Wheel of change

Abstract

Project management is not just about having the competencies to manage processes. It is also about having the competencies to manage the people being part of a project. Focusing on people and human behavior in project management, whether it is a team or an organization, is seen as important as planning the process to succeed with a project. ^[1]

According to Marshall Goldsmith, coach, and member of the 50 Thinkers Hall of Fame, an essential part of managing people to get them to deliver the best, is by providing them with feedback - with so-called “feedforward”, focusing on changing the future behavior instead of focusing on the past. ^[2]

To help with this, Marshall Goldsmith has created a tool designed to help change future behavior, referred to as “The wheel of Change”. It is a two-dimensional wheel consisting of pre-dominant axes: “change or keep” and “positive or negative”. The other dimension divides the wheel into even four additional quadrants: creating, eliminating, accepting, preserving. These quadrants help identify and plan future behavior changes to reach the desired state.

This article gives a brief insight into human behavior, as this plays an essential part in managing teams, just as processes. Further, the article will provide an overview of the general characteristics of the Wheel of Change and how managers can use it in project, program, and portfolio management. Finally, the article will include a reflection on the use of The Wheel of Change as a tool for managing people and behavior in projects by focusing on the actual usage compared to other tools.

Human Behavior

To outline why The Wheel of Change is used to manage people in projects, it is first essential to specify the impact of ‘behavior’. Behavior or human behavior is defined as a person’s actions and reactions in response to external or internal stimuli. In other words, one can say, that human behavior is being developed through experiences and that it is the unobservable and ingrained ways of responding to different actions and other behaviors, in a complex way that has been slowly defined throughout decades. Robert M. Sapolsky, professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University, California, describes the arising of human behavior in his book Behave as followed:

“A behavior has occurred – one that is reprehensible, or wonderful, or floating ambiguously in between. What occurred in the prior second that triggered the behavior? This is the province of the nervous system. What occurred in the prior seconds to minutes that triggered the nervous system to produce that behavior? This is the world of sensory stimuli, much of it sensed unconsciously. What occurred in the prior hours to days to change the sensitivity of the nervous system to such stimuli? Acute actions of hormones. And so on, all the way back to the evolutionary pressures played out over the prior millions of years that started the ball rolling”. ^[3]

By this, it is made clear that the explanation of human behavior is complex and the reason for the way humans behave is not relying on one simple thing. It should be understood as behavior is an outcome of culture, which marks the ingraining aspect of how ways of acting arise, e.g., how we communicate, how we schedule our day, simply how we eat, and how we react to things.

Furthermore, behavior often apprehends other ‘selves’, why the way of responding to external stimuli turns into interactions between individuals, e.g., when communicating. The phenomenon is defined as social behavior and has for a long decade been highly perceived as beneficial for the greater. ^[4]

Hence behavior is highly ingrained ways of doing things, and habits we perform without really thinking and reflecting, these will unfortunately not always be desirable and for the best – both for individuals and in social contexts. ^[5] According to Goldsmith, such behaviors can be difficult to change, why it is crucial to managing how to change these, by reflecting on the different perspectives of one’s individual and social behavior. The following part specifies the two dimensions and the quadrants of which the Wheel of Change is composed.

The Wheel of Change

Marshall Goldsmith is an American executive educator. For four decades he has been coaching people in understanding how environmental triggers can lead to undesirable behavior, and how to perceive positive, long-lasting changes in behavior. A collection of such tools was published in 2015 in his book Triggers; Creating Behavior That Lasts – Becoming the Person You Want to Be, whereas one of the tools for changing behavior is the Wheel of Change. Goldsmith’s Wheel of Change is more specific a tool for planning how one’s behavior should be changed in the future, with the overall goal to become a better and more beneficial version of either yourself or a group of people. The Wheel of change was originally designed for individuals, but as cross-functional teams are becoming more and more used, the Wheel of Change has as well become a highly important tool to address behavioral changes on a collaborative level.

When using the planning tool to address the changes needed, one should understand the two coherent levels; the two dimensions, with the pre-dominant axes: “Change or Keep” and “Positive or Negative”. Further, the other dimension consists of four options also referred to as quadrants, each describing what to do with a specific behavior; what you are going to create, what you are going to keep, what you should just accept, and what you should focus on to eliminate. ^[6]

The following section is describing the separate levels and dimensions of the Wheel of Change.

The pre-dominant axis:

The Negative-to-Positive axis defines the elements that can either be beneficial or hold us back. It can be seen as desirable and undesirable elements of behavior, that must be considered when planning how to behave in the future. The Change-to-Keep options clarify the elements of our behavior that we determine to either change or keep in the future. This axis is more ‘active’ and strives for action, compared to the Negative-to-Positive axis. These two axes of the Wheel of Change give four options, that is composing the before mentioned quadrants. The quadrants make it possible to either change or keep the positive elements and to change or keep the negative elements. How exactly this should be done, to achieve the desired status-quo can be handled/reflected on by coding the different behaviors in the four following options of actions:

Creating

Definition

Eliminating

Definition

Accepting

Definition

Preserving

Definition

Applying the Wheel of Change in management

How it can be applied
Different use

Reflections

Reflections of possible limitations
Using the tool when managing people in projects

Conclusion

Conclusion

Annotated bibliography

Goldsmith, M., & Reiter, M. (2015). Triggers: Creating behavior that lasts-- becoming the person you want to be.

This book is about what Triggers the human being, how it affects human behaviors, and which tools can help change our behavior to become a better version of ourselves.