At the beginning of almost every transformation, you have to push for change. You have to find early adopters, convince skeptical leaders and persuade teams to try something new. This can make you feel like the transformation is struggling, but it is actually how most change begins.
I think about organizational transformation as a flywheel:
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Consistent action produces visible results.
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Visible results create buy-in.
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Increased buy-in leads to more people taking action.
As more people join the movement, their additional actions produce more results, giving you another opportunity to strengthen buy-in. Momentum emerges from repeating this cycle over and over again.
In the beginning, you are providing most of the energy. You might have only a handful of champions willing to take action, so your job is to help them produce results that other people can see. If those results are valuable and credible, something interesting starts to happen.
People who were watching from the sidelines become curious and decide to participate.
Push Starts Becoming Pull
The fascinating thing about a flywheel is that every turn makes the next turn easier. The same thing happens with organizational change. At first, you might spend most of your time trying to persuade people to participate. But after enough cycles, people start approaching you. They start asking whether their team can participate, when the next workshop is happening or whether they can use your new method on their own project.
The Tipping Point
This suggests that one of the most interesting measures of success during an organizational transformation is not how many people are participating, but how they came to participate. If every new participant requires someone from the transformation team to chase and convince them, the flywheel may be turning, but you are still pushing.
The real shift happens when people outside the transformation team begin helping to turn the flywheel. When people start asking how they can become involved, you have reached the tipping point for change. Not because people are joining, but because you no longer have to convince them to join.
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