Change is not linear

When growing up I thought life would be a linear development. Going to school increases your knowledge, doing sports increases your performance and life itself increases your skills and capabilities. Health is a given anyway and wealth will come with the increasing knowledge and skills.

But I had to learn that life is not linear, but a complex development of ups and downs as we go through changes and learnings.

Most of us know the change curve:

📈 A small upward part of euphoria
📉 A deep downward part when people realize the whole impact and where the organization might perform worse than before
📈 A long upward trend of change and learning with organizational performance leveling on a much higher level than before – if things go the intended way.

But I learned another change curve in a very interesting simulation game with INSEAD 💡: the development of the number of people convinced of the change over time!

This curve is exponential, if you implement the right change management measures. It is very flat at the beginning and slowly starts to rise. Once it reaches a tipping point, the number of people increases very fast.

There is a huge problem with this curve. If a change – let’s say – is intended to take x years, we will hardly have changed 20% of the people after half of the time. More often than not, this is the point in time, when the management gets nervous and my declare the change to be not successful. They start a new initiative – and this starts right at the very beginning of the change curve again.

Another interesting point is the tipping point, from which on the change accelerates itself – and solves the problem of the minority of aggressive resistors.

Lesson learned: Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between failure and just not enough perseverance.

Have you encountered this phenomenon in the past?