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Adi Ignatius
I'm adi ignatius.
Alison Beard
Hi, I'm alison beard and this is the hbr ideacast.
Adi Ignatius
All right, Allison, it is quiz time. What percent of attempted transformations AT organizations fail?
Alison Beard
I know, it's a lot. I'll say half.
Adi Ignatius
That is a good guess. It's actually worse. 70% or more than 2/3 fail or at least fall short of their intended goals.
Alison Beard
Wow, that is a depressing statistic. And I guess the follow up question I would have is why? Why did they fail?
Adi Ignatius
Well, that is the good journalistic question. Look, it's of course about poor execution, but a lot of it can be understood through the lens of behavioral science as opposed to pure strategic discipline. So it's understanding what it means to have true alignment, to have agency, and to understand the emotional issues that are involved in a big transformation.
Alison Beard
That makes a lot of sense to me. It sounds like you're saying that people skills are really the most critical ones for leaders to have.
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They're up.
Adi Ignatius
Leading to transformation involves humans who are grappling with how to make decisions, how to be persuasive, how to test their biases, and so on. So yeah, very human things that can make or break a successful transformation. So speaking on that today is Julia Dahr, who is managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group and founder of BCG's Behavioral Science Lab. She's the co author, along with Christy Elmer and Philip Jamison, of the book How Change really seven Science Based Principles for Transforming youg Organization. And here's our Conversation, you know, you assert, and this isn't controversial, I think this is well known. But I want to talk about this. The idea that most change efforts fail. So what do you mean by that and what does failure mean in this context?
Julia Dhar
We actually mean one of two things.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
Either they failed to return value to shareholders over the specified period and or they didn't achieve the objectives that the people who set up the change initiative or the program set out at the beginning of the effort.
Julia Dhar
And that in and of itself is pretty bad.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
An even more unfortunate under discussed element of that is it is expensive to try and change an organization to shift how groups of people get something done together.
Julia Dhar
And so when we look at that
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
failure rate, and that rate has consistently hovered somewhere between 60 and 75% for the last several decades, that's an enormous waste of human potential and talent and frankly optimism.
Adi Ignatius
And is your sense that, you know, the plans are good but the failure is in the execution, or that somehow the plants that we're drawing up are not even getting us in the right direction?
Julia Dhar
It's a little of both.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
That we don't bring far enough upstream the how of change.
Julia Dhar
And I have a little bit of sympathy with that.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
I think that there is an assumption in some camps that that is boring or unglamorous. I could imagine that some people might even say that is work that should happen lower down in the organization that isn't really the work of executives. My co authors and I completely disagree with that. That successful strategy is very much grounded in the how. So that's part of it. We don't talk about the how early enough. The second is we don't talk enough about the idea that it is not just a shift in concept or product or pricing, but generally we are talking about a behavior shift. And we don't ask deeply enough, often enough, is it likely that the people who we need to change their behavior are going to do this? Will they do it because they have the right incentives? Can they do it because they have the right skills? Will they be excited to do it because they have the right motivation?
Julia Dhar
That's all in a sort of bundle
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
of topics and concepts that in behavioural science we talk about as take up. We don't spend enough time saying is the change we desire other people to make probable?
Adi Ignatius
So let's talk about some of the challenges. So we've all been through transformations where let's say leadership says we're going to do this dramatically new thing. And often employees, if I can generalize, are like, ah, come on oh, please. You know, they're used to doing things one way and somebody says, we're going to do things other way. So you have this gap. Talk about that gap and why it matters and how leaders can try to narrow it and get past that.
Julia Dhar
I love the way you started, which is to say we all, if we have pretty much any amount of work experience, we've all seen a movie of this before. One of our primary motives as we
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
went into this work was to attack some of those cliches associated with change in organizations. A classic one when things start to
Julia Dhar
ebb or get a little bit low on steam or enthusiasm. If someone usually senior in the organization says, well, after all, people just don't like to change. And so the first question we were asking was, is that true? And the way that we set out to answer that question was to take 6,000 people in a dozen countries around the world, 1,000 executives and 5,000 non executives, and give them a version of a really simple change in their daily life and said, or in this case,
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
in their professional life.
