Change is easy: just don't do it

The Xpragmatic View #147
July 24, 2010
by Marc Buyens (@mbuyens), Xpragma
marc.buyens@xpragma.com
url: http://www.xpragma.com/view147.php
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In life and in business, agility is a major advantage. However, in life it seems to come more or less naturally, while in business it seems an impossible dream. Some thoughts on change.

We live in times of unprecedented change.
The speed of change is accelerating.
The only constant is change.

Change. We hear it every day. It is one of the biggest challenges for today's organisations. We have complete theories that tell us how we should initiate and manage change, but the practical results are often extremely poor. Why is it so difficult?

However, is that really so? Do we all have the correct understanding of what "change" really is and even more important, of what we can do about it?

Let us start by looking at our own personal life. We grow up, get married, get kids, grow old: a continuous sequence of fundamental change.

Yet, do we experience this as "change"? At any given moment of our life, do we have the feeling that we need to "change" in order to get to the next day? Do we have to use Kotter's 8-step change model? Step one: Create a sense of urgency...

No, not at all. We feel perfectly comfortable with this ongoing change process. Of course, most of us will try to settle for some form of stable state, but change is a normal part of our life.

Now, given our perception of change as being something difficult, this might be confusing, but in reality, it is not.

The reason for this is that, while participating in this ongoing change process of our life, we ourselves do not fundamentally change.

Once we have reached the age of sixteen or so, our fundamental beliefs, our core values, all the things that make the essence of what we call our "personality" remain largely the same.

Even when being faced with fundamental challenges such as accidents, diseases, disabilities, most of us don't change. We continuously adjust our behaviour, our "comfort zone" to cope with the evolving context, but we do not really change.

In life, change only exists for the external observer. For us humans, our evolving life simply is the constant state. It is business as usual.

So, why can't this work within the enterprise? Why don't we simply "adjust our behaviour to cope with the evolving business context"?

Well, while thinking that way, we overlook the reality that "keeping our own personality" in life also means that our surrounding contexts, our individual "comfort zones" will be fundamentally different.

Two individuals might do completely the same job in the same company, yet all the rest of their personal life will be fundamentally different. Their comfort zones are fundamentally different.

In life, we have the luxury of adjusting our comfort zone so that it becomes the right context for our personality. In the enterprise, that freedom is largely restricted. One of the major flaws of management thinking is that we look at employees as a largely uniform or potentially uniform population. It is not. Forget adoption.

Therefore, there is no such thing as "resistance to change". Change is a natural thing for all humans. There is only "inability to adapt", inability to adjust the individual comfort zone to the new business context.

So, while initiating change, just be aware of the reality that only part of the employees concerned will be ready for this new context and that in most cases, you will be unable to create the conditions that will cause the buy-in of the rest (or it will not deliver the planned result).

Therefore, as in life, fundamental change is a lengthy process. As Gary Hamel writes in Why Management Innovation is So Hard:

So while I believe an extreme management makeover is possible (...), I don't believe it can be done overnight or without occasional setbacks. When it comes to management innovation, the new doesn't instantly and magically supplant the old. Even after years of diligent effort, vestiges of the old, legacy model will remain.

Don't try to change the people you hired. Hire the right people.

About Marc Buyens

Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma. He started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.

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