Ripe for Change?

Organizational leaders are always agents of change.  We can make changes with intention and skill.  Or we can stumble into changes and find ourselves in a struggle.  Over the years I have found a simple acronym very helpful in thinking through change.  Healthy and effective change happens when the time is RIPE.

Have you ever bitten into a tomato that hadn't fully ripened?  We planted grape tomatoes in our little garden this summer.  I am color deficient in the red and green parts of the spectrum.  So as the tomatoes got close to ripe, I sometimes picked them too soon.  My eyes may have deceived me, but my taste buds were spot on.  Fruit picked too soon is bitter.  It needs to be fully ripe.  Fortunately it didn't take long for the really red tomatoes to hang next to the less ripe ones.  I can discern the difference when the options are side by side.

Ripe is always better (not much gets past me, does it?).  Here are the elements of the acronym.

• R-Rationale
• I-Input
• P-Precedent
• E-Experiment

R-Rationale: are there good and sufficient reasons for making a change?  

First, is it obvious to the stakeholders that things are not as they should be?  We who live inside the organization don't always do a good job of communicating to others how broken something might really be.  We don't like, for the most part, to deliver bad news.  We might understate the problem and then wonder why no one else is up in arms.  

So, take sufficient time to communicate that things are not as they should be.  The organization will resist this news.  Be prepared for that.  Try to communicate the bad news with a positive affect.  This is the beginning of the change conversation, not the end.  As you deliver the bad news, always assure folks that there is a way out of this situation.  There will be solutions to the problems.  This is not about about blame but rather about resolution.

Wait for the bad news to come back to you on the lips of leaders in some fashion.  If the organization does not own the bad news, there will be little openness to embracing possible changes.

Second, we also need to persuade people that a change can actually make things better.  We are a risk-averse species.  We believe that bad breath is better than no breath at all.  We will live with bad solutions unless we can see that something better might be on the horizon.  We live with the fear that we might make things worse in our efforts to improve things.

This brings us to the second letter of the acronym--Input.  In the process of Input, people can begin to develop possible solutions that will be better than the status quo.

More on that next time.