Julia Dhar
A change is coming to your professional life. You don't yet know what it means for you. It's the impact on the organization, the
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
magnitude of the change.
Julia Dhar
Instinctively, how do you feel about the
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
change from very positive to very negative?
Julia Dhar
70% of executives feel very positive or positive. And this is where you know nothing about the change the change could have been. We have decided we can do without you on the executive team, for example. But like, there's a kind of hardwired enthusiasm among those senior leaders for change. But about 45% of employees also feel positive or very positive. So thing number one, it's clearly not true that people just hate to change. We also generally are somewhat favorable towards change, but nowhere near as favorable as executives. There is a huge gap between the predisposition of executives for change and for employees in organizations. And so that means that when you run into that other fairly common cliche in big change programs, that we just need to get everybody excited, the goal shouldn't be to get everyone as excited or optimistic as executives, that's probably a fool's errand. It should be to try and bridge that distance through very specific, ideally behaviourally focused interventions that bring people closer to an understanding of what needs to change.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
Why?
Julia Dhar
And very practically, what are we going to do not only to make that change achievable, but ideally also pretty attractive.
Adi Ignatius
You have a great line in the book that says the emotions that employees feel during a transformation may not be your fault, but they are Your problem because they affect your chances of success. And that, to me, is interesting. There is an emotional component to change. I think for employees, change feels like something that will happen to them. Maybe it's executives that feel like this is something that will benefit them. But it's interesting because it's, you know, you can either say, look, get with the program or you're out, or you can get engaged in a more sophisticated way on these emotional levels in narrowing these gaps.
Julia Dhar
You know that line that you just
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
quoted, that the emotions of executives during change may not be your fault, but
Julia Dhar
they are your problem, was written by
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
one of my co authors, Phil Jamison, who had also pitched an alternative title
Julia Dhar
for the book that was not ultimately
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
successful for reasons that are about to be very obvious, but was kind of charming. The alternative that he had pitched was
Julia Dhar
Shut up and Change. And there's so much about the way in which we often do change in organizations that has an element of shut up and change to it. Or we might more gently say, people just have to get on the bus or we will leave them behind, as opposed to saying, we have a sincere interest in reasons why adopting a new behavior is challenging. And we sort of know these really basic laws of behavioral science, like the number one way in which we can help someone adopt a new behavior in a context is to provide a very
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
specific set of expectations.
Julia Dhar
The second is to remove obvious barriers. And the third is to make sure
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
that it's consistent with any other sets of incentives that they have inside the organization or other pressures that they have in their lives.
Julia Dhar
When we say those sorts of things in a meeting room, I think people instinctively nod and agree when we describe those challenges in relation to a customer, for example, Often executives are extremely curious, very passionate about knowing in detail what the challenges or concerns of moving, for instance, a customer through a digital sales funnel might be. But we lose a little bit of that same empathy, curiosity, helpfulness, even, maybe,
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
or sympathy for the objections that people
Julia Dhar
have when it comes to people that we know much better, hopefully have at least as much care for which is our own employees in the organization.
Adi Ignatius
So I think what you're saying is that the emotional resistance or the questions that employees have is understandable, needs to be managed. How do you even gauge and measure the emotional response to the process that's underway if your goal is to eventually get as much alignment as you possibly can, but by the way, to maybe get feedback from down below that will help tweak the strategic process in ways that leadership might not have seen initially?
Julia Dhar
One of the things that we ask
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
people, in addition to what's your instinctive reaction to this change, is what are
Julia Dhar
the emotions that you instinctively feel? As we describe this, the number one emotion is curiosity, which is really encouraging.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
It's people saying, I want to learn more.
