Experience Change...
...through Exercise and Practice
by István Kosztolányi, László Szalay
If You Learn, but Do Not Change, You Have Not Learnt Anything
Change processes often fail due to the low or slow level of changes at the individual level and leaders feel without means to tackle it. So, how can we support people in organizational changes to learn new behaviours?
Why this article?
Organizational change processes challenge leaders to help their team members learn and adopt new behaviors required by strategic, cultural, and structural changes. Despite good intentions, these change processes often fail because the level of individual change is low or slow and leaders feel helpless to address it. Therefore, based on our experience, we recommend that our partners use methods such as group exercises and practice activities to drive their individual change/learning efforts.
Where to start?
As a starting point, let's assume that the direction of the change (e.g., the new vision for the organization) has already been clearly communicated co-creatively, helping people not only to understand the change, but also to gain a sense of commitment to it.
Next, people should also understand what forms of behavior are expected in the new system that will make them successful. This can be done by giving more frequent and open feedback, setting clear goals, and creating a more open and supportive atmosphere within the organization. You need to create a supportive learning environment that helps people manage and overcome their learning anxiety and helps them adopt new behaviors. This includes clarifying about expectations at a very practical behavioral level.
It also involves finding different ways to support individual change while creating a psychologically safe environment where people can unlearn and be willing to step out of their comfort zone.
The key aspects of a supportive climate for change are:
Changing behaviour is learning
There must be a common sense throughout the organization that no organizational change occurs without individual change. There also needs to be a general understanding that these changes involve a learning process. This does not mean simply acquiring new knowledge or reading a book, but starting to act differently.
Contracting for the change/learning process
Keeping in mind that the ultimate learning goal is individual change, we need to be clear about the attitudes and efforts required of the learner to achieve behavior change:
1) Taking responsibility for their own learning and change 2) Willingness to step out of the comfort zone 3) Greater self-awareness and self-reflection are essential
In other words, we need to "teach" people how to learn, which means learning about learning, or metalearning.
Building a learning community/organization
In learning communities, members feel responsible not only for their own performance and development, but also for that of others.
Whether at the organizational, workgroup, or team level, this mindset is needed to support individual change in order to achieve organizational change.
As part of the supporting environment, targeted trainings and workshops can be of great help in supporting change processes.
In these programs, we use "structured experiences" that are carefully designed, interesting and challenging exercises that have structures based on reality. These experiences evoke spontaneous behaviors in participants and help them to recognize their own behavior patterns. This increased self-awareness is the starting point for change!
We follow the 4 steps of Kolb's Experiential Learning Curve: Experience, Reflect, Conceptualize and Experiment.”
Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you. – Aldous Huxley
Workshop examples
It is important to note that only experienced and professionally trained consultants can properly select and lead these exercises in ways that support the expected changes.