I have found Gleicher's formula for change very useful, but it is admittedly difficult to appreciate as a theoretical model alone.
Applying it to a practical example really helps, and that is what I will do in the following.
Assume for a moment that you are the manager of an in-house team of 20 lawyers (could be 2 or 200, the principles are the same).
The lawyers mostly support commercial transactions, but do some compliance work as well. You have inherited the team from a manager who left on short notice and the morale of the team is not great, but stable. Now, your legal function management and business clients have asked for information about the volume of deals the team support, deal velocity data and the team's value-add to the business. But there is practically no information to be found. Each team member supports deals upon request, typically as sales reps approach them deal by deal. Each lawyer stores the contracts on their own PC and uses MS Outlook to send and receive documents. Effectively, there is no workflow tool and no central repository. Your predecessor set up a Sharepoint and asked each lawyer to upload their main redline versions plus executed contracts so that at least Finance could have access to the executed documents as a basis for revenue recognition, but adoption was poor and the lawyers explained how they are too busy to deal with the administrative burden of uploading documents to a Sharepoint when the PC hard drives are managed by central backup anyway. Does the example sound familiar? A variation of this example case is the sad reality of deal support in too many companies, and even if you are not caught in this particular predicament, you are likely aware of some company and in-house departments operating similarly to the example.Fortunately, your employer has a creative resource that is willing to help (could be a Chief-of-Staff, Operations Lead, or a visionary GC or senior manager). When you explain the situation, your creative resource suggests implementing an IT solution that covers contracting workflow (aka knowing who supports which deals) and contracts repository (aka finding those executed documents without ever having to go through the embarrassing ritual of asking the other party for a copy ever again).
2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formula_for_change
You have found a commercial IT solution that provides both workflow management and repository, and you have secured budget for the project—let's call it project “Deal Performance”. But when you announce this to the team they show a surprising lack of enthusiasm for project Deal Performance. In fact, you get the feeling that they don't see any need at all for changing the way they work in supporting deals. Your creative resource suggests you do a Gleicher test on likelihood of successful change before you start implementation of Deal Performance as the company's new workflow and repository solution.
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