Currents, turbulence and disturbed air flows

We often expect things to be smooth and uninterrupted. I heard a driver shout ‘get out of my way’ to a fellow road user this morning.

It’s a complaint of our time, always expecting a clear path. But not every cruise can be on calm seas; not every flight is entirely smooth. Weather patterns clash and collide and we travel through so much airspace that we’re bound to encounter different situations.

This is most certainly the case in our diverse workplaces and communities. It happens in teams, in projects … even in meetings. We have a rich mix of styles, types, modes, preferences and behaviours. All colliding. And we need to be able to make progress with them, not against them.

What’s going on in your team or project may not be permanent. It may just be a passing current, passing weather, a ripple or ruffle from something else. Don’t be too quick to smooth it.

In becoming better facilitators of processes and people, we can learn how to go with currents. Just like a rip in the ocean or at a surf beach, fighting it is tiring, pointless, dangerous. Going with it usually takes you to another exit point, another way of exploring it, solving it and surviving it.

Start slow

This sign may not be out the front of your new workplace or on the door of that meeting you’re about to walk into, but take its message on.

When you’re working in a new area, starting a new project, trying some new processes or initiating new things, start slow. There’s plenty we don’t know and can’t yet see or understand. Start, yes. But no need to go all frenetic and chaotic.

You can still be committed, interested and intrigued ... and slow.

Many people are frustrated with change, that it’s:

🌕 too fast

🌕 not fast enough

🌕 too much

🌕 never ending

🌕 yawn, just the same as last year.

Take care. Moving fast may indeed break things. And people.

You don’t need to hide, restrict or withhold. It’s not that. It’s care, caution and safety. For you first ... and then others.

Boo! It’s why the worst leaders are brash, pushy, rude and dangerous. And completely unaware.

Yay! It’s why the best leaders ask questions, observe and enquire, are curious and engaging, building up awareness, scoping it out … and then moving. 

Respect the old please

'Push the new. Drive the change. Create urgency. Move on.'

These phrases are part of transformation at work - everyone’s on 'a journey' and many a leader wants us to ‘move on’. Those labelled 'laggards', are derailing change efforts, resisting the new.

But maybe it’s those who are 'pushing the new' who cause problems by resisting the old, not acknowledging the past. 'We’ve got to move on’ is so dismissive; I never use it in workshops or sessions.

During change, it's vital to spend some time acknowledging and respecting the way things were. For longer-term employees, dismissing the past, asking them to move on could feel like their efforts are dismissed, their purpose, previous roles, the work they did and their commitment ... dismissed.

Could we respect the old before moving on with the new, please?

In Stockholm last week - speaking at the software architect's conference - I visited the ‘old town’; part of the city that’s been preserved, recognised and curated so that in the present day we can understand, learn and respect it.

We learn where things come from, what it used to be like and it builds empathy and respect.

What happens when we 'move on' too swiftly? 

Are you tinkering or transforming?

The need for change in organisations and sectors all over the world created a whole field of expertise and a category of employee - The Change Manager, the Change Leader, the Change Consultant.  They live and breathe this stuff; they know what it’s about, how to do it and the impact a change initiative can have on people and the way organisations operate. They’re all about helping us get from here … to there. 

Yet some change leaders don’t just deal with change anymore, they deal with even bigger stuff … transformation.

Yes, change has grown bigger and become even more chang-ey; change that is more significant and more widespread and interconnected and ongoing is transformation. 

(Possible cliche alert regarding 'transformation' : please don’t use a picture of a caterpillar and a butterfly to show how you are transforming a project, system or people. Yikes. Cliche alert. Woop! Woop!)

Change : to make or become different. 

In one of my earlier careers as an awards judge for communication projects, the panel would review submissions where entrants would declare that their goals were to ‘change the community’s perception of….’ or ‘change the customer’s behaviour’ or ‘change the way that…’- yet few of these declarations of change seemed to also declare by what amount or percent or scale they would change, to make or become different. 

It seemed that a little bit of change was still change and for many in the field, that was enough. Tick. Done. Change has occurred. Next project!

Change often seems to have a defined and finite scope. 

But to transform is something else. It's often seen as something different. 

Transformation means ‘marked change’.

Is transformation a change you can see? Is it obvious, noticeable, significant, ongoing and interconnected? Could you perhaps keep track of it or mark it on something: “A year ago we were there, last month we were there and now ...we are here! Look! Transformation."

Do you remember the pencil marks on the kitchen wall? As you grew in height you could see that transformation had occurred, and a marked change had taken place. You might have done this for your own kids, or pets or plants or even your unread book collection. 