Julia Dhar
That's really consistent with basically everything else
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
ever written on change that says one of our failures is a failure to
Julia Dhar
communicate and to successfully explain to people what we are doing. But the number two emotion is anxiety. And so that means that we have a group of people, often thousands of people, existing in the organization in a state of curious anxiety that does need to be managed or at least really well understood. I mean, let me talk a little
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
bit about day to day, what I do in some of my own work.
Julia Dhar
One is literally ask people all of the time, very often through a survey.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
For example, at the start or end of a shift, if you are in
Julia Dhar
a factory or a store, the start
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
or end of the day, if you do a job that is desk based,
Julia Dhar
what are the emotions that you are feeling? And that actually is not the easiest thing in the world for people to do. But if you give people a moment
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
to reflect on it, people are able and generally very willing to share that.
Julia Dhar
The two other questions that I really encourage, frankly, everyone leading a change in
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
organizations to ask of the people they are requesting make a change is, number
Julia Dhar
one, would you recommend this transformation to a colleague? The other one that I find very,
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
very useful in figuring out whether the what has connected successfully to the how
Julia Dhar
is asking people, do you think we
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
are likely to be successful with the goals that we have set out? And so note that's not do you
Julia Dhar
agree with the goals? Do you think they will be good for you personally? Do you generally think that we are
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
likely to be successful in achieving them?
Julia Dhar
And so that allows people to move into a more objective stance, but also to consider whether or not, based on what they've been told about what we are trying to do here, whether or
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
not it's probable that that will unfold.
Adi Ignatius
If you get this right in terms of this employee engagement, this kind of emotional understanding, narrowing the gap through sort of intelligent ways, then what I mean, are you saying that that is the key to a successful transformation, that increases the odds? I mean, what's the value precisely of getting that right?
Julia Dhar
It doesn't guarantee that you move from being unsuccessful to successful, but incrementally it increases your probability of being successful because
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
you have a much better understanding of
Julia Dhar
how in fact, that change is actually
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
taking place in the organization.
Julia Dhar
Of course, there are many mountains beyond
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
having climbed the first mountain of empathy and understanding. And those are really specifically what does behavioral science recommend in terms of successfully and sustainably reaching people who need to change and who perhaps need to change on a very sustained and consistent basis? They need to make some pretty significant effort to move from the status quo.
Julia Dhar
We talk about seven of them in
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
the book, but a couple that I
Julia Dhar
really like are making much stronger use of stories and symbols, thinking about and
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
considering momentum as a resource that the organization has and can steward to appropriately manage the discretionary effort of individuals, and
Julia Dhar
getting really sharp about what the barriers
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
are to people doing something differently in an organization.
Julia Dhar
And indeed, there is a small number of people who appear to be allergic to change, persistently very negative about change, but it clearly isn't most people. And so where we run into resistance
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
in an effort to make some kind of change in the organization, a pretty
Julia Dhar
reasonable assumption is not that those people
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
generically hate to change.
Julia Dhar
It might be that they're just not
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
currently buying what you're selling.
Adi Ignatius
Julia so talk about the IKEA effect in employee engagement. Talk about what that is.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
Have you ever assembled flat pack furniture, IKEA or otherwise?
Adi Ignatius
Oh my God, so many times, including
Julia Dhar
maybe with someone you loved or cared about?
Adi Ignatius
Yeah, initially we probably weren't talking by the end of it, but.
Julia Dhar
Yeah, exactly. But the IKEA effect, brilliantly described and
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
documented by Mike Norton at Harvard Business
Julia Dhar
School, basically says that people who have
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
had a hand in creating something disproportionately value it. That's the important takeaway for executives. The way experimentally he demonstrated this was
Julia Dhar
by having people build IKEA boxes. Maybe you have one of these in your house and then asking what they
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
would be willing to pay for it
Julia Dhar
versus one assembled by a professional. And you can probably guess the ending to this story that people were willing to pay 63% more for their own, I'm going to assume, inferior boxes than they were for a professionally assembled one. People do not burn down houses that
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
they have had a hand in building.
