Neurological levels of change

TO BE or not to be - that is the question before many Indian organisations as they prepare for the next century. The future however belongs to organisations that can change and that too drastically. And the new survival formula for any organisation, especially in India, is go global or go away!

To prepare themselves for this grand global fight, organisations took the initiatives of implementing new work practices such as ISO 9000, QS 9000, TQM and the like. However, if you talk about these initiatives after 10 years of liberalisation, you are anachronistic! Now the buzzword is the Deming Award and Six Sigma.

In order to successfully implement the globalisation process in organisations, you have to bring about a paradigm shift in the behavioural process and not merely in the behaviours. The behavioural process includes the mental process of the people who make the organisation. If the old behaviour at the work place does not change, there can be no change in the quality configuration of the product made in the organisation. And change in the work practice cannot take place without a change in the mindset and attitude of people who should be implementing the same. But there is a problem: how to change the mindset? Fifty years of a protected economy has resulted in a mindset of comfort and complacency triggering a particular pattern of behaviour. Hence the critical issue: how to train the mind to accept the changed work practice voluntarily?

New strategy

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) offers a strategy - that of focusing on the neurological levels of change and not merely the behavioural change. Neurological levels of change talk about five layers of change discussed below:

Behavioural layer: This is the basic change of behaviours manifested through indicators such as punctuality, attendance, discipline, adherence to work instructions and standard operating procedures. Many organisations have implemented this change by processes such as ISO 9000 and TQM implementation. In fact, even before the liberalisation process started, many organisations were focusing on this. The tools they used at this level were the reward and punishment method, rewarding conformance and punishing non-conformance to desired behaviours and work methods. However, this change is merely external and the moment the reward and punishment is lifted, there will be a tendency to slip back into the old behavioural pattern.

Capability layer: This level of change goes into the issue of the capability of individuals to appreciate and accept the need for change given the proper input. We should understand the basic fact that human beings are instinctively security oriented and averse to risk of any form. The human mind can learn from any experience - good or bad. One of the NLP presuppositions is: experience has a structure. In many organisations not enough effort is being taken to understand the nature of human motivation.

There are several reasons why an individual will accept change. It is not merely through using the basic human instincts of pain and punishment that we can bring about a change in the mindset of people. The maturity level of the supervisory and managerial levels to understand the context of change and their own capability to communicate the same convincingly down the organisation is important. With the level of investment that has taken place in human resources development, it is no wonder that many organisations are finding it difficult to implement the changes without meeting with major resistance. However, once this layer of change is accomplished, half the battle is won since the people in the organisation would have understood the context of the change process.

Lack of `killer instinct'

Belief layer: This is an important layer of change. In the context of globalisation, organisations have to believe that they can become global. If this basic conviction is not there in the people of the organisation, it will lead to a limiting belief that Indian organisations will be `killed' by the entry of MNCs. This limiting belief will only lead to two things: lack of initiative on the part of the management and a desperate mood in the lower levels and self-destroying tendency through resistance, negative criticism and lack of cooperation. If one can learn anything from the Japanese and Korean examples, it is the capability of a nation to set and achieve super ordinary goals. This applies to an organisation also and there has to be a shared belief among the various organisational layers that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with Indian organisations except the lack of a 'killer instinct' which helped put the Japanese organisations on the world map.

Values layer: Then we come to a sensitive issue: the value system that is the heartbeat of the change management process. It is not the product quality approach implemented through the quality department and quality inspectors, but the value system of Total Quality Management (TQM) through a mindset of `do it right' which can produce a world-class product and services. We should remember that the Taj Mahal, Kutb Minar and the ancient temples were constructed to world-class standards hundreds of years before the TQM and ISO 9000 concepts were born! What happened to that Indian mindset which was so obsessed with quality above all other parameters? We always thought about great monuments, grand palaces, and large structures.

The Indian mind, in its original form, never compromised on quality. Nor did we compromise on the value system of hard work and creativity. Our capacity to build huge temples and monuments even before the mechanical and hydraulic gadgets came is testimony to this aspect. There were no CAD facilities and computers to design our temples in those days! In order to build world-class quality into our products, we need not go to the West; let all our employees take a pilgrimage to these ancient Indian monuments and we will get back to our old value system.

Spirituality and identity: The last and final layer of change is the spirituality and identity level. There was a time when man `loved people and used things' which was the age of spirituality. But now man `loves things and uses people to love things'. This transition started the de-humanisation process in the society. In order to create excellence in goods, we should believe in our identity with the God who gave us only his form. That means that we should believe that only human beings can create excellence to serve people and we should identify ourselves with this spiritual aspect of our actions. This mindset can be deployed in organisations only through a series of interventions so that the people working in the organisations believe in mottos such as `Work is worship', and `Service to humanity is service to God'. Only this supreme mindset will make them implement projects such as `Customer delight programme' that we talk about these days. Perhaps this is the significance behind the Ayudha Pooja celebrations!

If this `soft' aspect of the change management strategy is not understood, we will only be attempting to bring about exterior changes that will be shortlived. Yes, this strategy will take a long time and will call for enormous effort and dedication. But we should remember that Rome was not built in a single day nor was Japan born overnight!

N. C. Sridharan The author can be contacted at: timeline@md3.vsnl.net.in

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