Welcome to Ask Dr. Change. I’m Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson. I’m happy to have you join me today to explore how to seriously up level your leadership and consulting to transformational changes all through conscious change leadership.

Welcome. Today’s episode is about the strategy of creating critical mass, a powerful, essential way to generate momentum for your project. I often get the question, especially from change management folks. We work hard to overcome stakeholder resistance, but it’s not enough to get us to the finish line.

What else can we do? So today’s episode is to focus on what else you can do. Every change management practitioner focuses a lot of energy on managing stakeholders to overcome their resistance and gain their adoption. This is essential.

However, there’s more to the need to generate momentum for change. Consider that momentum is energy. This is key here and I’ll explain it as we go forward. I want to introduce you to the strategy of creating critical mass in nuclear physics.

We know that critical mass is the attainment of the amount of fissile material required to set off and sustain a chain reaction. What does that translate to? A lot of energy? Webster defines critical mass as the size number or amount large enough to produce a particular result.

Large enough of what? Energy. Particular result in the organizational context is the project’s successful outcome. So in organizational terms, creating critical mass refers to influencing the number of people required to support a change so that it has the momentum not only to launch but sustain through to successful outcomes so that it can take on a life of its own as it’s proceeding.
Overcoming the inertia of the past and generating the energy, the positive energy required for its future to happen. so that the outcome can be achieved. in a change management context, think about how much energy and focus you give your resistors. You assume the energy you put into getting them to be supportive will be worth it to the project.

And that’s really important, right? One might also say this is from our standpoint being first, designing your change strategy at the beginning to minimize stakeholder resistance, and then therefore you will have to spend a lot less of your energy on overcoming resistance when you do this, and your project will have a much better chance of succeeding. This is also true and a strategy we support. Yet for today’s topic, there’s another strategy that will give you the momentum you need without as much attention on your resistors.

That’s creating critical mass. So I want to describe some of the elements of critical mass for you to begin thinking through this strategy. One major focus, of course, is your resistors and the amount of against energy they generate. Resistors work against your project from happening.

However, to fully appreciate this strategy, I want you to temporarily put aside focus on your resistors for the moment. We’ll get back to them. there are two other groups in a critical mass strategy. Two other groups of people involved in your project and having an influence on its ability to move ahead.
First, are your supporters. These are the folks that have a lot of positive energy for the project for they want it to succeed. You may have spent time and resources to identify and enhance the positive energy of your supporters. That’s essential as well.

This energy, the positive energy goes directly into your equation of the positive momentum you need for your project to succeed. The second group involved in this strategy are your fence sitters, your middle of the roaders, the uncommitted. They will not impact the energy for your project until they have a position, although they can bog it down by non-action, which in many cases might be a form of resistance. So it’s really kind of an insight here, spending your energy to focus on your fence sitters to become supporters is essential to gaining their positive energy for your project to move forward.
So these two groups, your supporters and your fence sitters are your first priorities before your resisters. Now think about how you hold these two groups today, how you appreciate them, how do you attend to them, Communicate with them, engage them, listen to them. These questions are key to generating critical mass momentum for your project. How do you hold these two groups?
A lot of people will think about their supporters and not attend to them because they already think they’re in the boat. A lot of people don’t bother with the fence sitters because they’re so focused on overcoming resistance. Neither of these strategies support the critical mass requirements. Let me explain more.

How do you know when you’ve reached critical mass? There’s no numeric formula, no set number of people. I’ve had a number of people. When I explain this, they just tell me how many people I need to get in the boat, and then I’ll do that.

And then we’ll be able to succeed, right? Well, not quite. Consider the analogy of the snowball effect. Once you start a snowball rolling down a hill, it gains mass while it rolls and ultimately takes on a life of its own, generating the right amount of energy to speed down the hill.

Now, that’s what we’re after with organizational change, generating the right amount of human energy so that the project rolls ahead. And we have to assume good leadership and strategy are also there to guide it and sustain it over time, which is essential. So we’re after speed and ease and your conscious attention to generating this strategy. That’s what I’m talking about today.

