A company introduces a shared customer-management process. Leadership expects cleaner records, better forecasting, and easier coordination between Sales and Support. At the launch, employees are encouraged to embrace change. A month later, sales staff are still keeping separate spreadsheets and managers are asking why adoption is slow.
The new process requires more data entry while the sales targets remain unchanged. Some fields help Finance but have little immediate use for the person completing them. Regional managers also have less discretion over how their teams work. These effects deserve examination alongside whether staff understand the new system.
Quotes about change can make a principle memorable. They provide less help with deciding how the work, benefits, and authority should be distributed. For this company, the useful conversation begins with what employees are being asked to do differently and what makes that change practical.
Looking Beyond a Request to Embrace Change
Encouragement can help when people face unfamiliar work. They may need confidence, training, or reassurance about where to obtain support. Those needs should be taken seriously without assuming that every objection has the same cause.
A salesperson might resist the new process because it duplicates information already entered elsewhere. Another may be uncertain about how customer information will be used. A regional manager may object because approval rights are moving to a central team. Each concern calls for a different response.
The company needs to investigate what the objection describes. Removing duplicate entry can improve the process. Explaining data access can resolve uncertainty. Changing decision authority may require a leadership decision that remains contested even after everyone understands it.
Treating these concerns as a general attitude towards change loses useful information. Listening does not require accepting every objection, but it helps establish which problem needs a decision.
Examining the System Around the Behaviour
The Deming Institute records the observation:
The line offers a useful prompt to examine working conditions. Its absolute wording should not be treated as a substitute for investigating a particular case.
For the customer-management process, the relevant conditions include available time, ease of use, access to information, and what managers reward. Employees may understand the required fields while still facing a workload that makes completion difficult.
If the company wants accurate records, it needs to establish when information becomes available and who is best placed to supply it. Requiring Sales to enter a billing detail that only Finance knows creates a design problem that further training will not resolve.
The question prompted by the quotation is therefore practical: what in the process helps or prevents people from doing the work being requested? That gives leadership a basis for changing conditions it controls.
Identifying Who Gains and Who Carries the Cost
An improvement for the organisation can create additional work or loss of discretion for particular teams. Better forecasting may help leadership while requiring sales staff to maintain information they previously recorded only for themselves.
The change assessment should make those effects visible. This includes time spent learning, new administrative tasks, altered responsibilities, and any work the new process is meant to replace. If nothing stops, the company should account for the additional workload.
Some costs can be reduced through better design. Others reflect a deliberate trade-off, such as requiring a consistent record for a cross-team process. Leadership should explain why that requirement matters and provide the resources needed to meet it.
The distribution of benefits also affects adoption. Showing staff how a complete record reduces repeated customer questions can connect the requirement to their work. That explanation is credible when the downstream process actually uses the information and removes avoidable repetition.
Aligning Measures With the Intended Outcome
The company should examine how staff will be judged during the transition. If sales targets remain fixed while data entry expands, employees face competing demands. Managers need an agreed way to handle that conflict.
Adding a completion target may encourage more populated fields without establishing that the information is useful. The assessment should also examine accuracy, correction effort, and whether Sales and Support can complete the shared workflow.
Measures need interpretation. Low completion might indicate confusing requirements, missing information, or deliberate bypassing. High completion might conceal placeholder values. A useful review connects the figures with observed work and conversations with the people involved.
This gives measurement a role beyond reporting adoption. It can reveal whether the design supports the intended behaviour and where leadership needs to revise expectations or capacity.
Making Authority Consistent With the New Process
A shared process needs a route for resolving disagreements. Sales may want fewer mandatory fields while Finance needs specific information before billing. Local managers may want exceptions that affect other teams.
Clear decision rights should establish who defines the minimum requirements, who can approve an exception, and how a disputed requirement is reviewed. The people accountable for data quality need a way to influence the work that produces it.
Leadership also needs to decide when the old route can close. Removing spreadsheets before the replacement supports important tasks can create new workarounds. Leaving both routes indefinitely may preserve duplication and prevent the shared process from becoming dependable.
These are implementation decisions for the transformation roadmap. Communication supports them by explaining what has changed, why, and where unresolved problems should go.
Reviewing What Happens Under Pressure
The first busy period tests the new arrangement. If managers tell staff to bypass the process whenever a target is at risk, employees receive evidence that the requirement is conditional. A temporary exception may be justified, but its scope and consequences need to be understood.
The company can define how urgent cases are handled and when omitted information must be reconciled. That is more workable than either pretending exceptions never occur or leaving every team to invent its own response.
Reviews should distinguish a process defect from a capability gap or a choice to disregard an agreed requirement. Those findings suggest different interventions. They may also reveal that the original design needs adjustment.
Broad failure statistics add little to this diagnosis. Mark Hughes’s review of the widely repeated 70% claim questioned its empirical support. This company’s results should be assessed against defined outcomes and evidence from its own transition.
Using Quotes as a Starting Point
A quotation can introduce a useful question about decision-making, incentives, or the cost of maintaining the current arrangement. The organisation still needs to examine how that question applies to the proposed change.
For the customer-management process, progress means more than attendance at training or agreement with the launch message. Staff need to complete the work, downstream teams need to trust the records, and managers need a way to resolve conflicts without quietly restoring the old process.
The company can revisit those conditions as it learns. It may simplify fields, reallocate tasks, adjust targets, or revise approval rights. Each action responds to an identified difficulty rather than a presumed lack of enthusiasm.
Quotes about change are most useful when they lead into this work. Their contribution is to help people notice a problem clearly enough to investigate it; the decisions around the process determine whether working differently becomes achievable.
