Small Changes, Giant Leaps: How Micro Changes Lead to Major Shifts
Last month, did you make a resolution to change something in your work or life? Maybe you decided to evaluate how you approach change, as we recommended in one of our previous articles. Or maybe you set your sights on a long-term health goal like losing weight, and you started exercising more and eating better.
Many people begin a new year with long-term personal goals but find that they lose momentum over time. It’s not that they didn’t want to change. It’s just that long-term change can seem daunting.
It’s no different with large or multi-year organizational change. That’s why it’s important to build and maintain momentum for your large transformational change by planning to achieve smaller, shorter-term “micro-changes” along the way.
These five strategies can help you kick off transformational change with gusto and maintain momentum.
1. Identify and plan to achieve micro-changes throughout the program.
As you may have experienced with efforts to make personal changes, the urgency and appetite for change can wane over time, especially in multi-year transformations when long-term goals seem distant.
So don’t just wish for wins along the way: Plan for them. Break the project down into the key actions and decisions needed to move to each next step throughout the entire transformation. Then identify the smaller, micro-changes that feed into those, and build them into your overall project plan.
Achieving, and celebrating, these incremental changes along the way will help keep you, your team, and your leaders motivated to continue moving forward.
Example: Getting leaders aligned on smaller things leads to agreement on the big decision
Getting leadership alignment is important, but sometimes it’s hard to get leaders to agree on the “big decision,” like what the new operating model should look like. At one client, we moved leaders forward toward the big decision by first getting their alignment on smaller, foundational decisions, like:
Who the internal “customer” was
What that customer needed
What internal capabilities were needed to deliver value to that customer
How the model should support the team in delivering value
“Pro tip: Even these smaller, short-term goals must be real and measurable, so the team can see movement toward the bigger goal.”
2. Aim first at ‘low hanging fruit’ micro-changes to get quick wins.
Building confidence in a project’s early stages is critical to gaining momentum. That means the micro-changes you put in your plan to achieve first should be low-hanging-fruit changes that are achievable with a moderate to low amount of effort and/or that solve common pain points. Your focus here is to quickly get a positive result by addressing these items with a minimum viable product solution, even if more will be done later.
Example: Hiring managers for high-priority roles experienced early program benefit
We helped one client achieve a quick win for their long-term Talent Acquisition transformation by simply rewriting priority job postings to reflect the company’s new culture and branding. This allowed hiring managers, the Talent Acquisition team, and candidates to experience an early benefit of the transformation.
We find that helping clients find and achieve quick wins jumpstarts the program team’s sense of accomplishment. And if the problem being addressed is also important to a key stakeholder group, solving it—or at least improving it—early on can convince them to be more accepting of the larger changes to come.
3. Communicate (and celebrate!) the wins.
If a win happens in the forest and no one hears about it, does it count? Well, yes. But you still need to pause to acknowledge progress.
Publicly recognizing team members involved in successfully making a micro-change helps maintain the momentum throughout multi-year programs.
“Pro tip: It is especially important to recognize and communicate the “quick wins” to kickstart your team’s momentum.”
Timing, impact and visibility determine how broadly to communicate or celebrate. For example, if you’ve achieved a “quick win” micro-change early in the program and it’s visible only to the program team, we recommend keeping communications and big celebrations within the team and sponsors to avoid appearing to declare “mission accomplished” too soon.
But if your program has been announced and is well underway—and the micro-change will be visible and appreciated by those outside of the program team—we recommend that clients consider communicating it more broadly.
Example: For many clients, we’ve found that broadly communicating achievement of a micro-change as “just another small step in our journey toward [your program’s ultimate goal] …” helps bring stakeholders along on the journey and maintains engagement.
4. Nudge people along the way.
Nudges are simply finding ways to make good behaviors easier to do (and/or bad behaviors harder to do).1
Examples
Some companies automatically enroll new employees in the company 401(k) and begin contributing a percentage of the employees’ pay to their individual 401(k) accounts. Others even automatically increase the employees’ contribution by 1% of their pay each year until they are receiving the full benefit of the company match.
Of course, employees can opt out or change their contribution levels at any time, but most find it easier to just continue saving for their retirement.
At one client, a new HR function wanted to demonstrate the value of a technology implementation to its vice presidents. Nudges we facilitated included:
Helping a leader and her direct reports use their newly launched technology to easily create data captures and dashboards that made it easier to see trends and discuss progress
Establishing team routines to capture data
Adding metrics report outs to every team meeting agenda
These little nudges made it easier for the team to get comfortable tracking and discussing metrics with each other—and ultimately with the VPs they each supported. This, in turn, fed into the larger change: becoming a culture that frequently used data to inform decisions.
5. Create a visual to show upcoming milestones and progress.
It’s like the mall maps that say, You are here. A roadmap is a simple, visual way to:
Keep focus on upcoming milestones
Reinforce the ultimate longer-term goal
Remind everyone of progress made
Need help building and keeping momentum for your transformational change? Submit your contact information here or sign up for our mailing list to stay informed about upcoming webinars, panel discussions and roundtables with our experts and clients.
Thaler, R. and Sunstein, C. (2009). Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin Books.
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