Are Your Initiatives Breaking Through Resistance to Change?
(5-minute read)
In the life science industry, change has become a relentless constant of initiatives that promise transformation but deliver disruption. Every few years a “new” vision emerges, sparking a cascade of activities that stalls previous progress. Companies thrust their Marketing organizations into an endless cycle of competing priorities, emerging buzzwords, and shifting tasks—all while maintaining the imperative to grow the business. Change fatigue makes it hard for marketers to stay steady in their daily work. They feel stuck between the hope for change and the difficulty in making that happen.
Beneath this veneer of constant motion, the fundamental issues remain remarkably the same. The 1966 McKinsey & Co’s article, “The Changing Face of Marketing,” 1 still reflects today’s challenges. These include shifting customer expectations and new decision–makers. It also pointed to the changing role of field sales, rising global interdependency, and increasing influence of technology. Similarly, from Pharma 2010 to Pharma 2030, the industry’s outlook reports read like variations on a theme, recycling similar trends and implications. “Transformational change” has become a narrative of wishful thinking with minimal substantive action.
Despite living in a constant state of change, organizations remain surprisingly inept at navigating it.
The root of this paradox lies in a deeply entrenched worldview that imagines businesses as mechanical systems—manageable, compartmentalized, and fundamentally static. Leaders cling to an illusion of control, perceiving people and projects as assemblages of interchangeable parts: always knowable, consistently rational, and entirely predictable. Companies blame external market dynamics as an invasive species threatening a steady state of profitability and growth. This mechanistic worldview is profoundly at odds with reality. Since the dawn of existence, ongoing change embodies the Universe. Every system—from atoms to cells to biospheres—exists in a state of continuous transformation. Yet, businesses persist in treating change as an aberration rather than a natural state of being.
Ironically, in the life sciences—an industry based in rigorous scientific methods—transformational change initiatives neglect the science of human and social behavior. Whether pursuing digital transformation, reimagining customer value creation, or developing marketing capabilities for the future, organizations consistently sideline the human side. They plan for change as they plan for a product launch, rather than as an emergent process involving primal brain rewiring, intrinsic motivations, and entangled agendas.
The Lime LASTING IMPACT Model™
Creating change that lasts requires an interdependent approach, one that addresses the core human systems that constitute an organization: the individual systems, the institutional systems, and the interrelational systems.
Marketing Capabilities Require Change Capabilities
Change isn’t one, discrete “initiative.” It’s a dismantling and subsequent rebuilding of the organization’s entire ecosystem. This effort includes employee beliefs and behaviors, internal processes, tools, and technology, as well as language, conversations, and other cultural “currency” that’s exchanged. Drawing from extensive research and real-world practice, the Lime Lasting Impact Model™ offers guidance to take a more humanistic and realistic approach to change planning and implementation. Here are critical considerations for marketing leaders navigating change:
Get GranularChange programs are notorious for their clichés, platitudes, and grand ideologies of a utopian future. Companies have to get grounded and real, rather than promise something that most people will be skeptical of anyway. The change has to be broken down into manageable steps along a journey, where the nearer steps are mostly clear, and we’re okay with the farther away ones being less clear. Leaders must go beyond fancy words from the stage to provide vivid, detailed descriptions of what change looks like:
- How will a day-in-the-life be different from before?
- What stops? What replaces it?
- What new conversations happen, and which ones go away?
- What urgently needs to be done? What can wait?
- How will I be rewarded, and what happens to me if I don’t change?
Manage the Pain of ChangeWhen it comes to motivating people, marketing professor and the dean at the Wharton School, Patti Williams, describes how “pain is more painful than benefits are beneficial.” While creating the WIIFM (what’s-in-it-for-me) for marketers, companies also must be brutally honest about the pain that accompanies the change. Leaders should be understanding and planning for the things we cherish that are being abandoned, like one’s identity, authority, control, expertise, relationships, or comfort. What legacy aspects of the company will linger for a while, creating confusion, contradictions, and additional tension? Do people even have the time and capacity to understand, let alone build the skills and new habits to implement the change? Change plans must address and overcome the pain.
Use the Marketing 4 PsSuccessful change follows the marketing practices of creating customers—determining who, if, and how people are willing to “buy” what your change offers. Because not all people know, want, or are motivated by the same thing, we can’t treat change as one-size-fits-all. Seek to understand the array of people who will be impacted and build a “customer” foundation to inform program strategies and tactics:
From there, develop change plans around the Marketing 4 Ps, shaping the PRODUCT you want them to “buy,” the PLACE where you want them to engage with it, the PRICE of their time and energy, and the PROMOTION in how you communicate and compel them to take action.
- Who are the segments and their respective needs or desired outcomes?
- What is the Moment That Matters in their journey?
- What is the belief/behavior shift you want to impact in that moment?
- What is the deep and hidden why behind what they believe or do now that is getting in the way of achieving their need or outcome?
From there, develop change plans around the Marketing 4 Ps, shaping the PRODUCT you want them to “buy,” the PLACE where you want them to engage with it, the PRICE of their time and energy, and the PROMOTION in how you communicate and compel them to take action.
Train the “Changers”There are few, if any, practical experts in human behavioral change within most life science organizations, and for change leaders it can be a once-in-a-career role, rather than an expertise built up and leveraged over time. Companies typically rely on outside business consultants to be change architects, but after the initiative is launched, the consultants go back home and the hard work of embedding change returns to the novice team. Life science companies need marketing organizations that can design and implement humanistic change plans, marketing leaders who can help teams and stakeholders navigate change, and marketers who can be resilient and thrive in change.
Breaking through resistance to change means breaking through our own instinctual ways of how we handled change before. The path forward isn’t about managing change—it’s about embracing it as our natural state. When we align our transformation approaches with this reality, we create lasting impact that transcends traditional change initiatives.
Example of a Lime Treatment Pathway to Help Break
Through Resistance to Change
1
Partner with Senior Leader and Change Team to diagnose current state of initiative, clarify goals and specifics, and implement a targeted intervention plan across systems and stakeholders
2
Increase marketer self-awareness on own mindset and skills, create engagement around their own development, and diagnose skill gaps to prioritize future training efforts
3
Define what good looks like and establish shared, consistent expectations around marketer performance, development, and career pathing in a transformed organization
Do you have the proven ingredients to create lasting change?
Download the Top 5 Things Marketers Capability Leaders Get Wrong to consider what might be holding you back from creating lasting change.
If you’d like to brainstorm or learn how we’ve helped other marketing organizations transform for good, reach out to schedule a free Let’s Grow! session.
1 Louth, J. D. (1966, September 1). The changing face of marketing. McKinsey & Company Quarterly. Retrieved February 1, 2020, from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-changing-face-of-marketing
