Don’t Neglect the 3 Critical Ingredients of Every Successful Change

Plus, the one aspect you don’t want to overlook.

I’ve seen my share of change efforts miss the mark.

Miss by solving a problem that nobody wants to solve.
Miss by not bridging the capability gap.
Miss by not making change safe.

This is not a mix that works.

But some get the recipe right.

They embrace improvement as the norm.
They skill up to meet the change.
They remove barriers to trying new things.

Smooth change happens with these ingredients (and roughly or not at all if any are missing).

I coach product teams to maximize outcomes with less effort while respecting people.

I’ve been activating change for more than 25 years with over 150 teams and 75 organizations. This has presented me with many variations of how change takes root. And these 3 ingredients have emerged as the core of any successful change effort.

Below, you can steal the learning from my journey in under five minutes, and apply it to your change efforts.

Let’s dive in and learn about these 3 ingredients and an often overlooked secret to lasting change.

This year, I’ve committed my focus to a concept called Lean Leverage, as described in my inaugural 2024 post. Each article I craft this year, including this one (the 11th in the series), will focus on an aspect of Lean Leverage. Enjoy and stay tuned for many ways to do more with less.

The 3 Critical Ingredients of Every Successful Change

The will to change.

The skills to conquer it.

The safety to step into the unknown.

These are the 3 key ingredients to harvesting the opportunities change brings us. If any are left out or sparse, the meal of change will be bland or downright unappetizing. We will reject it, spit it out.

Let’s uncover the nature of these ingredients and how to nurture them to harvest change.

Ingredient 1: Will.

Courage might be an apt description for the will to change.

Stepping outside of an accepted, embedded culture is not easy. Many organizations have built-in mechanisms to thwart any deviance from norms. These fan out like antibodies to reject the foreign virus of a new behavior. It takes courage to outmaneuver the counterattack.

But courage requires something else.

Courage requires the desire to change.

Desire is often driven by discomfort—the level of pain of doing nothing. Without a compelling reason, the spark to ignite the fire of change is missing. While nobody wants a burning platform to be the reason for change, it is a strong and familiar motivator.

But desire requires something else.

Awareness fans the flame of desire.

Though, being aware is tricky. Many who have been doing the same behavior for years are unaware of an alternate path. They are stagnant in their learning. And many can continue to deliver in some capacity with stale habits; this is why a better way is so elusive.

And meanwhile, others who continuously adapt to better conditions are passing them by.

Static behavior also forms a blindness to an inevitable gradual, silent decline.

Changing conditions are all around us, especially in the product space. If we aren’t changing with it, we will eventually reach an impasse. This is an uncomfortable and alarming situation to be in.

An alternative does exist.

The alternative to waiting on the burning platform to spur willpower.

We don’t have to wait on a code-red moment to open our eyes.

We can simply have a burning desire not to get comfortable in our habits. This must be fueled by the truth that If we aren’t changing to meet our changing conditions, we are stagnating. This fuels our awareness of the ever-present shifts all around us.

”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.”
—Heraclitus

We must be poised for change and willing to meet it head-on.

Here are a few key ways your organization can do this:

Make change everyone’s job.
Embed the mindset to embrace change in job descriptions, 1-1s, and performance goals.
Change even when things seem to be going well.
Ensure employees stay up-to-date on emerging trends through communities, training, and external guides.
Hold frequent improvement co-creation sessions across the organization to meet and embrace change.
Assume planning is essential, but the plan is worthless; expect things will not go as planned.
Make change priority 1, not an afterthought.
Expect change, don’t avoid it or delay it.

The will to change emerges when you embrace it as a competitive advantage.

Ingredient 2: Skill.

As the saying goes, you can’t train experience.

But this does not stop organizations from trying to do so.

Many assume mass training or community-building is enough to skill up around change. Yet, my experience has proven to me: training and community are not enough to build capability. In most cases, the fruit from these activities died on the vine as soon as they were over. Without immediate and repeated application, existing behavior smothers the new.

Fresh skills, if not immediately put to use, quickly become a distant memory.

An alternative does exist.

The alternative to relying solely on training and community to build skills.

Practicing new behaviors is difficult and time-consuming without experience.

New habits form faster and easier with the help of an experienced guide. Putting a new skill into practice is ten times harder without the guidance of a steady, skilled hand. This provides crucial course correction and ensures you don’t fall back into old habits.

