Change Management: Always Start with the Familiar
Anyone who’s ever moved into a new place knows this instinctively. Whether it was when you moved into your freshman dorms for college, a new apartment or your first home, you made sure to bring something that was already familiar to you. Something you liked. Something that instantly made this new environment feel like home.
Why? Most likely it was your way of dealing with change, easing the transition from your comfort zone into what felt outside of your comfort zone. It’s not much more complicated than that.
You’d think that a behavior like this for most people – something so universal – would be more readily understood in the communications world, but it’s not. In fact, communicators almost reflexively work to ditch anything and everything that is familiar as they devise new change management strategies.
This is usually due to a desire to get on with necessary change as quickly and definitively as possible. Perhaps senior management is driving this sense of urgency. Sales are down. Membership is dwindling. Funding is drying up. Whatever the challenge, once leadership has determined that change is necessary, and it’s ready to embark on a plan for that change, the first impulse is to abandon anything familiar. The familiar is seen as the enemy to effective change, and this assumption can be a fatal mistake.
The mindset among leaders and communicators is that anything that’s too familiar is just a reminder of prior failed strategies and behaviors. Ditch it. Get rid of it all. Make a bold statement. Change is here.
This can exacerbate the organization’s problems. Now, not only do you have a dreadful situation that necessitated the change, but people are left with a bad taste because you failed at getting them to embrace your strategy. They didn’t buy in. They’re guarded and skeptical. You hit them with too much too fast, and you removed the things they did trust and like. You took away the familiar.
A Ketchup Case Study
In 2002, I was a member of the communications team that handled the sale of some of the major assets of the H.J. Heinz Company. The company sold two of its major subsidiaries, iconic brands in their own right, and certain other operations to Del Monte. Among those operations was the legendary Northside plant in Pittsburgh represented the company’s roots, a place where the founder once ran the company. Where so many generations of Pittsburgh families worked. Where iconic products like ketchup and Heinz pickles were initially made and served to generations of Americans.
The plan coming out of our transaction was to use a portion of the property for Del Monte, and to convert other portions of the property for private real estate development and repurposing.
This meant that Heinz would no longer have a manufacturing presence in its headquarters city. That those two very familiar plant smokestacks on the Northside featuring “Heinz 57” would no longer be owned by Heinz. That the city’s claim on the beloved Heinz name would be somewhat lessened. And that future generations of Pittsburghers would not be able to do what some of their parents, grandparents and great grandparents did, and that was to actually work in a Heinz factory.
These were the facts we could not change. So, addressing these concerns and sensitivities became as high a priority as clearly communicating the business implications of the deal.
We took stock of where in the city the Heinz name was so integrated. We started with the products themselves, and how their shelf presence in every grocery store was something that mattered. The company made sure, especially in Pittsburgh, that its in-store presence was as strong as ever.
Looking around the city, there were obvious locales where Pittsburghers expected to see the Heinz name. They needed reassurance that the company still called Pittsburgh home. That Pittsburgh was still integral to the company’s identity.
Headquarters wasn’t moving out of the city. Another place of note was at the stadium that was home to the Pittsburgh Steelers and the University of Pittsburgh football team. Heinz Field.
The company had just bought naming rights for the stadium when it opened in 2001. Just a year later, when this transaction happened, we had to assure the region that the company remained committed to keeping the name on the stadium as a symbolic way to reinforce that Pittsburgh was as important to Heinz as ever. We handled that through messaging and action, but also through a wide range of smaller community-centric sponsorships. If you lived in Pittsburgh, you were sure to be seeing the Heinz identity around town.
I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but local traffic reporters continued to refer to Northside traffic as “backed up to the Heinz plant,” even though the new owner was Del Monte.
All of this heightened the familiar and did nothing to diminish it in spite of the major corporate changes that were taking place.
Change Happens
Sadly, nothing is forever in the business world, especially among publicly traded companies where priorities can change from quarter to quarter.
After my work with Heinz, in 2013, Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital bought the company. Not long after that, in 2015 Heinz merged with Kraft, creating a new entity called Kraft Heinz Foods Company. Its CEO and other key members of the leadership team are no longer based in Pittsburgh. Heinz Field is now Acrisure Stadium.
None of this, however, diminishes the fact that for as long as you can control your brand and your organization, you can institute change effectively. But you really can’t do so without understanding just how important the familiar is to the people you’re trying to reach. Embrace the familiar. Conserve and preserve it. Promote it if it makes sense, but do not discard it out of hand.
When you want to institute an effective change management strategy, start with the familiar.