Buy-In: Before You Can Get Buy-In, People Need to Feel the Problem
Buy-in, By John Kotter|Wednesday February 16, 2011|Harvard Business Review
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Picture this: you’re in the middle of presenting your proposal and a person at the far end of the table, lacking buy-in, raises her hand. “I’m not even sure the ‘problem’ you’re describing exists, or is a big deal at all!” How do you deal with that?
From reading your responses to my previous posts, I find that many people aren’t able to even reach the point where they can debate the merits of their proposal. Many get bogged down in the quagmire of trying to effectively communicate the nature and extent of the problem. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t much matter what your proposal is. People aren’t going to consider anything until they are convinced there is a problem that truly needs to be addressed. In scenarios like this, I’ve found that it’s effective to highlight the problem and the people affected by it in a way that makes the problem feel real. What’s less effective â and far more common â is to make a dry business case that, even if correct, is usually less persuasive and less memorable than it needs to be.
On this topic, one story I’ve always liked (from my book The Heart of Change) I affectionately call “Gloves on the Boardroom Table.” A large organization had an inefficient purchasing process, and one mid-level executive believed that money was constantly being wasted with each of the organization’s factories handling their own purchases. He thought there could be tremendous savings from consolidating the procurement effort. He put together a “business case” for change but it went nowhere. His boss said that senior executives didn’t feel it was truly a big problem, especially with so many other daily challenges taking up their time.
http://blogs.hbr.org/kotter/2011/02/before-you-can-get-buy-in-peop.html
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