Unintended consequences

One of the most fascinating examples of a large-scale transformation programme is the ‘great leap forward’ introduced by Mao Zedong in communist China in the late 1950s.

Mao was frustrated at the slow pace of China’s development and was determined to accelerate it. One of his key priorities was to increase grain production. To help with this, he introduced a campaign urging everyone in China to kill sparrows. 

Sparrows were thought to consume 2kg of grain a year each, so Mao reasoned that every sparrow less would mean 2kg more grain that he could export to earn valuable foreign currency.

Nests were destroyed, eggs were smashed, chicks were killed. Millions of volunteers formed into groups, banging pots and pans under sparrows’ nests so they couldn’t rest and would eventually drop dead from exhaustion.

The campaign was remarkably effective. Within a few months, sparrows had all but disappeared from the Chinese countryside.

The problem was that, as well as eating grain, the sparrows had also been eating all the locusts and other insects that would otherwise have been attacking the crops.

As the sparrow population dwindled, the insect population surged, wreaking havoc in the grain fields: instead of a surplus, China found itself struggling with a shortage.

And this is where the story gets really dark.

Because it was such a priority to increase grain production, local party officials were under pressure to deliver ever-higher quotas. The rewards for reporting the biggest increases were spectacular – including the chance to meet Mao himself – while the penalties for failure were brutal. 

As a result, officials competed with each other to report production figures that were up to ten times higher than reality. Delighted by the apparent success of his policies, Mao struck a series of deals to export grain to other countries.

In order to meet these export commitments, the officials were now required to deliver the ‘surplus’ they had reported. Grain stores all over the country were ransacked, leaving the people who had picked it to starve to death. Only when the stench of rotting corpses became too great to hide did the truth begin to emerge.

Some 30 million people are now known to have died in the Great Chinese Famine. Mao remained in power, but was edged aside from economic affairs. The reforms of the ‘great leap forward’ were quietly shut down. And 250,000 sparrows were imported from the Soviet Union to begin rebalancing China’s ecology.

What conclusion should we draw from this? That ambitious transformation projects are doomed to fail? Not necessarily – although KPMG estimates that 70% of major transformational change projects don’t work.

For me, there are two big lessons.

First: simple solutions to complex problems are always attractive, but there’s usually a reason why no-one’s tried them before. So, before you kill all the sparrows, spend a bit of time thinking about what will happen next.

Second: be honest about failure. Most change doesn’t work first time, however much you may want it to. If you incentivise people to pretend it’s working when it isn’t, you won’t be able to fix it until it’s too late.

Viva la Resolution

Happy New Year.

And congratulations: if you’re in the 41% of adults who made a new year’s resolution, chances are you’re still on track with it.

Of course, that may not last long. Studies suggest that, on average, 22% of new year resolutions fail within the first week. 40% within the first month. And, by year end, only 8% of resolutions will still be holding.

Sorry to bring you down like that, but it’s always best to be realistic about these things.

In any case, as failure rates go, that’s not dramatically worse than most corporate transformation projects.

Consultancy KPMG says only 30% of corporate transformation programmes achieve sufficient progress to be considered a success.

And, since the Project Management Institute estimates global transformation activity this year will account for around 65 million full time workers and $15 trillion in economic activity, that’s an awful lot of wasted time and money.

So don’t feel too bad about yourself as you’re hanging laundry on your otherwise unused cross-trainer. Most of us have been there. And, by and large, the reasons why most corporate transformations don’t work are pretty much the same. 

For me, the three big ones are:

1. Lack of motivation. ‘Why?’ is always the most important question. It’s easy to give up drinking when you wake up hungover on January 1; less easy to stay on the wagon when you’re out with friends three weeks later. If you’re going to make the effort to do something difficult, there has to be a prize that makes it worthwhile. For most people in most businesses, the end goal of a transformation programme is often either something that doesn’t directly affect them (the business makes more money; the leadership team gets a bonus) or something they feel actively threatened by (they have to learn a new system; there may be fewer jobs). Change takes effort – so, unless the people in your business really want to change things, nothing will happen.

