Dear Beloved Clients
Start Doing. Stop Planning to Do.
Between 2016-2020, I had so many conversations about the inherent values and differences between a change and organisation design approach we were using versus an Agile (capital A) approach to transforming the way a system and teams operate.
I was admittedly impatient around these types of comparisons for several reasons.
The first is that what pretty much always sits behind the "comparison noodling" is the reptilian brain wanting to negotiate risk, fear, and impotence veiled as an intellectual exercise around practice and methodology. I get this and am empathetic to it. It also must be named.
A second reason is that I am principally a fan of good and ethical systems change practicing, regardless of how it is packaged. Thoughtful and fresh methods entering the collective awareness is innovation. Hop on board to learn what works sensing into if it may be true for you (by engaging in doing it), and then you can lead from a deeper understanding.
Lastly, I am forever a person and practitioner who has a strong commitment to leading the experience of change over debating and cognating about change. The reason being is if you are standing in a place wondering about changing, most likely you are resonating with changing. To get you changing, we have to begin activating it – which does not happen by talking about it. Time matters here.
Too much time and money is spent considering change versus just doing it – and I am far happier to get you moving.
Below are thoughts in response to common change framework questions. Grappling with the questions behind the questions is a real part of any change.
Systemic Organisational Thinking
We know that every organization has many nested implicit and explicit operating phenomenon. They are made up of countless assumptions, behaviors, and default practices that manifest into leadership, communication, power, structures, culture, brand, and become strategy consequences or levers. Awake organizations understand that being deliberate about their operating models and systems designing is as essential as
being intentionally
thinking strategically,
communicating artfully,
working progressively,
steering responsviely, and
learning openly.
Any smart framework ought to continually provoke whole systems design thinking, conversations, and active application onto a living, directly experienced organizational system. Any posited framework should also provide scaffold to consider and act on cultural, behavioral, and structural shifts – and illustrate how they all knit together to create the living, breathing, constantly evolving whole.
Applied Changing
An Agile (capital "A") transformation effort, Design Thinking, or a Lean Startup basis are all foundationally pulling from the deep well of systems change methodology and resources — whether overtly understood by the users or not. You will feel commonalities in the designs and the spoken language around change.
Whether it is the install of standups, learning to work and scale iteratively, emergently designing, or introducing retrospectives you are participating in the methodological realm of change packaged under different labels.
Where I am trained as cautious and skeptical is the human proclivity to fall into the ideology trap. Commoditizing or adopting any methods or practices as a whole system change ideology (versus a method of intervention) will quickly create limitations on their application and sustainability in complex, perpetually changing ecosystems.
Any framework can be an inroad to enliven a system to be and do differently. None should ever be sold, promised, or practiced as end states.
Designing change and transforming culture norms require new awarenesses, alternative tools to work and operate by, fresh techniques — and willingness. Learning what these are and being able to make them distinctly your own so you deliberately get better as people, a team, and an entire organization every day is a framework's potential value. (If it has any value to begin with.)
A framework can serve as a map and navigational tool to start, before designing and adopting your own.
- The risk will always be that the individual and collective monkey mind will want to grab hold too tightly to the new "known".
- Emotionally wanting and then expecting the externalised framework to actually be and do the change, because that means less applied effort when everyone is just so busy creating the mess.
- And then the monkey mind will be able to blame it when the denial, false believing, and apathy to involve oneself effortfully leaves everyone a bit vacant and disheveled.
To transform any system, you must first experience some shedding. Then, you must learn new tools and techniques. Finally, you have to learn how to apply and integrate them to your given system resistance, culture, work context, and norms.
You want to understand and embody better how to work more dynamically as a transforming system, because we live in a world of work and leading that demands of-the-moment choreography.
You also want to consciously apply individual and collective rigor and consistency. This is because designing tangible change needs to become foundational and perpetual to compete and thrive in today’s fast-changing, globally connected world.
All of these take courage, muscle development, and getting out of your own way.
To do the above well, you have got to stop merely hoping or strategising conceptually. Instead, you create safe contexts to be in the direct experience of learning and changing by applied doing. By design, change work in this way is disorienting. Yet, it gives you a far better shot at becoming the team and organisation you envision — and much more quickly.
Mindsets Shifting
Org design, agile, lean, holacracy — or any otherwise named transformation work are all mindset shifts first. They are not destinations and frankly, rarely is there an arrival.
Progressive change means nothing is static.
