Category: Change

How to Best Engage and Transform People

Seth Godin, in his piece about how to transform higher education, writes a quote that is deeply at the core of change management in general: “If you want people to become passionate, engaged in a field, transformed by an experience?—?you don’t test them, you don’t lecture them and you don’t force them. Instead, you create an environment where willing, caring individuals can find an experience that changes them“.

This is a fundamental recipe of change management: get people to find their own way within a general direction. It is clearly the only way to get people to get passionate. This means that they will go through a learning experience, and thus commit mistakes and explore dead-ends. This will be more messy and might take slightly more time. We need to be patient and benevolent during the process. Still that is absolutely the best solution for a sustainable and true change.

Never underestimate the power of passion and willingness. It just needs the space to grow and the time to flourish. Let that space and that time be.

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How We Need to Define Urgently Personal Behavior Rules Around Smartphones

The provoking title of this Atlantic piece ‘Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?‘ is worth pondering. And the article worth reading too. The theme of the article is “more comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.”

Modern group social discussion?

The author is a mental health researcher that has noticed an abrupt change in teenager generational behavior around 2012 – the year 50% of the developed country population got a smartphone i.e. where smartphone penetration began to change our habits. “The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household.”

Teenagers socialize physically less and the rate of depression and suicide is going up dramatically. Research shows that more time on the screen and on social networks lead to higher rates of depression and lower happiness.

Like all new tools in our lives, we need to define social rules to live with it. The smartphone and the associated social networks are still too new to have developed and ingrained these behavioral rules. It might become a matter of urgency, still I am optimistic that a reaction will prevail.

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How Startups Are a Toolbox for Dealing with Uncertainty and Complexity

Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame defines a startup as “a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty“. I find this definition extremely powerful. In reality startups are an organizational model to deal with uncertainty and complexity. And it can be actually seen as a tool in that context.

Eric Ries goes further: “According to this broad definition, anyone—no matter their official job title—can be cast unexpectedly into the waters of entrepreneurship if the context of their work becomes highly uncertain. I argued that entrepreneurs are everywhere—in small businesses, mammoth corporations, health care systems, and schools, even inside government agencies. They are anywhere that people are doing the honorable and often unheralded labor of testing a novel idea, creating a better way to work, or serving new customers by extending a product or service into new markets”.

This is why in his new book ‘The Startup Way‘ he explores the way the startup toolbox can be imported into larger and more institutionalized organizations. I tend to find that he sometimes stretches the concept a bit too much – don’t expect suddenly mammoth corporations to become an agile startup (that would end up like a mammoth in a porcelaine store I presume), still the idea is interesting and fruitful, if properly executed in the right remits.

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How Telling People What To Do is Easy, but Building Real Change and Agreement is Hard

Today I am in for a rant: I am amazed at how people still believe that change is so easy it is enough to tell people what to do. To force them doing something different. In reality, deep and sustainable change has to be built over time over a wide agreement of the participating group.

Not quite the right manner to implement change management

I am still called up to effectuate deep changes in organizations under the belief that the orders from the top combined with the industry best practice experience from a consultant will create a sustainable change of habits and ways of working. Worst is that many consulting firms do nothing to dissipate this illusion; they are too happy to work undisturbed to develop tools and processes that at the end will never get deployed for lack of knowledge and understanding.

This is too naive to be true, but believe me it still happens! (although not always exposed as directly). And we have some great examples at the moment in the world that this approach does no work: an American President that tells people what to do, and noting gets ever really done after the announcement.

Creating sustainable change requires a more subtle, engaging and inclusive approach that involves the people that will later implement those changes in their daily activities. This is why successful transformation programs are often longer and more resource-intensive at the start, because they need to involve more people. This investment redeems itself many times after during actual implementation.

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How to Deal with Mood Issues When Facing Disruption during Change Efforts

To complement our post on ‘How to Deal with Inevitable Disruption in a Transformation Process‘, let’s talk a bit further about our mood. In another post ‘How to Get Back on Track with Motivation & Habits‘ Leo Babauta extends his reflections on the issue of one’s mood when facing an unexpected disruption in the midst of a change effort.

In addition to the derailment of our current efforts we are too often impacted in terms of mood and that is very often a killer for the change effort.

His main point is thus that “getting off track and getting back on track is all about mood.” He further proposes the following steps to regain confidence:

  • Admit there’s a problem, and ask a key question to remind us about the objective of the chain.
  • Take one small, easy step. Don’t think about the entire project of getting back on track. That’s too much, and can be overwhelming, which means we’ll never start. 
  • Focus on getting any kind of victories.
  • Build long-term strength with small steps. If you build little victories, take small steps, and nurture your mood as in the previous steps … you’ll start to have a more solid habit or motivation for your project. 

When faced with disruption in a change project, take care of your mood. Go exercise, change your mind. Look at the big picture, and take it a small chunk at a time. Go slow, and go steady.

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How to Deal with Inevitable Disruption in a Transformation Process

When we decide to change ourselves or when we are in charge of a transformation project, things will never go as per the plan. Events will inevitably happen that disrupt our well-thought expected sequence of activities.

Leo Babauta in his post ‘starting, over and over again‘ deals with this issue in the context of trying to gain new habits, but of course the concept can be used in a wider range of situations.

