Risk Management - Preventing Reversion: The Reversion Risk Continued
High Awareness of Negative Effects
While there is a low awareness of the results, or gains, of the change, there is often a high awareness of any negative effects. This is because a business will typically have a high commitment to prevent negative effects and people, by their nature, are generally more loss-adverse than gain-seeking.
The common negative effects of change projects include:
- The staff do not like some change in what they have to do.
- Staff think the solution over-manages them.
- The effort of monitoring the data are not be kept up-to-date when the business is busy and then people assess that the effort to put it back in again is not worth the time.
- There is often a perceived ‘admin’ burden of keeping the system updated.
Although these negative effects are transitionary, they will need to be addressed to prevent the solution from being undone.
The solution to this dilemma is to detect the benefits of the change project quickly, and to use the ‘reversal of fortune dynamic’ to install a fear of going backwards.
The Solution: Use WOW Measures
We want people to be aware that there is going to be step (sudden) change that they need to capture evidence of, so that when negative effects occur they don’t panic and undo the solution (and benefits gained).
It is important that the measure is a Wow Measure. That is a measure that is a really strong lead measures that tells people the implemented change had a significant effect on reality.
- A lead measure is something where there is no question about the causality, e.g. “You see the rain clouds before it rains.”
- A lag measure will leave room for argument; a lag measure is something where the effect ‘lags’ or does not occur straight away.
Strong lead measures are very twitchy, and these can be used to reinforce the positive change effect.
- A twitchy lead measure allows people to see that ‘the thing they are doing differently’ is causing the positive effects they’re experiencing, as soon as possible, e.g. hourly, daily or weekly type measures.
When employees or stakeholders start to say, “Stop, hang on, hang on, I don’t understand this, we should go back to the old way,” this Wow Measure evidence can be used to create the threat of reversal of fortune. “Sure we could, but you will lose these gains! Do you want that?”
