Why is organizational change so hard? – Quotes to tee up the conversation

Organizational change, knowledge management, and SharePoint solutions

In July of last year, I wrote a blog post I called: "A Change Will Do You Good: Lessons from Change Management for SharePoint Solution Architects."  This week, the relationship between implementing SharePoint and organizational change came up once again at one of my clients.  I referred back to this blog post to help facilitate a discussion of change management activities. I also gathered up a few of my favorite quotes about organizational change to tee up the conversation.  You may find these quotes useful too - feel free to share some of your own.

From Peter Senge: "People don't resist change. They resist being changed!" 

When we implement new systems, I often feel like the users are indirectly communicating, "I'm not broken - why are you trying to fix me?"  It helps to keep this in mind when you are launching a new solution.

From Peter Drucker: "Company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try, instead, to work with what you've got." 

I think about this a lot in the context of user adoption.  For example, we were discussing the topic of incentives to contribute to the new knowledge management system at my client.  Incentives are tricky - they definitely have to work within the corporate culture.  Moreover, they can't be relied on as a long term strategy if the processes you are trying to introduce have no connection to the work itself.

From John Kenneth Galbraith: "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."

From Charles Darwin: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."

From the engineer and inventor Buckminster Fuller: "If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

I use this quote a lot when I am trying to get clients to think about using a new SharePoint feature (like Meeting Workspaces, for example).  It's amazing what people can envision when they actually try out the new tool - simply talking about it or describing it doesn't work - they really need to see it in action.

And, finally, my personal favorite, from Kenneth F Murphy, writer and former SVP HR of Altria Group:

"Change is good. You go first."

• Microsoft
• change management
• knowledge management
• Organizational Change
• SharePoint