Change management or effecting behavioral change is often seen only as a process of changing from the current behavior to a desired behavior. Effecting the desired change usually involves a number of certain steps including understanding why people behave in that manner and communicating the benefits of the desired behavior with shared vision and leadership playing a critical role. With such a clear objective it is natural to celebrate once the desired behavior is seen to have been adopted. What is often overlooked is the fact that the adoption of the desired behavior is the start of another process to ensure that the change is sustained.
What brought this trend of thought into my mind? It is the driving etiquet (or more precisely, the lack of) on the Johannesburg city streets!!!
About two to three years ago, almost everyone in Johannesburg was complaining about the dangerous driving of taxi drivers and how they put other road users at risk. At the time, such criticism was justified. However, while the taxi drivers are still the worst transgressers of driving by-laws, they have been joined by ordinary road-users: men, women, young and old in increasing the risk of harm in driving on Johannesburg streets. The result is unnecessarily congested streets during peak hour traffic and a plethora of avoidable accidents on a daily basis. The question is what happened to get us where we are?
The answer to that is speculative and possible a combination of a number of issues. The failure of law enforcement agencies in controlling bad driving through the enforcement of existing by-laws possibly created an impression that motorists were on their own when using the roads and thus starting the dangerous attitute of everyone for themselves with total disregard for other road users. Clearly, this has to stop somewhere to give sanity the opportunity to prevail as the current situation is totally out of hand and insane. The challenge will be to reverse this unsafe driving behavior and replace it with safe and considerate driving etiquette. Would behavioral communication initiatives attain this change? I have no doubt that they would but they would need to be reinforced with some law enforcement initiatives to convince all of us that we need to operate within the parameters of existing laws. A free for all, every one for himself attitute has proven to be a disaster.
Changing behavior from bad to good is difficult. However, failure to take preventative steps to stop the deterioration of good behavior makes reversing the process that much more difficult. That is why continuous re-inforcement of positive behavior is critical in ensuring that adoption of good practices is sustained.
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