The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
It seems that today change has to be ‘Transformational’, whether it’s a corporate change programme or some personal development. If you don’t emerge butterfly-like from the chrysalis of change transformed into something new … well, you’re not doing it properly.
I understand that the consulting organisations want to amp-up their offerings, that the self-help gurus want to big-up the impact of their programmes. They’re fighting for attention, for commitment and, of course, for money. Big promises justify big price tags. It’s just their marketing schtick.
And I understand that we have a narrative of dramatic change, we are attracted to stories of ‘Damascene Conversion’, the thunderbolt of realisation that causes someone to change their course, the breakthrough moment after which life is never quite the same ever again.
It’s just that I don’t really believe in transformations or Damascene moments or breakthroughs. It’s not that they don’t happen, it’s just that’s not how most change happens. They are the exceptions, the outliers. For most of us, for most change, it’s actually much less dramatic, much more mundane. It’s mostly boring, tedious drudge.
It’s a dangerous myth, this one of transformation, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s another version of the ‘silver bullet’ that I wrote about recently, it’s another type of short-cut. That’s why it’s so alluring, so attractive and that’s why they sell it to you.
Secondly, looking for the thing that’s going to bring about this ‘transformation’ distracts you from the real work of making the small changes stick, and it distracts you from acknowledging the progress you are making. If nothing less than transformation will do, every other improvement is going to be a disappointment.
So it doesn’t really work, this transformation thing. I’ve changed enormously over the past decade or two but I can’t identify any breakthroughs or lighting bolt moments, I can’t see one intervention that changed it all for me. What I see instead is a number of things I’ve tried, small changes that have stuck or not, little experiments that mostly failed, a lot of going around in circles, a lot of retracing of steps, lots of interactions and relationships that have all contributed a little bit and led me to where I am today.
Transformational? Hmmm.
The comedian Bill Bailey, on being hailed as having had a meteoric rise to success, observed that it was true if the meteor was going at the speed of an arthritic donkey crossing a ploughed field. He’d been working at his ‘overnight success’ for over 20 years. Not so much breakthrough as finally making a dent in the brick wall he’d been bashing his head against for so long.
I guess “Dull, slow and painful Change Programme’ doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it? But it does have the ring of truth.
The Drugs Don’t Work
The other thing that the big consultancies don’t mention is that most of their change programmes don’t actually work. As my mate Geoff Marlow points out in a recent LinkedIN post,
‘To save their own embarrassment they attribute this failure to “employee resistance and lack of management support”
(You should sign up to his excellent newsletter, btw).
What normally happens is that the employees endure the change programme as it is rolled over them. They go along with it, they adopt the new behaviours and systems for a while. Over the course of the next 18 months, they gradually revert back to what they did before, all the time making it look like they are doing it in the ‘transformed’ way. Two years after the change programme, everything looks much like before, but with a new paint job.
Maybe the real problem here is that enduring change is, in fact, a chronic problem and ‘Change Programmes’ and similar interventions treat it as a critical problem.
This is the premise put forward by Prof. Katy Milkman in her new book “How to Change”, which I heard her talk about on this week's episode of Mark C. Crowley’s great podcast “Leading from the Heart”.
She points out that when someone is diagnosed with diabetes, the physician doesn’t put them on insulin for month, see their blood sugar levels stabilise, and then think the diabetes is gone and withdraw the medication. They treat them over the long term to deliver enduring change in their condition. Most Corporate Change programmes are effectively giving insulin for a month, claiming success and stopping.
Milkman points out that we are, as humans, naturally resistant to change for four reasons.
Temptation - the desire for instant gratification
Laziness - path of least resistance
Forgetfulness
Underconfidence
She said she felt Temptation was probably the biggest, due to ‘Present Bias’. This causes us to overweight the immediate benefits of an action and underweight the long-term value. However, it’s often a combination of these factors and so a suite of tactics is needed to counter them.
