Using Hindsight in Change Management

Have we all been kidding ourselves for years, trying to make change management a discipline 'owned' by a bunch of organizational behavior/ development specialists? There's been so much written on the subject but despite that, by and large, companies drive through change on the basis of good old project management disciplines, responding to the human issues that arise either through the application of HR policies or by acting on intuitions forged by past experiences. The whole change process is essentially one of trying to get people to behave differently, which means having to figure out a way to manipulate or convince them that something needs to change. The old adage of achieving change one person at a time really isn't true, given that we are all highly susceptible to the influence of those we admire or who surround us. The problem is that it's really difficult to predict the point at which a group-wide change of behavior will take place. People can't even predict how they will feel about what they want for themselves, because of 'miswanting' as the psychologists call it. The drip drip of prods and pushes that finally reached the 'tipping point' when the financial markets decided to exit stage left en masse, or the American people to vote for their first black president was hard to predict right up to the moment they actually happened.

I'm not sure we will ever develop a predictive capability for these complex situations, but we might benefit from taking some lessons from disciplines that grapple with this topic on a big scale, every working day. Possibly the most challenging arena for achieving mass change is in the world of politics. Further down the food chain but nevertheless influential in this regard, we have advertisers who tap into all sorts of human psychology to try and seduce us into buying things we might not otherwise want. These practitioners of change keep plugging away, trying a speech one day, an ad campaign the next, without knowing when and how the tipping point will be reached, but applying one simple rule: keep on trying anything and everything until something substantial shifts in the target population, for better or worse. Once a change has been achieved, one thing that is predictable is that people will claim to have seen it coming because of a wonderful thing called 'hindsight bias'. I wonder if the only practical advice anyone can give to a CEO who is trying to bring about a shift of attitudes and behaviors is to throw the kitchen sink at it, see what happens and then claim victory for any good that results.