Context is Everything

At 7:51 am on January 12, 2007, a man wearing a baseball cap, T-shirt and faded jeans entered L’Enfant Plaza in Washington D.C. amid the morning rush of commuters and quietly removed his violin from its case. The violin was the rare Gibson ex-Huberman handcrafted in 1713 by Antonio Stradivari during the Italian master’s “golden period,” when his technique had been refined to its highest levels. After tossing some seed money into the case to encourage those passing by, the man lifted the violin to his chin and began to play the beautiful “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita Number 2 in D Minor, considered one of the most difficult pieces to master.

On this particular morning, however, the violinist was not your ordinary street musician. It was Joshua Bell, thought by many to be one of the finest violinists in the world.

Of the nearly 1100 commuters that passed Bell that morning only seven stopped to listen and only twenty-seven gave money. Just three days earlier, Bell had played to a sold-out crowd at Boston’s Symphony Hall where mediocre seats cost $100. Bell usually earns around $1000 per minute, but his earnings that morning amounted to a little over $32.

“It was a strange feeling,” Bell said, “that people were actually, ah . . . ignoring me.”

Context is everything.

Bell’s performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities as well as an assessment of public taste. They wanted to answer the question, “In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”

This is the same question we face every time we implement change. And the answer is a resounding “No!” If change is not framed in the right context then the organization will never see the beauty of the solution.

Researchers Achilles Armenakis, Jeremy Bernerth, Jennifer Pitts and Jack Walker identified five important precursors that determine the degree to which change recipients accept the context required for successful organization change. Assessment of these factors can help to gauge the degree of buy-in and determine the specific gaps in contextual understanding that may impact the success of your initiatives. In addition, these factors can serve as basis for planning and executing actions to enhance the understanding of change recipients.

As you manage your change efforts ask whether your stakeholders believe the following factors to be true:

  • Discrepancy. The belief that a change is needed. The belief there is a significant gap between the current state of the organization and what it should be.
  • Appropriateness. The belief that a specific change designed to address a discrepancy is the correct one for the situation.
  • Efficacy. The belief that the change recipient and the organization can successfully implement a change.
  • Leader Support. The belief that the formal leaders (vertical change agents) and opinion leaders (horizontal change agents) in an organization are committed to the success of the change and that it will not be another passing fad.
  • Valence. The belief that the change is beneficial to the change recipient.

Add to FacebookAdd to DiggAdd to Del.icio.usAdd to StumbleuponAdd to RedditAdd to BlinklistAdd to TwitterAdd to TechnoratiAdd to Yahoo BuzzAdd to Newsvine


2 thoughts on “Context is Everything

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s