It’s important to note that once you identify your supporters, we’re not talking about creating a formal structure around them. This is more of an informal, energetic dynamic here. The power of this strategy is in informal nature listening, interacting, relating. It’s not about force.

And so this is different than perhaps have talked about a culture champion network, which is kind of an informal network. This is I don’t want to conflate those two. This is really an informal strategy with tremendous impact. So how do we go about building critical mass?

How do we generate your strategy? The first step in a change management context is from a neutral position, scan all of the people engaged in and affected by your project, your looking for your influencers here. Who are the folks with authority, the thought leaders, those with referent power who are popular and have influence over others? How they have a following.

Who are your advocates? Your advisors? Your experts? These are the folks you want to identify is individuals or is groups. Then again, as neutrally as possible, you’re going to rate these folks for being supporters as uncommitted or resisters. Now, this is a gut reaction. It’s not some formal kind of assessment. You might do this yourself.

You might do it in as a team. You might do it with your leaders or your sponsor. It’s a gut reaction. As I mentioned, generalizing about them is fine, at least to be able to begin your strategy and you need to keep the political dynamics among these people in mind as that will have an influence on their ability to move forward or be blocked in terms of supporting the change.

Your next assessment will be how to work with your supporters to have them spread their support. This is critical in a critical mass strategy. Focus on those with position, power or charisma in major parts of the organization versus spending a lot of energy in folks that are in small parts of the organization. You want to have as much snowball influence as you possibly can on your fence sitters.
By having these people actually work with your fence sitters. That’s an important part of this strategy. So how do we influence your supporters to play their part? First up, invite them to be a part of this critical mass strategy in role them in becoming mobilizers.

That’s a critical word. And it means a lot when managers think, I’m not just informing my people that a change is going to happen. How do I go about mobilizing? So the supporters who are already interested in the success of the change effort, they’re going to need care from you feeding and guidance along the way.

Why didn’t follow you provide them? What do you want them to communicate with you and with your sponsors? What input do you want from them? One of the things that we found to be important here is with your supporters to create ground rules or guidelines for how they’ll treat and respect individuals who are particularly challenging to influence towards the positive.
Maybe those are your fence sitters or your resisters, so they need to know how to work with. Again, not against the folks who are against the project. And so some guidance and perhaps some training, some coaching is helpful to help these folks play their part. You can also use your supporters to help shape the project.

Design requirements might come from them troubleshooting issues or blockages along the way, busting rumors really helpful being models of the new culture supportive of the conditions for success. Perhaps sources of information that you need for the project. Any number of things are ways you can use your supporters. What’s most important is you want to not just know they support the change, but they’re engaged in some way, which brings them from commitment to alignment with making the change be successful.

Now, how to influence your fence sitters, your middle of the roaders. They take less energy to move into the positive camp than your resisters because they’re already on the fence as opposed to against it. So strategies for your fence sitters meet with them, talk through their reactions, their level of understanding of the project, what assumptions they’re making, what implications they see for it. Ask them to start thinking about where they actually are in relation to the success of the project.
Invite them to town halls to participate in relevant project actions along the way. Communicating or an engagement strategy. Perhaps they can help tailor or tinker with the future state, since it will impact them perhaps ask them to do something important for the project that they would not typically be asked to do. That’s generates excitement.

That’s like, wow, you know, I’m seen here, I’m valued here. That’s useful for fence sitters especially. Have your most influential supporters meet with them to hear their concerns and needs to actually talk directly with them about what’s going on for them and how they can be brought further into the boat in support of the project. Now about your resistors.

Let’s get back to them. Focus first on your resisters. You perceive to be the most influential or the loudest. They have the most against energy and can more easily spread it We want them somehow to be contained.

Have your leaders meet with them, talk through their reactions, their assumptions, the negative impacts they see. The implications they see about this. Ask what they would need to be able to support the project, what they see that they think leaders don’t see. All of these questions lead to asking your resisters to think, to be present with their own reaction.