Julia Dhar
People don't sabotage projects that they helped to create. And a consequence of that is to say we don't always have to make it unbelievably easy for people to participate in change. But giving people a reasonable opportunity, a sincere and genuine opportunity, to shape an
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
element of the project that affects them,
Julia Dhar
is an important and really useful step
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
to be able to take.
Julia Dhar
I often think things that executives can immediately do is upfront as we are designing a project, ask people how comprehensive
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
the understanding of the problem is and give them an opportunity to have input
Julia Dhar
at that point, allow people to do things like name a project or to determine the right sequence of events for
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
certain changes to be ruled out.
Julia Dhar
Of course, not everything in an organization
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
can be by consensus.
Julia Dhar
It cannot be a democracy. But if we keep the IKEA effect in mind that people who have shaped something take care of it, it quickly becomes their agenda, as opposed to the CEO's agenda. You start to see intuitively, although this has also been proven analytically, that the
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
chance of success is much higher.
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Adi Ignatius
So we've been talking mostly about the extent to which there's alignment between know, leadership and employees. But there's also, you know, and we've seen this where even among leaders, executives aren't fully aligned. And this I think gets into the storytelling aspect to a degree. I mean I've, you know, I've been involved with startup companies and been involved with efforts to tell their stories. And tell their stories is useful for investors, for the public, for the media, but also internally, you know, sometimes it's in the storytelling that you realize that senior people aren't completely aligned. So to what extent is that a problem in transformation efforts and to what extent can that be broken down?
Julia Dhar
One of the things I feel we
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
know for sure is that perhaps the most underused tool for behavioral change is the well told story and the powerful visible symbol.
Julia Dhar
Human beings, we are profoundly narrative. Which I've guess is good for people like you and me who love words, but it's actually good for people who think that they are only mobilized by
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
numbers or by data.
Julia Dhar
Stories are memorable to us. They mobilize us to action.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
They captivate our attention.
Julia Dhar
However, a really important thing is to note that in order for a story to work well as a Tool for
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
behavior change in an organization.
Julia Dhar
The very first step is that it must be true and it must be honest and specific about the reality and
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
the request that the storyteller is making of the listener.
Julia Dhar
We talk about three different types of
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
story of mobilizing for change in an organization.
Julia Dhar
Type number one, threat we have to change or we will suffer and maybe die. Ford did this really successfully after the auto bailouts, after global financial crisis, and in rebuilding and turning around that organization,
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
often a couple more times after that.
Julia Dhar
The second type is fitness. And this, by the way, is most of the change efforts in organizations. We need to continue to get incrementally better at what we do best, or we have gotten a little sloppy, a little loose, a little undisciplined at what makes us really good and we need to be more consistent. And then the third type is destiny. Say by making this shift, we can actually realize the promise of what this company was always meant to be. We can become who we really are. John May, when he talked about the
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
transformation of John Deere towards being not
Julia Dhar
just a hard iron company that sold tractors and farming equipment, but to one that also sold software that allowed farmers to be much more productive. That was a really good example of a destiny story. Threat fitness or destiny. The thing that leaders have to make a choice about is where are they
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
genuinely in the business cycle, in the
Julia Dhar
strategy cycle, in the change cycle, and invite people to participate accordingly.
Adi Ignatius
I know you write about momentum in the book. When you're launching a transformation, should you think about momentum? Should you think about, we're going to have this early win, but we have to think about, you know, let's not just see what happens and hope that it works. Let's actually stage a kind of plan for momentum so that there is this constant, you know, let's say positive feedback as we keep moving, as we hit another milestone, should we plan momentum into our transformation strategies?
Julia Dhar
100%.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
It might be one of the only
Julia Dhar
really truly controllable variables. And what I mean by that is basically in any organization, there will never be enough money, there will never be
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
enough time, there will never be enough executive attention.
