Organizational change is constant. Every organization and every person in it is constantly evolving. To handle change effectively you need to have strategic management for that change. You need a plan.
During planned changes at work, there are 5 different stages that should occur. These stages are:
1. Contracting - Contracting is the process of agreeing with key individuals for the success of a change project.
2. Data Gathering - The change agent initiates a data-gathering stage after establishing the initial contract, providing crucial information for effective planning, galvanizing organizational energy, and offering initial empowerment coaching. The data should cover the system's state, improvement needs, facilitation efforts, barriers, and reactions to change goals.
3. Intervening - Interventions are designed to improve relationships within the target system, involving open communication, team building, strategic planning, training, conflict management, and coaching.
4. Evaluating - The evaluating stage informs the change agent and the system about the results of interventions. It is an ongoing process based on feedback, providing critical information for leaders to design more effective next interventions.
5. Disengagement - Change leaders should agree on the project's completion or end, and personal feedback should be shared.
85% of organizational change efforts fail because no structure existed to support and sustain the change. Creating a sustainable framework for success before you roll out your ideas and making sure the right people are fully on board and understand the goals and their role in achieving transformational change are fundamental. Effective organization and communication are key.
Today, we are going to focus specifically on the intervention stage. What is it? And why do we need it during organizational change?
The dictionary defines intervention as “the act of interfering with the outcome or course especially of a condition or process (as to prevent harm or improve functioning).”
We define intervening much the same way, but with the added parts of the stages of planned change, both before and after. We define intervening as sharing with everybody the ultimate intent, the data that’s been collected and what it means, how you want their input, their feedback, their contribution, their perspectives, and their thinking.
You want to use the diverse thinking of the group to see if someone else sees something that you can’t see. When you have an intervention, make sure to have a wide variety of people in the room so that you get many different perspectives and opinions.
Types of Interventions
There are many different kinds of interventions. There's a kickoff intervention, where you explain to everyone what it is you’re all doing and ask for input and buy-in.
Then there's the kind of intervention where things are not working well. There’s friction or problems, and you declare a breakdown. In this intervention, you have a discussion about what's not working so that you can get the project back on track and not have that same breakdown happen again.
Another kind of intervention is when a new leader in a company inherits a toxic situation and declares the need to fix it and bring the team back together.
For example, we once did an intervention with a company with a brand new CEO. He was the third CEO. The second CEO was caught embezzling and the first died on the job. The new CEO’s people had trauma and PTSD. He tried for a year to help them accept him. Finally, he called us and said, “I need support and we need to do a facilitated intervention”.
For over 25 years, they had a sales leader who made his way through bullying, command and control, powering up over others, and instilling an unhealthy level of competition in the organization. While these tactics worked for the last 25 years and led to a lot of success for the company, he's now retiring. And there's a whole new generation of people who don't actually want to work that way and don't thrive in that environment. Instead, they wanted to thrive through achievement, self-actualization, affiliation and being more of a community. This kind of intervention is known as a reset.
Interventions are not meant as maintenance. They are there as an interruption. You perform the work you need to do and then there must be some kind of maintenance or continuous learning put in place, otherwise the environment will go back to the way it used to be. This is because environments are very similar to behavior - unless you're constantly working on it, It goes back to the path of least resistance, which is the state you were in before.
If you're doing an intervention, you always need to have an intention for that intervention. You also need the environment that you want to create with the intervention and the structure for the intervention. Will there be a facilitator? What hours will it be? Will you feed people? What exercises will you do? Will you bring in liberating structures? Will you have any training or any teaching and experiential exercises for people to learn from?
When an intervention is facilitated correctly, it shapes the environment during that intervention and gives people the resources to continue to nurture that environment so that it can be a catalyst for a conscious use of self. People should learn about themselves in an intervention. They should learn to turn friction into flow so that teamwork can evolve from a fragmented state to exceptional team efforts.
A properly executed intervention reminds people of why they showed up to work in the first place for this job, this company, and/or this project. It taps into their intrinsic motivation. A good intervention will cause three things: exceptional teamwork, intrinsic motivation to optimize conscious use of self, and an environment that's fertile for growth, development, partnership, contribution, and cooperation.
We recommend you do an intervention at the beginning, a couple of times in the middle, and one at the end of any major change initiative or project. And it should always be live and hands on for everyone that's involved in that project.
The idea of empowering human systems is that by improving relationships within the system, leaders and members can identify and resolve their own issues, leading to desired change. That’s what an intervention allows you to do, and it’s why every organization can and should implement them during change. Change can be chaotic. Interventions allow for us to break through that chaos and transition from friction to FLOW so that we can achieve more in less time and with higher levels of collaboration and contribution from the people involved.
P.S. Want support or facilitation for your intervention? We offer both Deep Alignment and Compelling Future Workshops that bring breakdowns out into the open and foster teamwork among participants, allowing them to set an intention for the future and transition from friction to FLOW. Learn more by scheduling a free consultation with us!