Why Change Is an Affair of the Heart

From CIO Magazine. Editorial by Dan S. Cohen.

"In the drama of change, emotions, not logic, impel people to cast off the old and embrace the new.

Everyone wants to know why so many IT projects fail to produce the business transformation they're expected to. The reason we found after years of studying large-scale change may surprise you. Our research, based on interviews with hundreds of executives in Fortune 1000 - type companies around the world, revealed that it is not the complexity of the technology, a lack of buy-in from top management, high cost or the failure to create shareholder value that derails new projects. Instead, the single biggest challenge in any transformation project is simply getting people to change their behavior.

We also discovered that when people do change their behavior, it's rarely because they are offered a logical analysis that shifts their thinking but because they are shown a compelling truth that influences their feelings. Emotions are what trigger action - impelling people to behave in the often radically different and difficult ways that substantial change demands. We have found that at the heart of every successful change effort lies a three-part process:

1. seeing what the problems are;
2. feeling an urgency to solve them; and
3. being emotionally compelled to act."

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