Making Meaning: Change from the Beginning

Change is the only constant in business today.

Change is the new normal.

Change is hard.

Change or die.

A lot has been said and written about the phenomenon of change.  It’s a good thing too, because change is all around us all the time.  Always has been that way.  It is a fundamental condition of being alive, despite what anyone tells you.  

It only seems, in retrospect, like there was once a golden age sometime in our past when everything was still and knowable.  Perhaps the change came at us more slowly then, but it was there nonetheless.

Whomever you like on the subject of change, whatever thinking or model appeals to you, it all starts in the same place: taking stock of where you are now.  

What are you noticing -- in yourself, in your team, in the organization?

What in your interactions has led to the situation you find yourself in?

What is the best thing about what is happening now? 

One could say that a big reason the Obama administration has been less successful than expected in creating the change it promised is that it didn’t do a sufficient job of assessing the overall situation at the time it was getting started.

The reason for this stock taking is to get the relevant information out into the open, so you can see it and talk about it.  Sure, there are going to be differing experiences and contradictory data.  That’s kind of the point.  Unless you’re aware of where you are, it will be very risky to choose your next steps.  If you are all starting from different places, there’s no telling where those steps might take you.

What are the stories you are telling yourselves?

What themes emerge from all these stories?

What do these themes say about you and where you are right now?

There are a number of tools you can use to perform this assessment, to create an understanding of the ground you are inhabiting together.  I like conversations.  It sounds obvious, but talking to people individually or in groups can be a very rich source of data.  Sometimes the culture or some aspect of the situation won’t allow this.  Then, try getting people to write it down.  Send out a survey that asks about what you are interested in.  You can also pull the files that pertain to the current situation.  A robust approach will use some combination of these (and other) ideas.

Regardless of how you do it, remember you are seeking an answer to this fundamental question:  What is the shared meaning you make out of your current circumstances?

Speak Clearly; Say What You Mean

An invitation showed up in my inbox today.  It was for a training program or webinar of one sort or another.  Nicely formatted, professionally done.  With photos of the owners of the training company looking earnest and enthusiastic about what they are offering.  This was the tag line:  “Empower your people to take ownership of their own engagement.”

Huh?

Looking at the buzzwords per pixel, I’d say it would be pretty challenging to cram any more in there.  Scott Adams’ Dilbert has made a career out of skewering this kind of business-speak.

The cynic in me thinks that the purpose of the advertisement was to put in front of me the current, hot topics from the business best seller list on Amazon, hoping that one of them would grab my attention and entice me to click through.

That kind of language has the opposite effect on me though.  I can’t tell for sure what the point is, so I move on in my busy day.

It’s the same thing in your work and interaction with your team.  Helping people to be motivated to do what needs to be done involves being precise and clear about where you are going, how you would like to get there, and how you’ll know you’ve arrived.

Direction, expectations, measures.

To be fair, the invitation goes on to promise “concrete action steps” I can “take immediately … to make an impact on my organization’s bottom line.”  What is not obvious is how those action steps will emerge from all the empowering, owning, and engaging that came before.

Tell your team where they need to end up -- what’s the finished product or service?  Then, what are the parameters within which they need to operate?  These could also be called guidelines or ground rules.  Finally, how will the team monitor its progress and results?  What are the important things it needs to keep track of along the way?  It probably knows what these are better than you.

Bottom line:  Speak in plain language, treat your team like the intelligent, capable beings that they are, stand back, and be amazed at the results.

Going Slow to Go Fast

One of my wife’s favorite sayings is, “More haste, less speed.”  She usually utters this in exasperation after she has knocked something over in her rush to do something else.  Or when she can’t find her keys, making her later than she already is.

In our overly-busy lives, we make constant demands on ourselves to cram more doing into not enough time.  We are incredibly adept at convincing ourselves that there is always room for one more thing.

Whatever happened to reflection?

What?  I don’t have time for that!

Really?  What’s the cost to you and those you work with for not taking even a moment to think about what you’re doing?

Speed can be a false economy.  Just jumping in and getting on feels good because we’re “doing something”, whereas pausing to plan, reflect, or just breathe feels like a waste of time.

So many of my clients talk about planning and reflection as a luxury they just can’t afford.  So often I get called in to help only after they haven’t indulged sufficiently in this “luxury”.  After they have discovered that re-work is more time consuming (and expensive) than reflecting a little bit.

Reflection is the pause that refreshes (sorry, Coca-Cola).  It is looking back just enough to help you go forward more intelligently, with greater effect.  It is an essential aspect of learning.  It is what you are doing reading this post.

And, there is a great continuum of reflection: all the way from multi-day planning retreats to taking a deep breath at your desk to everything in-between.

Learn to recognize when you’re running on auto-pilot.  That way, you can flip that switch to “off” every once in a while to have a look around to make sure you’re where you think you are.

Getting Things Done vs Getting Things Done

I like to judge my success by how much I can accomplish in a day, though “plow through” is probably a more apt description.  Make the list and start checking things off.  Hope that there aren’t too many interruptions -- emails and phone calls from pesky clients, requests for pick up after practice from the kids, uncontrollable urges to surf the web, trips downstairs to refill the coffee or go to the bathroom.

All these things (and more) get in the way of the work I tell myself I need to do.  And when there are too many of these distractions, I tell my wife at the end of the day, “I just don’t know where the time went or what I did all day.  I sure was busy, but I didn’t get anything done.”

Does this happen to you too?

One day, after a particularly robust evening of complaining about my circumstances, I decided I’d try an experiment:  I would consider whatever I was doing to be exactly what I was “supposed to be doing” at that moment.  Sure, I still had a list and pretty high expectations for what the day would be, but all that was tempered by taking a more holistic view of my reality.

To my relieved surprise, going to my daughter’s track meet was suddenly much more enjoyable.  Spending an entire Saturday watching the kids’ crew regatta wasn’t an obligation that was taking me away from what I needed to be doing.  Walking the dog when he asked (yes, he does!) wasn’t an unwelcome interruption.

What made the difference?  It’s almost too trite, but really, it was choice awareness.  The acknowledgement that pretty much everything in my day is up to me -- not only what I do, but how I choose to feel about what I do.  This last is the more important bit, by far.

I can pay attention differently when I recognize that my choices are my own and I am intentional about them.  Meaning I can allow myself to be in the moment, guilt free most of the time.

“Most of the time”, because the organizational assessment still needs to be written and the proposal still needs to be edited.  This isn’t a fairy tale, after all.