How to Successfully Drive Change When Everything Is Uncertain

Traditional change management advice emphasizes gradual tactics like pursuing “small wins,” building coalitions, and pitching pilots that require minimal investment. In stable times, these approaches have been shown to build momentum and buy-in from stakeholders and employees alike, softening the rigid status quo. But in turbulent times—in a crisis or when market upheaval is under way, for example—leaders who follow gradual change tactics risk underperformance. In our research and experience working with organizations, we’ve observed that when tumult begins, there is a brief window—a temporary loosening of red tape and resistance—when change is actually easier, if leaders go about it well. For example, during the first months of Covid in 2020, one of us (Julia) and her colleague at Yale School of Management, Elisabeth Yang, were studying the difficulties facing hospital managers and their staffs. But these managers surprised us by reporting that there were silver linings to the crisis: Operational changes they had wanted to institute for years were suddenly being approved, such as a streamlined process to batch orders and labs, hand-held ultrasounds for patient exams, and the addition of a lead nurse role to support less-experienced nursing staff. While change can be easier amid disruption, though, it is by no means guaranteed. Organizational scholarship suggests that under threat, organizations are at least as likely to grow rigid as to adapt. To take advantage of such moments to promote the changes they want to see, leaders need to be proactive and opportunistic. The adage “never waste a good crisis” is commonplace but often forgotten. Sometimes this is because leaders fear change, are distracted, or don’t want to overwhelm their employees further during a time of upheaval. We have seen this in executive teams facing crises, among frontline managers during the pandemic and in multi-business companies during the financial crisis of 2008. But making the effort isn’t all—change leaders also need to deploy different tactics during these times of turbulence. We’ve noticed a pattern in the successful change-leadership approaches taken by the hospital managers Julia and her colleague studied during Covid, and by the leadership teams that Michaela interviewed during the same period. These successful leaders of change identified shovel-ready ideas and reframed them to address an urgent need, moved fast, and thought big. We are living at a time in which crises and dramatic changes in technology, health and natural disasters, the geopolitical sphere, and elsewhere occur with alarming frequency. For those looking to drive change amid such turbulence—whether they need to get their people on board, gain approval from more-senior leaders, or influence their partners—we’ll describe how these approaches work in more detail. But first we’ll explain why we believe this approach has particular value in turbulent contexts. Why It’s Easier to Drive Change Amid Disruption Decades of research by USC’s Wendy Wood and her colleagues finds that times of major change present the best opportunities to make changes that stick on the personal front. The best time to quit smoking for good, for instance, is during other major life changes, such as moving to a new city or getting married or divorced. That’s because people are most receptive to breaking and forming new habits when everything around them is already changing. The environment that supported old habits is upended. There is space for new habits to form. Other research suggests that a similar logic holds for organizations. In turbulent market environments, inertia, red tape, and resistance are suddenly diminished by the force of external demands. Old routines can change and greenlighting can come more easily to novel ideas, especially if they solve immediate problems. Colleagues can be more open to changing how they work when other aspects of their work are changing too. When events upend organizational stasis in a way that is widely recognized—if people are talking about “a crisis,” work being “upended,” or “unprecedented times”—that’s when the time is ripe to drive other changes. Here’s how to do it. Select the Right Opportunity and Reframe It When the roof unexpectedly collapsed at the historic B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore in 2003, damaging many artifacts and yielding a rebuild estimate higher than insurance was willing to pay, the director of the museum didn’t just call a contractor to fix it: He recognized a propitious opportunity to gain buy-in to change the identity of the museum. He had long desired to transform it from a sleepy, financially struggling institution visited primarily by school children during field trips to a major attraction offering rides, expanded family-oriented programming and accommodations, and a venue for large-scale events. But he had encountered resistance to these ideas in the past, especially from his staff of elite curators who had sought to maintain the organization’s focus on historical artifact preservation. When the roof collapsed, though, he reframed his vision as a response to the crisis at hand. An analysis of this case by Rotman School of Management faculty Marlys Christianson and her colleagues demonstrated how the director was able to gain staff support by showing how his vision would secure the museum’s financial standing long term and avoid closing permanently despite the damage. The tactic here is idea selection and opportunistic framing: First, selecting a shovel-ready idea—perhaps one that has been stalled, or one that repurposes dormant technologies. The idea needs to be well-planned out and ready for strong execution. A cautionary tale: In Julia’s and her colleagues’ study during Covid, the physician leaders in a flagship emergency department saw an opportunity to address the longstanding problem of patients awaiting beds crowding the hallways. The physicians asked for more space, making the case that it would improve social distancing. Their