. Take a call center, for example, that measures employees based on how long they take to resolve each call. The call center may say it wants to increase customer satisfaction, but if employees spend that extra time to increase customer satisfaction, they’re going to get penalized in the measurement system. In that case, it’s important to consider fixing the measurement system to achieve the change goal.

I found that following my 11 questions increased the probability of sustainable change to 96% at UP, where we had hundreds of change initiatives a year.

One of my favorite insights from your book (and from having the opportunity to engage you as an advisor to our work at BBH) is the 20-60-20 rule. Tell us about this idea and how it works.

There is a 20-60-20 curve applicable to people’s willingness to adopt new ways of doing things: 20% of people will resist change, 60% will be neutral, and 20% will be the change agents and early adopters.

You need the neutrals to swing over to the positive side. Whenever possible, start implementing the change with change agents. You can do this in many ways – as a pilot, an experiment, or a simulation, for example. When you start to have successes, share these wins – the middle group will get excited and want to be involved. That’s where you start the tipping point.

Most change is not done this way. People decide on the change, announce it, and everyone gets the information at the same time. Then, the resistors start the tipping point in the other direction, and it is difficult to overcome that momentum. On top of that, if you haven’t piloted with the change adopters, you often have bugs in your launch and create needless challenges to overcome with everyone.

In every organization, system, and family, there is always resistance to change – you describe it as a “natural bias toward the status quo.” How should change agents plan for and deal with change resistors?

Often when we’re implementing change, we think that people who resist change are the bad guys. It’s more helpful to give them the benefit of the doubt. Understand that they may have had issues with change in the past, likely believe their current processes work well, and are trying to protect themselves. Talk to them about their concerns and how to help.

I always create a customized plan for each group, and I leave the resistors for last. No one likes to be told what to do – especially someone not comfortable with change. If you get the change agents leading the charge and the neutrals on board, you reach a tipping point that makes it much easier to get the resistors to come along.

One of the change questions is about whether your culture supports the change. How can we assess this?

Trying to change an organization’s fundamental culture is difficult to do, but what you can do is have initiatives that will start to affect culture and push people in this new direction.

Whenever I’m implementing change, I do a quick assessment where I have people from different layers of the organization give me three positive and three negative things about the company’s culture. Their view often depends on where they sit in the corporation. For example, leaders tend to have a rosy glow of the culture. Different layers may have their own culture, but the commonalities across the board reveal the truth about the company’s culture.

To know if your culture can support change, get it down to the key elements. Then, ask yourself, “This is what our change initiative looks like. What in our culture would hinder that? And what can we leverage?” Look at it both ways.

In the book, you talk about the importance of using data to create and sustain a change initiative. How and when do you obtain reliable data on your change?

The research shows that if your change is going to fail, you can detect it in the first month.

Armed with this, I have always tried to get an early detection metric in place. That is why one of the change questions is about how to detect failure early – because you can course correct! No plan is ever perfect – you can experiment and adjust so that you iterate yourself to success.

At UP, we had everyone who was trained in a new way of doing things trained by their managers, but with us in the room to support that. We gave everyone an anonymous survey afterward asking if they understood the topic, if it would improve what it was intended to, if it would improve employee engagement, and if they could implement it.

A few weeks later, we sent a follow-up survey to see if it was actually working and improving outcomes. We were able to see who had and hadn’t implemented the change. The managers and employees who were successfully implementing the change were widely recognized across the company. For those who hadn’t, we reached out to see how we could help. We continued to follow up with surveys and could measure success by manager. This is an example of how you can track and link success with data.

What is the role of failure in change implementations, and how do successful organizations react to failure?

If there is no problem, that’s a problem. That tells you something about leadership. You need to feel free to talk about problems. Problems are not a sign of personal failure – they’re a sign that something needs to be fixed.

It comes down to how we address our problems, failures, and mistakes. You can iterate yourself to success if you really pay attention and learn. It takes a lot of work, but it takes more work to fail. Not only have you put in a lot of time and effort, but you leave behind failure debris. We do so much damage each time we walk away from a change without trying to fix it.

What’s the failure you have learned the most from personally?

I was a professor teaching about lean manufacturing, statistics, and measurements. A Michigan-based Tier 1 automotive supplier came to me for advice about how to implement lean manufacturing. I put together a plan for them, and the company took off like wildfire. They won the Michigan Quality Leadership Award, and a large U.S. industrial conglomerate purchased them because their numbers were off the charts.

At the same time, that acquirer also purchased a fastener company in France that was operating in the automotive space. They asked me to move to Paris to do the same thing I had done in Michigan. I failed miserably there, and I could not figure out why. It was an iconic French company that had produced the rivets for the Eiffel Tower, bought by an American company, with a U.S. woman coming in to tell them what to do – no way!

That’s when I realized the importance of buy-in and started to fixate on change management. It’s how the change questions started!

Lynn, thank you for your time. This has certainly affected how we will think about change going forward!