Experience can grease the wheels of change.

But you have to be open to this guidance.

Bringing in a mentor requires a degree of humility and curiosity for both the learner and the guide. There is no shame in the past behavior; it all made sense at the time. And having a beginner’s mind is crucial for the learner to make space for the guidance.

Be humble and curious to learn from a guide.

Also, the guide must aim at building confident autonomy in the learner.

The guide moves through a pattern of I do, we do, and you do. This gives the learner a real example to emulate instead of starting from scratch. Then, the student gets training wheels as the new behavior is tried. And finally, the training wheels come off.

”Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”
—Xun Kuang

A successful guide can eventually disappear.

Here are some ways your organization can embrace the experienced guide:

Bring in an experienced, external coach to guide the new skill.
Invite a subject-matter expert from another team to coach you.
Be a guest in another team to see how they do things.
Instead of handing off work to another team, have the other team teach you how to do the work (break the dependency).
Invite managers, stakeholders, and customers to problem-solve with your team.

Training is important, as is community.

But they are insufficient and pale in comparison to experienced, in-the-moment guidance.

Ingredient 3: Safety.

No safety, no change.

You could say safety is a prerequisite for the other two ingredients. But this is not always true when courage is present. If you are creative, you can always find things to change that are in your control.

Change what you can control or what you have the courage to face head-on.

Although, when you hit a roadblock and courage is not enough to break through, safety becomes critical.

Do you need to wait until you hit a roadblock to make change safe?

No, you don’t; there is an alternative.

The alternative to waiting for safety to become a blocker to change.

Building safety should be proactive, not reactive.

When facing change, we must make it safe to do so. One of the most crucial ways to do this is to make space for it. Change is an investment, and it needs room to happen. This is an act of slowing down to speed up.

But slowing down is not a popular notion, especially in the output-driven world of product.

Though, if we don’t slow down to adapt as we go, we may get to a point where we completely stall out.

So, we must see change not as a cost, but as a necessity. Change is not a one-time event, but a daily practice. Forever.

If we can accept the nature of change, we can prepare for it better.

Here are some tactics I’ve seen work to clear the path and make change safe:

Don’t expect a detailed plan for the complex uncertainty of change.
Don’t expect an end date for change.
Don’t expect change to be frictionless.
Provide cover to make space for change.
Leave slack for change.
Don’t expect everything to work on the first try.
Know unlearning might take longer than learning.
Expect and embrace the red when a change does not work.
Meet obstacles head on and remove them.
Place problem-solving in the hands of those closest to the work.
Play the long game; this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Hold no-blame retrospectives.
Blame the system, not the people.

”A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
—W. Edwards Deming

To make change easy, embed safety into your system of work and how you show up.

The often overlooked secret of lasting change.

Knowing the importance will, skill, and safety play in making successful change is one thing.

It’s quite another to realize the vast reach of their importance.

Many might think will, skill, and safety are only for individuals facing change. This has some truth. But you need to zoom out.

Think of an employee who is a member of a product team.

The team also needs will, skill, and safety to change. This team is part of a product community. The product community needs will, skill, and safety to change. The community exists in the organizational ecosystem. And, you guessed it, the ecosystem needs will, skill, and safety to change.

Every level, function, and role in the organization needs will, skill, and safety.

Any change at a lower level or in a function will reach a ceiling if the rest of the organization can’t change with it. This is why many change efforts only make it so far or fail and revert.

Will, skill, and safety are an organization-wide imperative for embracing change.

That’s it. Those are my 3 ingredients for successful change harvesting.

Will, skill, and safety at all levels and across the organization.

This is my secret to embracing lasting change.

Last but not least, I’m also on a continuous change journey. I’m well aware that these may not be the ingredients you use, and there may be better ones out there. So, comment and let me know what you do.

I’d love to learn from your journey.

TL;DR

Here are 3 ingredients of successful change and the overlooked secret to lasting change.

Ingredient 1: Will — Don’t rest on your laurels; develop an insatiable curiosity in the direction of better.

Ingredient 2: Skill — Trust in an experienced guide to amplify your learning and unlearning path.

Ingredient 3: Safety — Be proactive and create a safe environment that invites change.

The Overlooked Secret to Lasting Change — For change to be the norm, every level, function, and role in the organization needs will, skill, and safety.

THANK YOU!

I hope you found this post useful.

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