You can’t make other people change. Sure you can change their environment and they will either:

• Change and fit well in the new environment
• Or not change
  • And leave the environment
  • Or not leave and either
    • Not fit with the environment
    • Or not let the environment change

The discrete options are for the purposes of making a point. In reality this is more of continuous spectrum.

How can people be influenced to move towards the willingness to change end of the spectrum?

A frequently noted benefit of value stream mapping is that it enables mutual understanding and we emphasize that what matters isn’t what the map looks like, but the conversations you have when creating and socializing the map. It is a phenomenal tool for helping to understand  what people do (and sometimes why) and how all of our work fits together. And sometimes this level of understanding is sufficient to engage people to change and sometimes it is not.

Using the basic approach of:

• Where are we (understand / grasp the current situation)
• Where do we need to be (willing to change?)
• What countermeasures (questions, conversations, facts & data, interventions) can we try and learn from to move from where we are to where we need to be.

How can we better understand the resistance and respect where it is coming from?* This understanding will influence the countermeasure used (both for engaging the people and the problem you want to change to address). We can’t know what to do until we understand. How will we seek to understand? I like to start with conversations.

* I highly recommend Peter Block’s Flawless Consulting (http://www.designedlearning.com/flawless-consulting-guide/) for understanding resistance to change. Thank you to my friend Dan Prock (http://www.senseiway.com/) for coaching me and introducing me to Peter Block’s (http://www.peterblock.com/) work in the process.

ps. This post was written on my porch 🙂