LTYM - The Benefits of Pain

Letters to a Young Manager

The Benefits of Pain, #71
LTYM > Change Management

Dear Sophie,

***

What you've realized is that change is hard. Just because the new way is better, does not mean that people will flock to it.

At a nonprofit where I worked, child sponsorship was a program we had from the early days. A donor would pledge a monthly amount, and the funds would go to a local program like health or education, where the child was enrolled. But donors changed and children graduated. The reassignment process was manual and tedious. So we built a new system to replace the old process. But few wanted to use it. It meant not only learning a new system but changing the way they did it for years.

It was then I realized that the pain of the old process was not painful enough. How is that? The pain of changing to a new system felt greater than the pain of the status quo. It was only when the volume of children in the program grew that the old way became too much. The pain of the new was less than the pain of the old. Then people changed.

Breaking out of legacy processes is more than just pointing to the shiny new way. The benefits to the user must be strong enough to overcome the old way.

***

Sincerely,
Ed

________________________

References...

Takeaways:

The pain of change needs to be less than the pain of the status quo

Discussion Questions:

1. Has your team experienced resistance to change? How did you overcome it?
2. Are you able to state the user benefits of each new system? In the user's terms?
3. What are some of the things that increase the pain of the status quo?

For Further Reading:

See "The WIIFM Principle," Letter #582
See "The Burning Platform", Letter #366