Student: My name is Boone Young. All of you have been in leadership positions and have encountered change. What kind of influential tactics have you used to bring about a sustained and effective change?

Marie Williams: I’ll go for that. OK. I think it’s back to an issue we hit upon a little earlier in terms of leadership. It is to be able to articulate and communicate why we exist today and to be able to provide that visionary issue of how we wish to exist in the future. And to then make the case for that in terms of what role you play in it. How are you important to that future? What does it mean to you and to the greater good? So that yes, it is that balance of, we’ve got to be in business. We’ve got to sustain but we have to change in order to have survivability and profitability and the things about which we are passionate over time. So I really think it’s back to the communications, ownership, empowerment commonality so that here’s where you fit in and we’re doing this together.

Bill Nussbaum: I absolutely agree with that as for the empowerment thing. It’s very important to be able to have people understand how they fit into the team and part of my issue with many of the manufacturers is I want to show them how they can work in a team. The biggest changes I’ve seen made in manufacturing; an example would be when people learn to work as a team and see the benefits of working as a team and the team functions together like a football team or a basketball team. They all know what to do. No matter what happens they all pull together and they’re all there to help the company grow and to help things become better. So those are the kinds of things I think are the most influential; being able to bring the level of making decisions down to the lowest level possible and to make those teams work together so they can make the right decisions together for the betterment of the company.

Joe Daylor: I certainly agree with all of your comments. It’s been interesting for me to sort of watch how we’ve looked at change in organizations over the years. When I started in the beginning stages of my quality career where we were trying to drive a lot change we recognized very quickly that just having the technical skills around process improvement or the statistical piece or whatever was only a part of it. So as we recognized that we started adding in some folks like maybe some communication people and add some folks in from HR that might know something about soft skills. What I’ve actually seen is there’s really been some great work done around some very systematic and scientific approaches as to how you can create change in organizations. We follow a model that’s sort of loosely based off some work that John Cotter did. The way it sort of flows is the first thing you need to start with in any change is you need to first create that vision and mission. You have to get clarity amongst the senior team around what’s really important. What are we trying to do here? You need to get that done early on and you need to get it done very precisely. From there, what we try and do is then create a guiding coalition. In other words, find some change champions in the organization, some folks not necessarily in any particular role but some folks that have energy around this vision. We call them a guiding coalition and we use them to bring information to the organization and we use them to listen to the organization. In addition to that we believe you have to have a 10X communication strategy. In other words, you have to say things often times ten times to people maybe even in ten different ways before they actually hear it. People receive information as we all know in different ways. So we use a 10X communication strategy. We have a strategy around how we engage employees, usually in things like training and all the things you do to bring them information whether it’s brown bags or formalized training sessions. In addition to that we’ve also learned that we need to change the systems in the organization to support the change we’re trying to make. This ranges from the IT systems to reward and recognition to all those pieces of infrastructure that have to be in place to support the change. Then for each of the things I spoke of we measure the effectiveness of those things. We’re always sort of checking it against whether or not we’re making progress. For me I think the great thing has been there’s really some great work that’s been done around the science of how you make change happen in organizations.

Marie Williams: Wouldn’t it be interesting if one of us said “I totally disagree with that”?

Joe Daylor: That would be.

Marie Williams: I do think that despite the fact that we’ve all had varying experiences in different parts of the world you’re going to hear us identify some very common tenants that say look at these things and if you do well then you build the strength around you with others that can do things. Oh, he has said something that I disagree with. I will not use the word weakness. I will use the word opportunity for improvement. There’s a whole philosophical approach that’s different than ‘let me help you get better’ to ‘let’s work on that weakness’ whether it’s organizationally or individually that helps drive change in a systematic manner.