Key Performance Indicators, 4th Edition

CHAPTER 4Leading and Selling the Change

Overview

All major project implementations are deeply affected by the success or failure in leading and selling the change. Far too many well-meaning initiatives fail because we have not understood the psychology behind getting change to work. This chapter explores the work of Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan in The Three Laws of Performance and John Kotter's Leading Change. It covers the importance of Harry Mills' “self-persuasion,” emphasizes the importance of selling by emotional drivers of the intended audience, and sets out the steps required in this stage.

This chapter gives instructions on how to access, free of charge, a PDF of the suggested worksheets and checklists to be used by the KPI project team.

The key learning points from this chapter include:

1. How the default future in the organization will always kill change initiatives if it is not appropriately challenged. As Zaffron and Logan point out, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.”
2. The key to change is to re-create, in the minds of the organization's staff, a new vision of the future—let's call it a reinvented future.
3. The importance of getting the staff in the organization to have for themselves that aha! moment, that “Hell, no! We do not want the default future.” When the staff come to this realization, change is inevitable.
4. The importance of having the organization's oracles on the KPI project.
5. John Kotter's eight-step leading change process which ...