request was rapidly granted, but the physicians did not have a ready plan to use it nor had they coordinated with nursing leadership about staffing or supplies, so the space was underutilized and soon taken away. In contrast, two years later, the department unexpectedly failed a state audit for the same issue; during this crisis, physician leadership was ready with a better-laid plan and agreements with nursing that resulted in the rapid and successful construction of permanent additional space. Once you’ve chosen the right idea, reframe it to show how it both addresses an immediate problem arising from the moment of turbulence and contributes long-term value to the organization as the B&O director did. Move Fast Speed matters in turbulent times; the window of opportunity to spot a shift and act accordingly is only open briefly. The executives Michaela worked with during and after Covid were able to actively pivot their organizational strategies as the policy and regulatory environment loosened for about 12–18 months, while the crisis passed by those who reported they were “too busy managing day-to-day chaos” or just awaiting a “return to a sense of normalcy” during that time. In Julia and her colleague’s Covid study with frontline managers and professionals proposing mostly operational changes, the window of opportunity was even shorter—about six weeks from the advent of Covid, from mid-March to the end of April of 2020. After that, leadership was less receptive to new ideas, and staff were no longer as willing to dramatically change their behavior; inertia and resistance to altering the status quo had returned. Seizing windows of opportunity requires being scrappy, making do with what you have, and mobilizing your team toward fast action, especially if that is not their norm. For example, one executive team that Michaela observed was able to launch a telehealth service line in less than a year after the pandemic started. This idea had been entertained and debated for some time, but by jumping on it early—within months—in the turmoil of the pandemic, they were able to push through indecision and concerns, especially among employees who had been resistant to altering their daily work routines. Within two years, this team was heralded throughout the region as a leading innovator in this virtual service, and competitors struggled to catch up. Moving fast can carry risk, of course; if you’ve selected a poorly considered idea and it fails, that can be even worse during times of tumult than doing nothing at all. Opportunistic change is best suited for wins you feel confident about (the operational change that you know would enhance your team’s workflow, the technology that is a pain to adopt but a clear improvement, etc.). That’s yet another reason to focus on shovel-ready ideas. Go Bigger When organizations are stuck in the status quo, small tests of change such as pilot projects can build momentum, minimize risk, and, through learning, help shape an idea—whether it’s a new product, process, or approach. These are good reasons to act in small ways. In turbulent times, the calculus is different. Pilot projects can doom change agents to miss precious moments when resources are briefly available. They can waste time generating data for decisions that in the moment are already obvious. For example, an operations manager at a top U.S. hospital in Julia and her colleagues’s study saw that the Covid pandemic offered an opportunity to finally reduce waste by centralizing their supply management while curbing Covid’s spread. Dutifully following the change management tactics she had learned in business school, she asked for a costless pilot to demonstrate proof of concept. When the pilot was complete months later, it pointed to certain success for a broader program. But by that time, there was a capital expenditure freeze throughout the organization, and it could no longer be pursued. For the B&O Railroad, going big after its roof collapsed meant more than tripling its initial fundraising goal (which the team then met). The chief operating officer recounted: “We said, “If we’re going to have to be closed for two years anyway, because it’s going to take that long to finish the [roof]…This is our opportunity to raise some more money, change the campus, do all these dreams that we all had.…Instead of a $3 million fundraising effort, we did a $10 million fundraising effort and we got it done.” What going bigger means for you will depend on the usual scale of your team’s work. For frontline teams, this could mean asking your boss for full funding to implement a project rather than asking for a pilot. For leadership teams, it might mean doubling a target or making a substantial infrastructure change that has been put off for years. Either way, going bigger doesn’t mean throwing caution to the wind and taking on major risk without a plan. It means recognizing that such moments bring considerable risk by their nature but sometimes require organizations to act differently. This requires investment and, sometimes, bigger bets on new ideas. As management thinker Peter Drucker said, “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence itself, but to act with yesterday’s logic.” Being an opportunistic change leader The studies and stories behind these tactics don’t prove that opportunistic change is always good. Pursuing change opportunistically is by no means a guarantee of success. And classic change management frameworks such as Kotter’s eight steps still offer great guidance for leaders. Certainly crafting and communicating a vision for change, building coalitions of supportive stakeholders, and engaging in “small win” pilot projects can be powerful ways to build buy-in. But for now, as we face today’s volatile and uncertain world, we can say with confidence that there is something different about how change happens during turbulent times, and that more-opportunistic tactics are a vital addition to the leader’s toolkit.

How to Successfully Drive Change When Everything Is Uncertain

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