2. Lack of clarity. Most resolutions are framed in pretty vague terms (‘lose weight’, ‘learn a language’) and transformation programmes are often the same. There tends to be a lot of detail about ‘what’s wrong today’, but less detail about the steps to correct it: what will happen and when, who’s involved, what it will look and feel like for them and how progress will be measured. Without that clarity, it’s very difficult to generate and maintain momentum.

3. Lack of focus. Most resolutions run out of steam because life gets in the way (‘I’m too busy to go to the gym’, ‘The weather’s too depressing to give up chocolate now’). Transformation programmes are the same: priorities change, market conditions fluctuate, teams get shuffled, new opportunities crop up. In most cases, there isn’t a dedicated transformation team – it’s something people are doing on top of their day jobs. The more other things they’ve got to think about, the less likely they are to give it their best attention.

Of course, the good news is that all three of these points can be corrected with surprisingly little difficulty: you can make your resolution one of the 8% that sticks and your transformation programme one of the 30% that succeeds. 

All it takes is more discipline in the planning, more engaging communication; and, of course, you have to want it enough.

Do you?

Blue eyes, brown eyes, closed eyes

In April 1968, Jane Elliott was an elementary school teacher in Randall, Iowa.

The day after Martin Luther King was assassinated, one of the eight-year-olds in her (entirely white) class asked her ‘why’d they shoot that King?’

So she asked the class if they’d like to try an experiment.

On day one, she divided the children into two groups: those with brown eyes and those with blue eyes. The blue-eyed children had to wear blue fabric collars, so they would be easier to identify.

Then she told the class the brown-eyed children were superior – and, because of that, were entitled to extra privileges, such as second helpings at lunch, longer breaktimes, access to the new jungle gym.

The brown-eyed children sat at the front of the class, while the blue-eyed ones sat at the back.

Blue-eyed children weren’t allowed to drink from the same water fountain as brown-eyed children – they had to use one further away.

And brown-eyed children were given more leeway in their behaviour, while the slightest transgression by a blue-eyed child was seized on and condemned.

The results were striking. Very quickly, the brown-eyed children became bossy and assertive. Their test scores improved, but they became ‘nastier’ to their blue-eyed classmates, mocking them for their inferiority.

The blue-eyed group, by contrast, became more withdrawn. They lost confidence, isolated themselves at breaktimes and performed worse in tests.

The following Monday, Mrs Elliott reversed the experiment – explaining that she had made a mistake and it was actually the blue-eyed group that was superior. The results were the same, with the brown-eyed group faring worse this time and the blue-eyes doing better. The one difference was that, having experienced discrimination themselves, the blue-eyed children were notably less nasty to their ‘inferior’ classmates.

Opinion was divided about Mrs Elliott’s experiment. Most of the parents were furious. The other teachers refused to speak to her. Her family were abused in the streets. And some psychologists said the effects might be traumatising for young children (which, when you think about it, says quite a lot about why the experiment was needed in the first place).

But it quickly gained national – and then international – interest, when letters by the children explaining what they had learned were published in a local newspaper.

The ‘blue eyes / brown eyes’ experiment has since been picked up and repeated all over the world – and is still often used in diversity training.

The point – the thing Jane Elliott instinctively realised – is that it’s hard for someone to understand a concept like discrimination without experiencing it themselves.

That’s why ‘white privilege’ is such a tricky issue. Most of us who enjoy it (me included) simply don’t recognise it as anything other than normal.

At a more mundane level, it’s also why so much organisational change doesn’t work (over 70% of change programmes fail to achieve their goals, according to research by McKinsey & Company).

It’s difficult to persuade people they need to change when everything feels fine as it is. Especially when change can be chaotic and unsettling – and often means more work, at least in the short term.

If you want people to engage with change, you have to help them understand it. You have to bring it to life, so they vividly feel what the benefits will be for them – and what will happen if things stay the same.

You have to open their eyes. If you don’t, nothing will change.