3 questions to ask before you begin a major transformation

My friend Jessica Kriegel often warns her clients about the action trap, the urge to do something—anything—when things aren’t going well. Yet while taking action might make us feel better, it’s no guarantee we’ll get results. Many leaders fall into this trap, confusing taking action with making an impact, which can blind us to the underlying problem.

The truth is that you can’t change fundamental behaviors without changing fundamental beliefs. It is, after all, beliefs, in the form of norms, that get encoded into a culture through rituals that drive behaviors. So unless you make a serious effort to understand the underlying problem you’re trying to solve, any action you take is unlikely to be effective.

That’s why you need to start by asking good questions. While coming up with answers makes us feel decisive, those answers will close doors that should often be left open and explored. Good questions, on the other hand, can lead to genuine breakthroughs. With that in mind, here are three essential questions you need to ask before embarking on a transformational initiative. 

1. Is this a Strategic Change or Behavioral Change?

Every change effort represents a problem, or set of problems, to be solved. A strategic change starts at the top and needs effective communication and coordination for everybody to play their role, like the famous case at Intel, when Gordon Moore and Andy Grove made the fateful decision to move out of memory chips and bet the company on microprocessors. 

In a strategic shift, resistance is not particularly relevant. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. As Grove recounted in his memoir, Only the Paranoid Survive, there were plenty at Intel who questioned the decision. But as chairman and CEO, Moore and Grove had full authority to allocate budgets and convert factories, and the change was going to happen whether people liked it or not. That’s why traditional change management methodologies, like Kotter’s 8 Steps or Prosci’s ADKAR (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, and reinforcement), tend to be effective for strategic changes. 

Yet research shows that change itself has changed. In 1975, 83% of the average U.S. corporation’s assets were tangible assets, such as plants, machinery, and buildings, while by 2015, 84% were intangible, such as licenses, patents, and research. That means the changes we grapple with today have less to do with strategic assets like factories and equipment and a lot more to do with the things people think and do every day. 

Clearly, that changes how we need to approach transformation. Because often the most important changes involve collective action, which can be maddeningly complex. People adopt things when they see others around them doing so. Success begets more success, just as failure begets more failure. Big communication campaigns can ignite early resistance and backfire, while isolated individual efforts rarely scale.

For collective action problems, we need to focus on, as network science pioneer Duncan Watts put it to me, “easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people.” You build momentum and reach critical mass not through persuasion but through connection—by empowering early adopters and helping them influence others.

2. What are the Shared Values?

Humans naturally form tribes. In a study of adults who were randomly assigned to “leopards” and “tigers,” fMRI scans revealed signs of hostility toward out-group members. Similar results were found in a study involving 5-year-old children and even in infants. Evolutionary psychologists attribute this tendency to kin selection, which explains how groups favor those who share their attributes in the hope that those attributes will be propagated.

Our ideas, beliefs, and values tend to reflect the tribes we belong to, and sharing our thoughts and feelings plays a key role in signaling our identity and belonging to these groups. For instance, expressing an expert opinion can demonstrate alignment with a professional community, while sharing a moral stance can signal inclusion in a particular cultural group.

Every organization has its own tribes, with their own values, customs, and lore. Divisions and functions develop their own norms, rituals, and behaviors, shaped by their institutional needs and priorities. As the workplace expert David Burkus told me, there isn’t really any such thing as an organizational culture because each organization contains multitudes of cultures.

So before you start trying to evangelize a transformational initiative across those myriad cultures, with all of their internal biases and emotional trip wires, think about the values they share and build an inclusive vision. That may sound simple and straightforward, but it’s harder than it seems, which helps explain why so many transformational efforts fail.

The problem is that when we’re passionate about something, we want to focus on how it’s different, because that’s what makes us passionate in the first place. We want to talk about how innovative and disruptive it is. Yet while that may honor the idea itself, it doesn’t do much for the people we want to adopt it. If we want them to share our priorities and aspirations, they have to believe that they share our values. 

3. What are the Sources of Power? 

We like to think of transformation as a hero’s journey. There’s an alternative future state that we want to reach, and we’d like to think that if we’re good enough, we do all the right things, and our cause is righteous, we’ll eventually get to that place. 

Yet the truth is that change is always a strategic conflict between that future state and the status quo, which always has sources of power keeping it in place. These sources of power have an institutional basis and form pillars supporting the current state. It is only through influencing these pillars that we can bring about genuine change. Without institutional support, the status quo cannot be maintained.

That’s why to build an effective transformation strategy, we need to identify the institutions that support the status quo, those that support the future state, and those that are still on the fence and as yet uncommitted. These institutions can be divisions or functions within an organization, customer groups, government agencies, regulators, unions, professional and industry associations, media, educational institutions—the possibilities are almost endless. 

What’s important is that they have power and/or resources that can either hold things up or move them forward. That’s what makes them viable targets for action. If you can influence the sources of power upon which the status quo depends, genuine transformation becomes possible. But make no mistake: As long as the forces upholding the status quo stay in place, nothing will ever change.

The Power of a Question

All too often, transformational initiatives are presented as a fait accompli. A strategy is set, a plan is made, and everything is announced with a lot of hoopla at a big launch event. Questions are treated as a nuisance, something to be batted away rather than engaged with. Change leaders, in an effort that seldom succeeds, try to act as if they have all the answers. 

Yet while answers tend to close a discussion, questions help us open new doors and lead to genuine insights. Asking “What kind of change is this?” is essential to building a strategy to overcome challenges. Investigating shared values is key to getting widespread buy-in. Analyzing sources of power is how you identify institutional targets for action. 

The truth is that every great breakthrough starts with a question. As a child, Einstein asked, “What would it be like to ride on a bolt of lightning?” which led to his theory of special relativity. He then asked a second question, “What would it be like to ride an elevator in space?” and that led to his theory of general relativity. 

Change leaders often feel they need to have all the answers, but what they usually need is to ask more—and better—questions. That’s the essence of the changemaker mindset: It’s not about building consensus around a plan and executing it, but about building a coalition to explore possibilities that lead to a better future.

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