The first step toward change is awareness.
—Nathaniel Branden

Change actuation begins with awareness. In Forceful Selling, I described five stages of change awareness:

1. Unrecognized. Either the person or organization has not recognized the need for a change, or is unaware of the proposed change.

2. Recognized, but not prioritized. Even once the need for a change has been recognized and a specific change has been proposed, it must still compete with the other needs and proposed changes that have been recognized by the person or organization.

3. Prioritized. If the proposed change has more driving forces and fewer resisting forces than other proposed changes, then it will be prioritized. Here, we define “prioritized” as having been assigned sufficient priority that the change plan is authorized and funded.

4. In process. The change plan has been actuated, but is not yet completed.

5. Satisfied. The change has been completed and the forces that drove the change have been satisfied.
 

You likely have limited influence on the priority of a specific change. If decision making in the organization is “efficient,” then high-power changes will be prioritized over low-power changes.

So, spend your energy aligning with high-power changes rather than trying to convince stakeholders that a low-power change is really a high-power change. Do this by performing a thorough and accurate force field analysis and identifying the largest forces. Then, align with the changes those forces are driving.

Once you are aligned with the most powerful forces and changes, help your customer drive awareness of them by assembling a change team comprising key stakeholders.

After all the key stakeholders recognize the need for change, work with your change team to develop a change plan that can be driven through the organization’s prioritization process. To ensure successful prioritization, make people “familiar” with the change plan by executing a broad awareness campaign that includes demonstrations and/or visualizations of the final outcome.

Align with high-power forces and changes. Help the customer drive initial awareness among key stakeholders. After a change plan is formulated, drive broad awareness of the final desired outcome.