CHAPTER 20 CHANGE

“And then one day you find

Ten years have got behind you

No one told you when to run

You missed the starting gun”.

Pink Floyd¹

Change is happening all the time. Change, in its broadest sense, means to cause something to be different (for example, in form, content, future course).² This broad definition includes change that requires conscious thought as well as changes that occur by chance.

“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”

Albert Einstein³

From our perspective, awareness enables change. Once you are aware of where you are (warts and all), change is possible. When you’re trying to pretend you’re in a different place, you get stuck. This entire book is about change at some level. Through the preceding chapters we have encouraged you to be the shift you are keen to see by raising your awareness. In Part 2 of the book, the focus is on raising your awareness of the purpose you are striving to achieve and from that, the principles that will guide you to that end. Part 3 is designed to raise awareness of your thinking, your emotions and your behaviours. Through this enhanced awareness, you can consider whether they are serving you well – and what would serve you better. Part 4 explores the context that we are in and change at a macro and micro level – from complexity to neuroscience. Much has been written already.

Change is constant and inevitable – it always has been. Did you know that most of the cells in your body are on average only between seven and ten years old? Your cells are in a constant state of flux.⁴ This idea of continuous change also underpins our view of the world and our place in it. We don’t see an objective reality, we see what we expect to see – and our world view is constantly reinterpreted in the light of new experiences – at any one moment of time, we see things differently to how they were before.⁵

“Nothing endures but change.”

Heraclitus⁶

Just recently, a client shared a story about his aged grandfather’s passing. For more than 20 years, there had been bitterness between two sides of the family about the inheritance of the family estate, which the grandfather had gifted to his youngest daughter. After his grandfather’s death, my client realized on speaking to the youngest daughter what the real cost of that inheritance had been. She had spent the last 25 years of her life as a devoted carer to her father – and in her words, had lost her life from her late twenties through to her early fifties. The bitterness evaporated immediately and the 25 years of pain and hurt were immediately reconfigured in the light of this new awareness.

And yet, we hold on to the idea that things stay the same, we build routines and habits of thinking – creating some sense of certainty against these constant internal and external fluctuations. We are hard-wired to see patterns – to make things connect. This hardwiring enables us to make decisions and navigate what would otherwise be an incomprehensible world.

On top of this changing baseline, there are the actions that we purposefully take to redirect events and make changes to suit our needs.

A colleague was brought up in the South West of England and had a broad, local accent, as did most of his friends. At 16 he believed his accent would cause others to see him as “slow” and “rural”, and it would be a disadvantage at university and in business. He made a simple decision “to lose the accent” and started copying people who spoke the way he wanted to speak. Through practice, sometimes with more success than others, eventually the strong accent was lost. This conscious change, brought about by deliberately doing something different, will have led to changes in his perspective, resulting in changes (planned and unplanned) unfolding in his life that would be impossible to track. Did anyone choose to (or not to) employ, befriend or spend time with this person as a result of his accent? No one will ever know.

Change happens within a system and one change in that system (losing the accent, a family member dying) ripples out into the system and those ripples bounce back, providing feedback to the person who made the change in the first place.

Many of the day to day incremental changes that take place go completely unnoticed, undetected. Yet those changes are core to the bigger changes that we aim for. Capturing those small shifts those daily movements towards a different future is key to tracking progress.

Purposeful change in organizations is possible but by no means straightforward. If you’ve ever had the role of driving and leading a change project, you will appreciate the challenge of engineering change in a complex system. Change needs leading from the front and supporting from behind. Often, rather than one big change, you get a series of small shifts that become self-reinforcing. This cycle of reinforcement amplifies the small changes taking place, ultimately leading to a felt difference.

What’s easier to change at the organizational level includes the structures, the written processes, the actual people occupying particular roles. The tricky bit is to bring about a change in how people behave, to shift ways of working, habits of thinking and doing, and to change attitudes. It’s easy to bring in a new process. And it’s just as easy for people to ignore the new process, to find a workaround. This difficulty with engineering change is not because people are deliberately obstinate, it’s because it’s often easier to keep doing what has always been done – and until that balance changes, and the new behaviour is easier than the old one, the old behaviour won’t change.

CHANGING PEOPLE IS PERSONAL

“Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better.”

King Whitney Jr.⁷

There are many ideas about how change happens and an equal number of examples indicating how those ideas have failed at some level, somewhere. This is because how people change is individual and personal. Each of us approaches change with a set of beliefs about change, about how easy or difficult a particular change will be, what we personally want to change or are prepared to change, a set of habits, a context and a set of resources that enable change to happen or keep us entrenched in current patterns.

Consider Sally, who has “given up smoking” at least 20 times in the last five years. It would be reasonable to assume that her belief includes “I cannot change my smoking habit”; “I will always start smoking again, I just can’t persevere long enough”; “It’s too hard”.

Let’s imagine another person, Les, who moves jobs every two to three years. When facing a new job, he is excited and optimistic, looking forward to the new challenges ahead. His beliefs might be along the lines of “I relish changing jobs, I look forward to the new learning and understanding I gain”.

And, imagine a third person, Kate, who has to move from a location she’s worked in for 20 years, to a new site, with a new team, to deliver a reformatted service. She’s not slept well since she received the news of the move three months ago and her performance has dipped at work. Kate’s beliefs might be along the lines of: “I’m terrified of starting with newco”; “I am not getting a lot of sleep – I wish I was still working for my old company”.

Three personal experiences and belief sets that lead to different expectations and divergent responses to the changes ahead.

