Is 'brute force implementation' ever the answer?

Over the years in this column, I’ve mentioned 'brute force implementation' – steam-rolling over an organization with your process change. Get onboard immediately or get out. I’ve never advocated this, but as part of due diligence in considering all available tools for practitioners, let’s evaluate this as an option and see where the logic takes us.

BFI first came to my attention in the 1990s when working at a large tech company. A consultant recommended this to us as an approach we should take in implementing a new process. He, of course, was not going to be around for that phase of implementation. Nor, I later learned, did he have a background in process implementation and sustainment. He was what I call a 'smash and grab' consultant: came in with a cookie-cutter process, showed us how it worked, and left the rest for us to figure out. (I rank him next to an org dev person who once told me – I just keep talking at them until they change. Not talking with them, mind you. At them...)    

I may have lied to you in the prior paragraph, because BFI may have come to my attention much earlier – as a child watching the comedy Gomer Pyle, USMC. In a way, the military has been using BFI as part of its boot camps for centuries. You never read books about the Navy Seal experience being described as laying about texting, tweeting and drinking Starbucks. When Arnold Schwarzenegger was winning bodybuilding competitions, he literally forced his muscles to grow. One of my consulting colleagues reminds me that Mike Hammer of Business Process Reengineering fame was quoted as saying, “you need a leg breaker at the top”. In a way, advocating BFI. I suspect if we thought more about it, we might see the results of old-school BFI having been used in organizations throughout the years.

But, it’s not the 1900s anymore. We’re almost 20% through a new century and our topic is organizational change. Today’s organizations, workers, and cultures often require a more sophisticated change approach. I remember one boss telling me the sequence was “You ask first, then tell, and then threaten”. Why lead with a heavy-handed threat up front? Well, I suppose those that use this may lack change tools, there is certainly a short-term speed benefit to it, or maybe they know of no other way. A big down-side is sustainability. Many places where a process change is shoved down workers throats snaps back to its old ways after a while. BFI may engage their hands but not their hearts and minds. Resistance, working as hard as possible to do things the old way, giving zero discretionary effort, are all symptoms of a mismatch between change methods and org culture.

Bottom line: while BFI is indeed a method in the tool box, I’d consider it a method-of-last-resort. In all fairness to BFI, there are some situations wherein its use may be appropriate: certainly, some emergency situations where people’s safety is at stake (if my plane is plummeting from 30,000 ft. I don’t want the pilot to set up some flip charts and lead a round-robin discussion about our feelings). Possibly some last-ditch turnaround efforts in organizations where they either change to a new process immediately or go out of business and there’s no time or wiggle room to debate and discuss. In those situations, survival is at stake, so we slam the new process into place and when the dust settles at least we’re still alive to mop up all the collateral damage it caused and carry off the wounded. After all process sustainability is a moot point if we are not around to sustain it!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to brute force about 200lbs of leaves from my back yard out to the curb... Happy change!