Change management is a key topic for any consultant; for those of us doing the work of moving organizations to networked collaborative styles of work it is a hot topic. Lately I’ve thought a lot about the best lesson I ever learned about how to change a large organization and recalled that I’d written about it in Freedom At Work, a monthly newsletter that I edited and produced between April 1994 and December 1995.

The topic was “enrollment,” the act of engaging others in a commitment to change. I opined on how truly great and charismatic leaders can move countries to embrace change even in the face of adversity. Others among us, I said, “must use 1,000 cups of coffee:”

I owe this metaphor to Chris McGoff who at the time I first heard him speak (1992?)at a conference on “groupware” which we quaintly called it back then. Chris at the time was at Global Decision Support Systems. Chris had been asked how to convince managers to use computer software in meetings. He smiled and said, “One thousand cups of coffee.” I continued:

With something that is particularly new, or that requires changes in many aspects of how people work, you need to be prepared to have the enrollment conversation with everyone single person in the organization, as many times as you need to have it. You have to listen to where people are coming from, and speak to them in a way that they can hear possibility for themselves, or the organization, in what you are proposing.

One of my own most successful enrollment efforts (six years prior to hearing Chris speak) hinged on 32 lunches. I listed to the individual stories [some heart-wrenching, personal tales] and concerns of each of the people in a documentation production group who were undergoing retraining to use a new publishing system [of which I was the software architect and development manager]. Passive aggression was rampant, and the production group manager said, “Patti, you have to do something.” I slowed down the pace of development, let people catch up, and let them choose roles and responsibilities that made sense for them in the way that the new system was changing their jobs. Some people blossomed into entirely new careers and learning; others retired or took new jobs. All received the support and coaching they needed through change.

The project was long and difficult, and it never would have succeeded without the hard work and collaboration of these production group staff. And I’m not sure that, without those lunches, the project would ever have succeeded.

Lunch was expensive, but my manager gladly covered the costs. Contextual listening, interviewing, coaching, are all part and parcel of moving an organization from one state to another, and it’s always the personal relatedness — at some level — that makes the difference.