Leadership and Workforce Alignment & Engagement Session 6: Overcoming Resistance to Change-Disagreement on the Details of the Solution | Operational Excellence Quick Hits

In today’s session, we’re going to continue the series on leadership and workforce alignment and engagement, which are essential for becoming a high-performing organization. Today, we’ll focus on resistance to change, specifically layer three resistance, which involves disagreement on the details of the solution.

Just to review, our layers of resistance are as follows:

Layer zero: Why change?
Layer one: Disagreement on the problem
Layer two: Disagreement on the direction of the solution
Layer three: Disagreement on the details of the solution
Layer four: Disagreement on the negative ramifications
Layer five: Disagreement on the details of implementation
Layer six: Disagreement on the risk or underlying fear
In our previous sessions, we explored layer zero and layer one, and now, in today’s session, we’ll dive into layer three. This layer deals with differing opinions on how to approach the solution to the identified problem.

Once we have defined the core conflict and verbalized it, we begin putting injections into the current reality tree to develop the future reality tree. These injections need to start with the root cause and break the core conflict. The next step is to determine the permanent countermeasures, which are the actions that will solve the core conflict and eliminate any negative looping within the organization.

To ensure the sufficiency of the injections, we check if they solve the core conflict, eliminate looping, and convert undesirable effects to desirable ones. We also validate the logic to ensure a clear cause-and-effect relationship.

For example, here’s an injection used by a company: ‘Protecting our capacity to service the urgent needs of the customer.’

Next, we sequence the injections. We take one injection and determine its relationship with the others: whether it is a prerequisite, needs to be done after, or can be done in parallel. This helps us identify the order in which the injections need to be implemented to achieve the goal of becoming a high-performing organization.

Once all the injections are in place and properly sequenced, we identify critical success factors and key performance indicators (KPIs). Critical success factors answer the ‘why’ and injections address the ‘what.’

The goal tree is then used to determine the organization’s goal, followed by critical success factors and injections with their relationships. This helps build the implementation plan.

Before proceeding, we need to identify any negative implications, which will be covered in the next session.

That concludes today’s session. Feel free to connect with me via LinkedIn, visit our website, and explore our YouTube channel for more videos on how to become a high-performing organization.