Transformation is change. But I fear that while we're all so involved and committed to a piece of change, it’s actually just … a tinkering. 

Tinker. Tinker. Tinker. 

A tinkerer was somewhat of a gypsy; they’d travel from place to place and make a living by fixing and mending metal pots and pans and tools. The noise was a ‘tinker’. 

You can hear it - when someone is working on an old car under the hood, or they are rattling around in the utensils drawer in the kitchen looking for a potato masher or a pot lid or the spoon that completes that set of salad servers. Rattle rattle clank clang and tinker. Yes that noise. 

Tinkering was about improving, to try to mend, to fix it up or improve. A little. 

Of all the effort that goes into change and transformation programs in workplaces, this is what I see: lots of effort. To improve. Hours and days, weeks and months of time and effort. So many meetings, information packs, version control of the information packs, flow charts and arrows, more meetings, working groups, town halls and whole-of-staff gatherings, more meetings and presentations and packs. 

But not enough of decisions, actions, experiments and results. As a recent Harvard Business Review suggested, many of our changes aren’t ambitious enough. 

Many changes or shifts are too delicate, bite size - just a morsel or a crumb. The end result : tinkering. Little changes. Petit. Picolo.  Over a l-o-n-g period of time.

We’re not really changing that much... are we?

We might be aiming to change a lot of processes or systems and structures, or hell yes, let’s change people, even just a few degrees would be great. And yet that is hard work. To get everyone - all of them - to shift. A little. All the teams, units and departments to all shift one or two degrees. That’s a big deal. 

Rather than tinkering on a little something with everyone, why not look at how you can truly transform a pocket, a division, a team, a squad or a unit. And dramatically. Markedly. 

Pockets of transformation

Internal hubs, accelerators and pockets of innovative joy are popping up everywhere in cities, communities and businesses. Some companies are setting them up off-site in a cool warehouse-style environment, others are cordoning off a meeting room and labelling it ‘The Innovation Lab’ or ‘hub’ or ‘foundry’ or ‘garage’ or other mechanical-workshoppy-sounding noun where things are being furiously made. 

Whatever you call your transformation pocket - and your business doesn’t need to be large to do this - be sure that you actually transform something... rather than tinkering with everything. Start there. 

Do you major in minor or minor in major?

Jim Rohn’s advice to avoid ‘majoring in minor things’ perhaps suggests we could avoid the large, unweildy and lengthy change we're trying to make to somethin' little. That can turn out to be a big mess. 

There is a more helpful (diagonal) opposite. It’s smarter, more lean and more agile to start with ‘minoring in major things’. That is, carry out little experiments on some of the bigger things. 

Then you can move step by step towards the big deal of majoring on those major transformative things. 

(And the other distraction, that's minoring in minor things - ooh, it’s all a bit scary so we don’t do very much of anything at all. It's an area of big fear. We distract and procrastinate and confabulate and obfuscate.)

Too often the default change initiative is majoring in the minor. I think you need to keep a look out, and then get outta there. 

It could look like this: 

 

Where agility happens 

So go ahead and 'have a crack' at radically changing something. This is where transformation is born. This is where success and learned failure live. It's way more experimental, experiential and insightful. 

With some experiments launched, you can see how they go. Then you can experiment faster, and get results faster and these will be results that are noticeable and reportable, applicable ... formidable. You'll be playing a leaner game (a-la The Lean Start-up) with yes, perhaps a low-fidelity version of that something, but with insights and data that pour back to you way sooner than a long drawn-out change effort involving a cast of many and a calendar of many months... or years. 

This approach schools us so the next one we launch - if it turns out that it’s actually worth launching another one or "rolling" anything out to anyone - will be more efficient, more valuable and simply work better.

Leave those little barely-there ‘just noticeable differences’ for the marketing world and their product packaging on supermarket shelves. They don't belong in change and transformation. 

Don’t fall into the safety of a too subtle, too gentle or too soft change - it keeps you busy but... it will do that for years. Yawn!

Too many people, projects, teams, units, industries and organisations are tinkering. 

You can keep tapping away on a little bit of metal somewhere - tinker tinker - gently and fearfully at the edges of what could be great, hoping to make a few indents ... or you can melt the thing down, change it markedly (transform it) and see what new there is to work with.

It’s minoring in major things, in transforming some. This will help get you ready for bigger transformations up ahead. This is marked change and this is the type of transformation the world requires us to make today. 

Where's your project on the path of change

Many change and transformation projects are spoken about as a 'path', 'journey', 'ladder' or 'roadmap'.

In short, we're here and we want to get to .... there.