Julia Dhar
But we can be really deliberate about momentum, including asking, are we continuing to increase momentum, to gain yardage? For example, are we stuck where we were a week ago? And what will it take to give people a sense of progress? Because one of the things we know for sure is that if individuals or groups of people believe that they are capable of doing something that turns out to be kind of a self fulfilling prophecy and the best way to do that is not just to tell people to be confident, but it's to give them the experience of acquired competence and success over time. And so in that way, momentum can start to move towards perpetual motion. I do think there is one pretty ugly truth about momentum that we don't talk about nearly enough in the planning phase or the deciding phase of change, which is like a lot of efforts
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
to change our own behavior.
Julia Dhar
It's not just that it gets messy in the middle, so sometimes it gets boring in the middle. And that sometimes what we could say is a loss of momentum or we diagnose as a problem of motivation or morale somewhere deeper in the organization is actually just that executives have lost interest and have moved on to something else. And actually asking, critically examining now the structure of the program, to say, is there a set of rituals, is there a weekly cadence and drumbeat for the program that will actually give it its own momentum so we don't have to think too hard about whether or not
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
we're all still in this together would
Julia Dhar
be very helpful for everyone.
Adi Ignatius
What are some early signs that a transformation is starting to stall in that way or in any other way? And what do you do about it?
Julia Dhar
I think a couple are those really obvious, but also easy to ignore daily or weekly signs. Things like an executive suddenly not attending a meeting because there was, not because of an emergency, but somewhere else that they had decided to be, for example, you can get around that by saying, we have a very rigorous set of expectations for one another up front, but that's a sign that you might be experiencing not so much loss of momentum in the organisation, but a little bit of boredom from executives. The second is if you are not systematically saying, let's measure and understand the behaviors and emotions of the organization, when you start to revert to expressions, cliches, frankly, like, I think the organization is tired, clearly not like an organization cannot be tired. People in an organization, of course, can be tired, they can be burnt out, they can be overworked. It is highly unlikely that it is everyone in the organization. And it cheapens that experience to just say, well, I think the organization is tired. I think there is general change fatigue,
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
so we should just back off a little bit, as opposed to saying, that's an opportunity to make deliberate choices about where energy and effort and by the way, other resources, including money, including expertise, are going in the organization.
Julia Dhar
And then I think the final one is if we underuse celebration, we underuse
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
praise, appreciation, recognition, and I think often
Julia Dhar
a painful reality about the early Phases
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
of change that you need some early wins.
Julia Dhar
We need this sense of endowed progress to keep going.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
We often have to talk about those early wins for much longer than we want to.
Julia Dhar
They're much more humble than we would
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
hope that they are.
Julia Dhar
But knowing that those are visible to people, that they remind everyone in the
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
organization that change is possible and that change is appreciated, is a really important act for executives who can amplify those successes, who can transmit their expectations through them.
Adi Ignatius
So, you know, if somebody's listening to this and is feeling, yeah, you know, I'm leading a transformation effort, I really want it to succeed. I believe in this. I understand that it's complicated. What are a couple things to think about that are within their grasp, that are reasonable to grasp onto as a starting point to kind of increase the chances that this transformation is going to succeed.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
Step number one, before you go too wide that you change maker, ask yourself is would I have false alignment? A bunch of people often in senior roles saying, this sounds good or do I have true agreement? An incredibly easy tactical way to test this is have that core team take out a pen, a piece of paper, this is a very low tech test and write down what it is that we have agreed to do, what is changing and how is it going to work. Until you have that consistently agreed, all of us are able to write down approximately the same thing. Approximately the same what and approximately the same how? You don't really have a change agenda. The second one is to focus on take up. And so you know this line from, often misquoted from Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come in change programs.
Julia Dhar
I think it's a really safe assumption. If you build it, they still probably won't come.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
Unless you have created a plan for
Julia Dhar
take up for people to do the
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
behaviors that you hope that they will do. And a take up plan. If you are sitting there by yourself saying, I have no resources, I have no behavioral science inside my organization is as simple as this. It is asking a project manager or a project owner to write down the answer to the question, which specific individuals and roles in this organization need to change their behavior? What behavior change do we expect and is it likely that people will make that shift based on the plan that we have? If no, you need a better takeout
Julia Dhar
plan because your business case assumes that
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
people are going to change and you know that they won't. So you can do this whole audit on two pieces of paper. Number one, do we have true agreement?