Strictly speaking, Milkman is talking about individuals but it seems to me that these apply to organisations and she also agreed that organisations are very resistant to change. The research shows this is due to two other biases, ‘Status Quo Bias’ and ‘Escalation of Commitment Bias’, which together make us want to hold onto to what we have. How many corporate change programmes explicitly address these biases?
Change is challenging and Milkman recommends finding ‘Fresh Starts’ to help give people momentum. A corporate change programme clearly gives that but if it’s designed to fix a critical problem when it needs to address a chronic one, it’s going to fail. Which is probably fine for the consultancies as they get to come in and do it again, but it’s not helping the organisation, which remains sick.
The drugs don’t work - unless they are combined with other therapies and lifestyle changes.
(Does this make the big consultancies drug pushers? You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.)
Groundhog Day
I don’t know about you but I’m still feeling a bit flakey, a bit up and down, a bit discombobulated by the whole Pandemic experience. I’m not alone and this is due to ‘Pandemic Flux Syndrome’, according to Dr. Amy Cuddy, who was on Brene Brown’s ‘Dare to Lead’ podcast this week.
She was expanding on the Washington Post article she co-wrote with JillEllyn Riley, which you can read here
I’ve written before about how we managed to power through the first lockdown on ‘surge energy’, which we get when we’re in a crisis. Well, we used that up several months ago and now we’re mentally and physically depleted.
We also started to look for the end, for it all to be over. We’re looking for that ‘Fresh Start’ that Milkman talks about but it just keeps getting postponed. Last summer’s upswing got derailed by the Delta variant, this summer we got the ‘Pingdemic’ and rising infections that may yet take us back into restrictions. Recalibrating everything all the time is exhausting and we either want to hide under our duvets or change everything. We’re ping-ponging between anxiety and depression.
Also, getting back to ‘normal life’ is a proving either disappointing or terrifying. You’ve been looking forward to going out with your friends for months and when you do, it’s all a bit weird and awkward. I was struck that Cuddy’s explanation for this, ‘Affective Forecasting Errors’, sounded a lot like Milkman’s ‘Present Bias’. To quote from the article
‘…“affective forecasting errors” may also be shaping our moods. That phrase, coined by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert and University of Virginia psychologist Tim Wilson, refers to the human tendency to be reliably inaccurate when predicting the intensity and duration of our emotions after significant possible future life events, such as serious physical injuries, financial windfalls, or — let’s say — emerging from a global pandemic.’
You know, we humans are such a mess it’s a wonder we’ve ever managed to do anything.
We could look at the pandemic as some sort of cosmic change programme, being implemented by Mother Earth to create some enduring change (she could reasonably argue that we are a critical problem and so an intervention is appropriate). We don’t actually know what the outcome of this change programme is and we’re particularly ill-equipped to deal with it, what with our biases and poor forecasting. It’s not feeling great, is it?
So maybe there’s such a thing as a ‘Change Programme Flux Syndrome’, suffered by employees who have successive change programmes rolled over them. They’re worn out, they need a break, they want a fresh start but it just keeps coming, a never-ending stream of initiatives in a blizzard of powerpoints, buzzwords and slogans.
Certainly explains a large part of my corporate career. And what most public servants in the UK are experiencing today.
More, More More!
If this isn’t enough, you can get even more me!
I wrote a guest blog for Rapal on what ‘The Decrapified Workplace’ might look like. It was the result of Ponthus Kilman’s challenge to expand upon an earlier LinkedIN post. Having had my bluff called, I think I’ve responded well but I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.
I was also interviewed by Danny Denhard on his podcast, “Fixing the Broken Work of Work’ about how we can Decrapify Work, leadership, rethinking the world of work and, of course, Pirates.
I’m sorry you had to wait a little bit longer this week for your regular fix of me but this schedule for this is ‘weekly-ish’. In the past I would have beat myself up for ‘being late’ but I deliberately set this up so I didn’t have any hard and fast limits and could keep it a bit playful, otherwise I would have turned something I wanted to do into ‘a job’ (a mistake I’ve made often in the past). Then I would have got fed up with it and stopped. So you’re lucky, really.
Until next Week. Ish.