Sometimes change and transformation can feel alot less safe than a simple path or road. It feels more like a gigantic cliff! And Jack Canfield's quote about 'making your parachute on the way down' or the entrepreneurial advice to 'grow wings as you're plummeting towards earth' (aka 'grow a pair!) ... who even wants to jump into a change when you're not sure how safe the whole path will be, let alone the landing!

Whether it's a structural change, a process or system change or a shift in culture towards new ways of working, it's in that metaphorical language we speak (paths, journeys, ladders and roadmaps) that we hear the cues and clues about where we are and where we want to get to.

We also hear about some of the roadblocks, barriers and obstacles (hey, more metaphors*) that are both hindering and helping progress through a transformation.

*Hint: Listen out for these metaphors; you can build lovely rapport and help people shift when you hear these metaphorical barriers and then talk about them, rather than telling people to 'move on'.

Change and transformation doesn't just involve the stuff or things that are changing; it involves the people, the humans doing the changing.

How about a ladder?

A path, journey or roadmap up say, a ladder of change can be tricky, treacherous... and for some impatient leaders, suitably time wasting. Knowing where you're at can help with leading that change.

 

At the bottom of the ladder are organizations and teams in chaos; they’re losing ground and on the decline. They are resistant to change, fearful and frightened of change and don’t know where to begin. They’re moving in reverse. They think they're standing still but it's worse than that. These are the businesses that go ‘belly up’, that become insolvent and are wound up. Too soon and they’re gone.

There are plenty of businesses close to chaos but they’re attempting change and transformation. They’re a little stuck. When teams and organizations resist change – which often happens in the early stages of a change or transformation - there is a sense of being in neutral; poor levels of productivity and a feeling of not getting anywhere. Going in circles, simple changes aren't being adopted and it’s all too easy to continue the old ways of working. Why change?

Progressing up the ladder (or along a path of change) are organizations and teams that are intent on change and transformation but they’re… distracted. They’re too busy looking at competitors and not responding, or they’re focused on internal changes that deliver little impact (or are unnecessary in the first place), or their attention is taken off the positive process of change by other significant troubles. This includes industrial, legal, financial or media crisis stuff. They're in the media everyday. They’re busy all right, but productivity and transformation suffers because they’re focusing on distracting stuff.

If you think of an organization as aiming to make forward progress through change and transformation, each of these stages of the change path or ladder see the business slipping, with wheels spinning, engine revving loudly, just not getting anywhere!

As a remote Australian outback fan, I'm often w-a-y out there, holidaying in our 4WD, taking paths less travelled, seeing the ochre-red sands of central Australia or the remote bush tracks where few tourists go. Spinning wheels? Not good. Get traction and get outta there!

And in change, that's where we get to a tipping point…get outta there.

Up over this point in change and transformation is where productivity changes, focus is shifted and positive friction is achieved, traction is gained.

At the shift stage, organizations and teams are making changes and transformation. The decision is made, they're onto it. They’re bringing new processes and ways of working to the business … but it’s still a hard slog. Change is not the norm; the dynamic of progressive change isn’t leveraged and change takes significant effort to get traction and to stick.

Once the team gets to perform, productivity goes up, change initiatives begin to ‘stick’ in a positive way and the path to being transforming culture is smoother. Positive change initiatives build on previous changes made and the culture is a higher performing one. There is acceptance of change as the norm; ‘This is what we do. We change. We keep changing because that’s how we do things around here.’

Ultimately, organizations and teams that reach transform, do so because they are agile and adaptive; they make change stick, and then reinvent, experiment and review to make change an ongoing part of how they work. 

From some of my blog posts, enews and social media shares, I often hear back from people in industries and sectors that say they are too low down on this path towards change. That they want to get moving; they want to change quicker; they need to or they'll be disrupted, replaced and decimated as a business... and possibly an industry.

Everything about your organisation speaks

In an earlier career in communications, I remember learning (and then lecturing) that 'everything about an organisation speaks'. It speaks to you about the culture; everything from how you're greeted, to what you see, to how people are sitting in pods and rows, to how a meeting room is 'all table' and no space.

How your organisation responds to change says so much about its culture. And if you want to change culture, you need to change how you see, lead and communicate about change.

The way you lead change says everything about your culture. Change brings renewal; if you want to change culture, change how you lead change.

This is why I think the reference to change as a death, a dying or a grief process is done. References to endings and beginnings are done. Change is ongoing. It needs to be part of "how we do things around here."

Rather than allowing change to be a burden, a challenge or a drudge, change can be the catalyst to shifting culture. The move is on from spinning wheels and being stuck in old ways, to a shift, up up up to higher levels of traction and performance.

To change culture, change how you lead - see and speak - of change.