Interrogating your entrenched personal, team, and organizational mindsets is an enormous part of any change work. All deeply important to the adoption of a new context from which you learn, create, innovate, work, and thrive.
New meeting structures, decision tools, communication technology, teaming ways are all well and good. But, if you are not prepared to give up what you know to make room for what you don’t yet know — and get comfortable with feeling slightly off balance in the process — far less new and different will occur.
The reason being that it is simply impossible to change without changing. Talking about changing is merely delaying effort. Good, ethical, and experienced transformation practitioners of any flavor can and will provide the tilled soil, but you ultimately have to sow the seeds.
This understanding and system motivation has to start right from the beginning when considering a change effort.
When you keep yourselves honest here, you have less chance of falling prey to the ideology traps or to the false logic that you aren't the one needing changing in the doing of change.
Here are some universal goalposts and mindset shifts to rely on when embarking on any agile, lean, new ways of working, human design or otherwise termed transformation journey.
1. Experiencing is believing.
Talking about change is like writing about beautiful fashion without the visual or describing an amazing meal or beautiful wine without tasting it. Seeing and feeling are far more powerful and emotional — and doing or scaling change lives in the actual experience.
Show rather than tell.
Put down the megaphone, stop wordsmithing, debating or opining, and just do.
People feeling the commitment and glow naturally spreads.
2. Don’t wait for permission.
While org change and transformation rhetoric became steeped in top-down sponsorship and while having strong leadership ringfence change efforts is extremely helpful, both are not deal breakers. Small groups of thoughtful citizens can change the world. They’ve been doing it forever.
Declare your independence (at least to yourself.)
Step into your personal authority, and show people the way.
Make people curious and take notice of your changing, rather than wait for permission.
This is leading.
3. Prepare to lose in order to gain.
Making space to learn new ideas and develop new muscles is an imperative. Otherwise, it is like dieting while eating all the same bad things or moving without dropping stuff off at Goodwill.
Shedding is a natural part of evolution.
Gripping and attachment exist to create friction around growth and change.
Resistance is what causes adaptation energy.
Lean in and let go.
4. Mind your ego.
The monkey mind will trick you at every turn into believing that it is unsafe to try new things. Stupid to not drive, drive, drive rather than create space for bigger thinking, deeper connecting, and reflective learning. Dangerous to not know all the possible pitfalls before trying. And, downright ignorant to show vulnerability, fault, or god-willing... to take a risk.
Leading means learning to not be dragged down the street in the shackles of your ego.
Settle into the very humanity that is you.
Take off the veil.
Quiet the noise.
Let you radiate.
5. Stop planning and start doing.
Project plans as fixed, waterfall, controlling what is uncontrollable have been an outdated methodological practice for a very long time In case it isn't alarmingly obvious, we live in an emerging era where anticipating, adapting, and pivoting in the moment are three of the most critical leadership skills needed in any role, in any organization, in any industry.
Be cautious even about the test and learn mantra that has now calcified into fixed and controlling ways of operating. (See about the monkey mind above.)
Falsely believing you can predict and plan your way to innovation is an assured loser.
Set a direction, but steer continuously by building systems designed to work from a continuous steering vision and strategy.
The speed and pace of change is only getting faster. Design systems that fly above.
6. Be grateful and present.
Learning from others and about ourselves, being on a team with good humans, and having the opportunity to contribute to something bigger are nothing short of gifts.
Don’t artificially or passively be grateful.
Look for moments that kick your ass or even peel back the slightest layer of new awareness or thinking — and feel the gratitude for being alive and present to the experience.
Say thank you.
Tell people you love them.
Live the moments consciously.
It’s contagious.
No framework is a panacea to magically become a system wired to an innovation, change, and transformation basis. They also don't magically make for strong practitioners to hold the space.
You will need to step in and do the work of change.
Your monkey mind will need to get worked over.
You will need to allow.
The choice has to be about learning with courage.
Experiencing yourself differently.
Being in the truth of how systems, change, and work actually work.
Using tools, practices, cadences, rituals, and methods to enable that.
Sometimes, you may use more than one method over time or even many methods at the same time. Fantastic. If they serve to create and leverage change as energy and toward a better understanding of how to lead, operate, and organize from a perpetual state of change you are then doing work that matters.
Start by starting, making sure you are doing real work.
You’ll know because it feels challenging, personal, enlivening — and yet not ideological.
Bear in mind you are never done.
Keep evolving from there.