His recommendations are to avoid feeling bad about the disruption but rather to implement the following process:

  • When you get disrupted, notice any tendency to be harsh with yourself about it, or resentful towards life or other people about the disruption.
  • Shake off that feeling and instead, tell yourself that life is an uncontrollable river and you just have to flow with it.
  • Shrugging off any past mistakes, focus on starting again. Just like before, focus on taking the tiniest step.
  • If there’s any learning to take from the previous attempt, adjust your method to account for whatever obstacles you faced.

Above all, his recommendation is not to be too harsh on oneself. Disruption just happens. It is not the fault of anyone. So let’s move on and continue our transformation, becoming wiser in the process.

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How Power Creates Responsibility (and Weakness Promotes Irresponsibility)

One of the issues we are facing as democracies is the rise of irresponsible requests from small groups. In fact, weak groups have nothing to lose: and they tend to become quite irresponsible. The weaker, the more desperate and the more irresponsible. A good illustration is the condition of trade unions in France, or the desperate gestures of people threatening to make their plant explode to avoid its closure.

On the other hand, power almost always brings responsibility, although it might take a while for the people to perform this transition (as such it is typical that a political party coming into power after too many years in the opposition will take one to two years to become quite responsible).

This observation bears also a way to deal with irresponsibility: give more power in certain areas to bring responsibility on the table. It can be an excellent negotiation strategy when facing a really irresponsible party.

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How to Deal With Chaos

The question is widespread: how to deal with chaos, or to use a trendy word, with a VUCA world (Volatile,  Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous)?

I like one answer provided by Leo Babauta in a blog post on how to deal with chaos: “When chaos and messiness come our way, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not inherently stressful and anxiety-inducing. It’s just that our minds don’t usually like these things. We want order and simplicity.

So the problem isn’t the external situation. It’s our internal ideals. We want order and simplicity, not to be interrupted, not to be overwhelmed. The ideal of orderliness is causing our frustration, stress, anxiety, not other people, not a chaotic situation.

The ideal of orderliness causes our difficulties. And we created the ideal. Therefore, we are causing our own difficulties.

The good news is that, if we created the ideal, we have the power to change it.”

The interesting part is to identify how our embedded ideal of orderliness and stability influences the way we look at the world. That is definitely something we need to overcome to thrive in the Collaborative Age, and that needs to be part of the education of every young generation: change is the new normal.

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How Not to Forget to Turn Knowledge Into Habit

In this excellent post ‘Don’t forget the second step‘ Seth Godin makes the point that it is essential not to forget the second step after having performed the first step, which is learning how to do something new.

“Step two is turning it into a habit. Committing to the practice. Showing up and doing it again and again until you’re good at it, and until it’s part of who you are and what you do.Most education, most hardware stores, most technology purchases, most doctor visits, most textbooks are about the first step. What a shame that we don’t invest just a little more to turn the work into a habit.”

I am also guilty from time to time to limit myself to the theoretical knowledge of a concept and not following up to put it in practice. It takes effort to put in practice, and practice until it becomes a habit. It is so much more worthwhile. The point is to remember why we wanted to learn in the first place. it was to resolve some problem we might have, and we need to face it after.

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How Risk Management Must Evolve into Resilience Management

In the past decades the concept and discipline of Risk Management has emerged and developed into a major management discipline. But now it has shown its limits.

Houston floodings 2017

One of the issues of the current approach to Risk Management is that it tends to address risk mitigations in a static manner, without considering the fact that quick response and evolutive systems can be a better response to unexpected situations. In addition, traditional risk management approaches address well the ‘known-unknowns’ but absolutely not the ‘unknowns-unknowns’ even in a generic manner.

Resilience Management should be the appropriate future extension of Risk Management. It includes an additional dimension of being able to bear unexpected events or events beyond the bounds of system design. It includes mitigation actions that could include evolution and revolution of the system in a dynamic manner.

As recent storms and unexpected natural or man-made disasters have shown, Resilience Management is a discipline to develop to enhance our capability to respond to the unexpected.

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How Different Power and Status Are

We are sometimes tempted to assimilate Power and Status. But these are quite different things. Valeria Maltoni in her post ‘Compound Effects in Influence‘ explains clearly the difference. And why we should try to aim at developing a bit of status as a way to be heard in the world – and not just power.

Status, but what about Power?

“Power and status are two major dimensions in social hierarchy. When we have no power, it is status that helps us be heard.

Because status is something we earn through respect and competence, only others can give it to us. Power gives us control over resources, and it’s something we may be able to take based on that. But only focusing on power means we’re missing the opportunity to develop status — and status helps us play the long game in relationships, and in life.

In relationships, when we have power but no status, we may use that power to retaliate by using that power to degrade others. This is the mechanism that locks bullies into a perpetual cycle of escalating consequences if not addressed.
When we’re under the influence of raging emotions, we’re not watching for our biases and assumptions creeping into our arguments and thinking. This prevents us from using reason to understand what is really going on. We may be too close to the dynamics and situation and seek comfort in all the wrong places.”

Of course there is still the dimension of influence in addition to Power and Status. But understanding clearly the difference between Power and Status is essential.

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How to Bounce Back from a Setback

We all have from time to time to recover from a setback, which may be more or less substantial and structural. That’s also part and parcel of experimenting. An excellent post in Lifehack ‘How I Bounced Back From a Fiasco‘ gives a useful list of activities to perform when one intends to bounce back from a setback or failure.

The headers are as follows:

  1. Give up the victim mindset
  2. Change the setting (environment)
  3. Know Yourself
  4. Body First
  5. Mull it Over and get it Out
  6. Set Goals

I find this list interesting in particular the first items and the emphasis on maintaining the body in shape throughout the process. And you?

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