So often we find resisters just go along because the, you know, the winds are against or they’re afraid of something happening. And so we want to actually be present with them. Asking them to think through, does this really make sense for them to hold the position that they have? You don’t have to do everything they ask for.

That’s not in this game, but they’re asking. And the listening helps to neutralize their against energy, hopefully reduce it, at least to put them in to a more neutral position. Like your fence sitters, invite them to town halls to participate in relevant project actions. One idea that we’ve seen work is to ask them to be on benchmarking efforts for the project, going out and talking about how this project was done in other organizations and how the benefits it achieved and how it became successful.
Ask them to do something you would typically not ask them to do again. That generates new energy that gets their attention. So in summary, what I want to clarify is we’re striving to create the most positive energy for the project and its outcome as possible. We focus first on supporters and engage them in spreading their positive influence.

First, to your fence sitters and then to your major resisters. So how will you actually do this? The underlying dynamic here is to generate lasting, positive support enough to drive the project to a successful outcome. Think the snowball effect.

It takes less energy to strengthen your positive influencers, then to overcome All of that resistance. I want to have you observe the dynamics. I know we have listeners from around the world, but those of you paying attention to the political dynamics happening here with our election coming up in the United States, think how this works. The supporters, the fence sitters, the resisters.

We are seeing this in action every single day here. No matter which side of the fence you’re on politically. You can see these dynamics of how we generate support, sustain that support, how we try and influence the fence sitters, the uncommitted, the swing states, so to speak here, and how we deal with resisters and attempt to influence their thinking. What’s most important is getting inside people’s heads so that they understand why they have the position they have.

What are the underlying dynamics and assumptions are they making? What implications do they see? It’s the folks that go along without thinking that are most troublesome. So this whole strategy is to unleash their thinking so they can actually make personalized, intelligent choices for what they want to have happen.

Critical Mass Strategy. So my pro tip for you around all of this is to understand that creating critical mass is not about force or threat. That’s not the underlying dynamic here. It’s about influence.
It’s about acknowledgment of these folks. It’s about being present with their energetic state of the leaders and the stakeholders, whether they are for or against or neutral. When you can see the energetics at play, you can strategize how to align them to mobilize support for the project and its outcomes. I do want to say this is not woo woo talking about energy.

It’s very real. And this way I use the the current state of our political dynamics, what’s happening with our election here, because it’s so obvious to see how this is working here and then you can translate that into your organizational setting. It’s very real and very subtle and very powerful. Once you can really begin to see the energy of four against or neutral.

So start with a project scan, see what you can see, and most importantly is create the opening with your leaders to have this conversation so that they too can participate in be supporters and be strategists for how to alter the energetic dynamics to create momentum. Positive momentum for the project. My personal reflection for you today is to reflect on your own energetic state for the work that you do for the projects that you serve. Are you resistant to any part of them?

Are you fully supportive? Willing to do anything? Or are you neutral? Just hanging out, waiting to see what happens, Observing, but not having much influence? What’s causing these states in you? What would you need to alter your own energetics? What information would you need or support would you need or own personal choices that you’re making to get you to alter towards a more positive state in relation to what you are doing in your work and in your life? recognizing what’s true for you will help inform the work that you do in creating critical mass in the projects that you serve.

It will also have a huge impact on the quality of your life and the dynamics that you deal with on a daily basis personally. Understanding your own Energetics. I hope you’ll tune into your own state, energetic state so you can work with it. Be more aware and conscious of it for your own good and benefit.

Thanks for listening today. I hope all the energy forces around you are positive. Today’s subject is one of the key topics that we feature in our leading transformational change online program. If you’d like to learn more about leading transformation social change, go to beingfirst.com/LTC.
Thanks for spending some time with me today. I hope you gain some valuable insights for your work. Please send me your questions and challenges by going to askdrchange.com.