“It’s not that some people have willpower and some don’t. It’s that some people are ready to change and others are not.”

James Gordon⁸

CREATING THE INFRASTRUCTURE AND PLANNING FOR CHANGE: WHAT DO THE EXPERTS SAY?

From systems thinking and complexity theory, we are told what we already know – managing change is not an exact science. The destination imagined at the start is unlikely to be where you end up, and what happens along the way is rarely expected at the outset.

Change frameworks such as those put forward by John Kotter⁹ or Jeanenne LaMarsh and Rebecca Potts¹⁰ are incredibly useful. These frameworks don’t provide all the answers by any means, but they can offer insight into the necessary infrastructures that support a directional change.

What can you do to make a planned change more likely to happen?¹¹

Clarity of vision: What is the reason for the change? Why bother? What happens if you don’t do anything? Not only is it important to clarify the reason for change, but what does good look like? Not just the organizational vision, but what will the employment process be like in the “new world”, what will the communication be like? What will the reward and recognition processes be like?

Awareness and acceptance of the current state of things: What is the starting point? How are things now? What are the structures in the organization like, what’s the culture, what are the capabilities of people, what processes are in place? It’s easy to set off without being clear about where you are starting from, caught up in the excitement of the possibilities promised by the future vision.

Change roles: Who are the sponsors? Naturally, sponsorship at the most senior level helps, and for an organization-wide change, is necessary. Potential sponsors, though, exist at every level of leadership and management across the organization – they may not all be on board at the start, or even at the end, so how do you engage across this population? A key role of the sponsors is to remove obstacles.

Who are the change agents? Who will be given specific responsibility to make the change happen? Who are the targets of the change? What is it that they need to change? Everyone is a target in the change process, no one can stay the same when the organization is changing around them. All targets to some extent will feel uneasy, self-conscious, thinking first about what they have to give up, not what they’ll gain. When a situation is ambiguous, we look to our leaders, peers, colleagues to provide clues as to how to behave – if the senior leaders are behaving in line with the vision, the vision is more likely to be seen as important and to follow suit. Similarly, those who’ve been given a formal role as a “change agent” will be under particular scrutiny.

Communication: How and what you communicate is critical. You need to be credible and trusted, bring personal stories and engage people at an emotional level to have impact. Communication is two-way – and not only is it important for people to be heard, but important for them to know that their views and perspective have been heard and actually considered.¹²

Aligning the safety net – empowering action: Doing something different is risky and uncomfortable. If you don’t support the changes you want to see – when they start to happen, if, for example, you blame someone for doing something wrong as they try a different approach – old habits will be reinstated. People will go straight back to doing what they’ve always done – because it’s comfortable and more familiar. As a leader of change, share the challenges, difficulties, mistakes you came across (whether real or imagined), praise and support when you see others starting to step up to the new way of doing things – even when they don’t get it right.

As well as the personal support you give – align the systems. Align reward and recognition, learning and development and communications directly to support the change that you are introducing. These systems need to positively reinforce the behaviours that you want to see and not give any reinforcement to old habits you’re trying to shift. These systems are the cornerstones of the prevailing organizational culture, with each one holding the other in check.

Working with resistance: During change, people go through a series of emotions as they transition the stages from shock and denial that any change is required, to a position where they are able to integrate new ways of being and doing into their repertoire.¹³ Resistance is something to engage with, rather than be squashed or limited. What can be learned from resistance, what improvements might the conversations deliver? Approaching resistance with a mindset of enquiry “What’s really going on here?” might just be incredibly helpful in ensuring that the change stays on track.

“What you resist, persists.”

Carl Gustav Jung¹⁴

CHANGE AND 31PRACTICES

Clarity of vision: The start point for 31Practices is to clarify the organization’s purpose; the purpose being something that is motivating and energizing, that people can engage with at an emotional level and get behind. Within the organization’s market niche, what is it that the organization wants to achieve, to deliver, to be known for? Getting this right will create the sense of urgency, the energy around a shared endeavour. Clarification of the values provides the guiding principles.

Change roles: Creating the sponsors and change agents is not only about engaging the senior leadership team; it’s also about creating a nominated group across hierarchy and function as guides and allies. These are the people who are closest to the front-line people, working alongside them every day. Together they form a network of “change nodes” throughout the organization.

Aligning the safety net – empowering action: The co-creation workshops for front-line employees provide the input for creating the wording of the 31Practices. When the 31Practices set is reviewed and finalized, a carry card is printed and becomes part of the uniform standard. This communication phase is revisited as stories of impact are shared individually and organizationally, and become part of the fabric of the organization.

31Practices works best when it is connected to a recognition programme. Recognition plays a key role in socializing how the Practices are being adopted, and the impact they have. This positively reinforces the behaviours, encouraging others to follow and the associated stories become part of the organization heritage.

One of the key elements of 31Practices is that people make the choice as to how they are going to “live” the Practice of the day. Each daily Practice is organization-wide, but what each person does to demonstrate that Practice is entirely up to them.

The core values of the organization are embedded into the decision framework for the organization: supporting decision making, prioritization and other day-to-day choices. For 31Practices, various actions take place so that they become part of day-to-day operational process. These activities can range from translating 31Practices into a set of questions to be used at interview, to formulating a meeting protocol, to a screensaver with the Practice for the day.

Finally, because 31Practices is an ongoing programme, it becomes the way people behave, and takes on a life of its own, becoming a way of being for the organization, emerging as the context fluctuates – building a virtuous and reinforcing cycle of behaviour.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”

Leo Tolstoy¹⁵