Change is easy - People are hard

People HATE change!

Is one of the major misconceptions running rampant in the world today.

Let me explain … no, no … let me illustrate.

We were members of a small (40-50 member) church that was hoping to grow and help revitalize a marginalized Boston neighborhood. We were young, smart, motivated, and anxious to make our mark on the city and improve people’s lives

We were doing the common church thing at the time - meeting in small groups of 8-12. My wife and I were co-leaders, along with another couple, in one of the groups. Our leadership heard rumblings of an exciting new way to organize our style of church, so we sent them off for a week to watch a big city church that was doing great things. They came back with a handful of books and a headful of ideas.

It seemed a trivial difference on the outside, but the difference inside was huge. Our current small groups were basically support groups. We got together to help each other with life. We’d stick together, grow to know each other, and learn how to help each other through life’s dramas and crises.

The new paradigm viewed small groups as outreach tools. Constantly be inviting people to join. When the group got over 12 or so, “multiply” the group into two groups, rinse and repeat. Instead of a circle of people looking inwards at each other, we’d stand back to back and look out at the world around us.

The OOPS

There was one point that the books we had on this new way of thinking made abundantly clear. Do NOT convert your existing small groups into the new kind. It would fail. Instead, take your best people, put them together, and grow. They’d see a success and learn how to recreate it. Sounds simple, eh?

So, armed with that information we proceeded to … convert our existing small groups into the new paradigm.

It went exactly as predicted by the books.

This is where change management enters our story.

I believe that people’s love/hate relationship with change lies somewhere along a bell curve. 70-80% of people are basically indifferent to change. These people are easy to work with and get on board. Give them a rational explanation, maybe a cute slide deck, and they get the idea and come happily along.

10-15% love change. They are all about change. They love it. A few love it so much that they chase it and the endorphins it brings, without really sticking with something long enough for it to truly affect them or help them grow.

The rest…. yikes. Any change is bad. That’s not how we do it here. I’m comfortable. I need routine.

To be fair, they are not wrong.

We had a couple of people who did not like this change. One in particular, let’s call him Drew, was strongly against it. I understand him now. He’d had a tough life and was just now getting his act together. He needed the stability of a support group. He wasn’t a bad guy. He was just hurting, and not in a place to do what we wanted to do. The last thing he needed was to constantly be asked to trust a string of new people.

Predictably, most groups in the church had similar issues, and this great new paradigm never really got off of the ground.

The Lessons

If the experts say “don’t”, maybe … just don’t. You’re not special or different or better. Unless you’ve got something tangible that you can use to show that your situation is different, then this situation is not different. Don’t bow to hubris. Don’t take the shortcut. Do the work. Read the manual, and pay attention to it.

People change when they hurt enough that they have to, learn enough that they want to, and receive enough that they are able to - John C. Maxwell

People LOVE change when it is THEIR change. That is the simple secret to change management. Help people see that the change is good for them, improves them, makes their life better. If you can’t, why would you expect them to want any change at all?

The other hard lesson about change management is: you don’t need to change everyone. Perhaps it would be best to help the slow adopters find another place to serve. Maybe their journey is taking them somewhere else.

Or, maybe your change is the wrong change. Maybe you are going about it the wrong way.

Maybe try what the book says.