Julia Dhar
You'll know you do.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
When everybody is writing down the same story for change, the same what and the same how?
Julia Dhar
And you'll know you have a pretty
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
robust take up plan, a good plan for behavioural shifts. If you know who you expect to change, what behaviors you want them to do and could explain to someone why you think it's likely that they will be able and willing to do that.
Adi Ignatius
And do you have an example in your head of a company that has gone through a transformation that just should be inspirational to everybody, that they really handled it well and the outcome was positive?
Julia Dhar
I think a company that has proven
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
that they can do all of the things that we've been talking about over and over again by keeping the employees who they are making requests of right at the center is Delta Airlines coming out of bankruptcy really at the end of that period of the company's history. And remember, Delta Airlines is 101 years old. This year, 100,000 people work there instituted a practice that exists to this day which is called Velvet. And Velvet is effectively an opportunity for senior executives and leaders across the organization to spend time with, appreciate, recognize, but also to hear from and to speak with employees across their organizations. Cabin crew mechanics check in agents, baggage handlers. And in doing that, they are living up to a very, very strong theory of change that has existed and has been talked about but also lived throughout the company's history, which is if senior leadership take good care of employees, employees will take good care of customers and customers who have been taken care of
Julia Dhar
will lead to shareholders and the share
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
price and financial performance taking care of itself. There's a lot that is wrapped around that as an organizational strategy. Velvet is one really obvious example of ways in which people literally physically come together and get appreciated. It gets matched in terms of the incentive program with profit sharing and other ways to directly appreciate people's efforts.
Julia Dhar
But to me, that is a really
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
good example of saying we have a really clear understanding of how all of our different stakeholders come together to change. We ask leaders to change before we ask employees to change and we ensure that their incentives are aligned to do so so that we are not asking people to volunteer for a change that they themselves will never see the benefit of.
Adi Ignatius
Julia, I want to thank you for being our guest on the HBR IdeaCast.
Co-author (possibly Christy Elmer or Philip Jamison)
Thank you very much for having me.
Adi Ignatius
That was Julia Dhar, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group and co author of the the book How Change really seven Science Based Principles for Transforming youg Organization. Next week, Allison looks at how leaders often overthink their problems and what they can do about that. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague. And be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCasts in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You'll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly Exclusive Insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR Online. Just head to hbr.org subscribe and thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Du, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox and Senior Production Specialist Rob Eckhart. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Adi Ignatius.
Episode Date: May 12, 2026
Host: Adi Ignatius and Alison Beard
Guest: Julia Dhar (Managing Director & Partner, BCG; Co-founder, BCG’s Behavioral Science Lab)
Theme: Science-backed leadership practices that make organizational transformation durable and more likely to succeed.
This episode dives deep into why so many organizational transformation initiatives fail, exploring not just the strategic or operational missteps but, critically, the overlooked human and behavioral factors. Guest Julia Dhar brings research evidence and practical frameworks from her book, How Change Really Happens: Seven Science-Based Principles for Transforming Your Organization, detailing how leaders can use behavioral science to foster true alignment, recognize emotions, rally participation, and sustain momentum for lasting change.
"That rate has consistently hovered somewhere between 60 and 75% for the last several decades, that's an enormous waste of human potential and talent and frankly optimism."
— Co-author, [03:44]
"There is a huge gap between the predisposition of executives for change and for employees in organizations... the goal shouldn’t be to get everyone as excited or optimistic as executives, that’s probably a fool’s errand."
— Julia Dhar, [07:18]
"You can do this whole audit on two pieces of paper. Number one, do we have true agreement? ... Number two, a good plan for behavioral shifts."
— Julia Dhar, [30:02]-[30:17]
This episode brings fresh, evidence-based humility to leading transformation, emphasizing rigor around behavior, practical empathy, honest storytelling, shared rituals, and the discipline to measure and manage emotional undercurrents throughout.