May I have your attention . . .
A few weeks before the National Basketball Association begins their season, all the rookie players meet for a mandatory orientation session. One year, a group of provocatively dressed females were hanging out in the hotel bar drinking and flirting with the young NBA players.
The next morning, as the rookies assembled for their first session, they were surprised to see the same group of young women from the night before. Each woman then stepped to the front of the room and introduced herself: “Hi, I’m Donna, Cynthia, Karen, Michelle - and I’m HIV positive.”
That one carefully designed experience had more impact on the players than a dozen cautionary lectures on the risk of AIDS.
What has this got to do with managing change?
Plenty!
There is a section of the brain known as Broca’s Area, which is a sort of filter for sensory input, sifting through everything we see and hear and read to separate the useful, the pertinent, and the unusual from the rest of what we can call background noise. In other words, Broca’s Area looks at all input and lets pass what is familiar and commonplace, but stops to examine what is novel or surprising. When something is described as having arrested our attention, the phrase is more than apt: some piece of input or information has in fact been detained for questioning.
Have you noticed that it is getting increasingly difficult to get people’s attention when you are announcing an organizational change? Maybe that is because change has become such a common occurrence that speaking about it has become part of the corporate background noise. It simply slides right through the Broca’s Area.
As a leader of change - if you want to grab someone’s attention, you may have to move from announcements to creating an experience (a product fair, a panel of customers, a “secret shopper” visit to a competitor, etc.) in which people learn for themselves that which you would have told them.
A few weeks before the National Basketball Association begins their season, all the rookie players meet for a mandatory orientation session. One year, a group of provocatively dressed females were hanging out in the hotel bar drinking and flirting with the young NBA players.
The next morning, as the rookies assembled for their first session, they were surprised to see the same group of young women from the night before. Each woman then stepped to the front of the room and introduced herself: “Hi, I’m Donna, Cynthia, Karen, Michelle - and I’m HIV positive.”
That one carefully designed experience had more impact on the players than a dozen cautionary lectures on the risk of AIDS.
What has this got to do with managing change?
Plenty!
There is a section of the brain known as Broca’s Area, which is a sort of filter for sensory input, sifting through everything we see and hear and read to separate the useful, the pertinent, and the unusual from the rest of what we can call background noise. In other words, Broca’s Area looks at all input and lets pass what is familiar and commonplace, but stops to examine what is novel or surprising. When something is described as having arrested our attention, the phrase is more than apt: some piece of input or information has in fact been detained for questioning.
Have you noticed that it is getting increasingly difficult to get people’s attention when you are announcing an organizational change? Maybe that is because change has become such a common occurrence that speaking about it has become part of the corporate background noise. It simply slides right through the Broca’s Area.
As a leader of change - if you want to grab someone’s attention, you may have to move from announcements to creating an experience (a product fair, a panel of customers, a “secret shopper” visit to a competitor, etc.) in which people learn for themselves that which you would have told them.
Labels: change management, communication, leadership
posted by ckg @ 9:43 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home