Engine For Change

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?… The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” – George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5

Have you read Orwell’s 1984?  If you answered no, don’t feel bad.  I hadn’t until recently (and I’m not quite done with it yet).

If you consider yourself a change agent, especially one working inside an organization to remake it, I encourage you to pick up a copy of 1984 and dig in.

What bearing does a 62-year-old book have on people working in modern organizations? A lot.

For the sake of this post I’ll stick to Orwell’s fascinating take on the use and destruction of language.  One of my earliest posts on this blog, When One Blue Crayon Isn’t Enough, discussed the willful shrinking of language within organizations and how the loss of language kills thought.  Little did I know then that Orwell had painted that topic well in 1984.

When we are challenging the orthodoxy in our organizations, we must have enough words to paint new pictures of the future.  We can use words that others don’t.  We can broaden the language to improve thinking.   Language doesn’t have to only shrink.  If you work at it, you can make your organization’s language grow, and with it the organization’s ability to think bigger and better about your future.

Whether you are implementing Lean with all its words or Theory of Constraints or even just driving change (instead of driving people), try to grow the language in your organization in 2012 and I bet you’ll win more in your changes along the way.  Why not try?

Science can tell us how to do many things, but it can not tell us what ought to be done.” – Author Unknown

In most workplaces, everyone knows who the internally motivated people are and most everyone doesn’t like those people.  Why? I’d offer it’s because most of the internally motivated people you meet in a workplace seem to only be internally motivated to gain power over their fellow workers so they can better drive people.  You see, driving people successfully (yes, sometimes it is successful in the short-term) requires power over others and thus the internally motivated people seek the power.

No wonder most people I’ve met have at first been truly suspicious of me whenever I’ve used my internal motivation to break free and try new things.  From the perspective of the coworkers it must have seemed that it was only a matter of time before I dropped the “nice girl” act, stopped driving change and pulled out my whip and started driving people just like all the others had done before me.

No wonder they flinched when I asked what their obstacles were to accepting the change.  They weren’t really responding to me, in that moment, but instead responding to all the other times where they at first trusted and then were driven to change by those they had trusted.

No wonder “flavor of the month” and other awful terms follow around process improvements in most organizations.  It’s the trust and let down of too many of those people driving other people.

Through our past actions and the past actions of so many change agents like us, we’ve killed the willingness to change in many of our coworkers.  In 2012, let’s vow to do better by ourselves and by our coworkers and actively drive change instead of driving people.

We can change the world if we do what we ought to do and drive change.  Who’s with me?

As you look toward 2012, think big.

Back in June 2010, I posted this quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower

Whenever I run into a problem I can’t solve, I always make it bigger.  I can never solve it by trying to make it smaller, but if I make it big enough I can begin to see the outlines of a solution.”

In that post I wrote:

If you’re driving a change that only solves your problem look around for others who share your concern and make the change you’re driving big enough to include their concerns.  In large organizations the charge to “make it big enough” is especially important if you want to gain sway over the powers that control company-wide policy or procedures.

For 2012 I encourage you to think big, very big.  There are real problems that deserve solutions and we aren’t going to solve them by playing small.

What change are you going to drive in 2012?  How big can you make it?

I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you can not fail if you resolutely determine that you will not.” – Abraham Lincoln July 22, 1860 in a letter to George Latham

Be brave and act my friends.  Drive change.  You will succeed.

Sometimes life intrudes into your project plans, you lose your momentum and you grind to a halt.

So what?

It’s not the stopping that matters; it’s what you do after the stop.

I’ve had an exhausting few weeks that have halted all forward motion, but next week I’ll be back with a few great posts designed to spark your energy to drive change.

Thanks for sticking with me through this halt.

I look forward to seeing you back here next week.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” – Buckminster Fuller

It’s good, as we start the week, to remember that fighting the existing reality doesn’t work.  Sadly, I can admit I’ve wasted many a week fighting the existing the reality.  This week, I’m going to spend my time building the new model instead.

Who’s with me?

[Thanks to Rogue Polymath for sending me the quote.]

This morning my daughter fell out of bed in her sleep.  She broke her collar bone in the fall.

This early morning chaos reminded me of the power of teaching new concepts as you prepare people for a change.

My six-year-old daughter, when I told her she would likely have to wear a sling on her arm, opened her eyes wide, dropped her mouth wide open and cried, “What’s a sling? Will it hurt? Is it scary?”

From the mouths of babes.

When you are pitching a change to a group of adults they may very well be thinking in their head, “What’s a product line? Will switching to it eliminate my job?  Will it hurt? Is it scary?” but being adults, they are too polite and controlled to ask you those questions.  They’ll just internalize their worry and stall your change.

Some concepts are easier to demonstrate that others. I can show you a picture of a kid in a sling.  A picture of a product line is more difficult to produce.

No matter.  Whenever you are taking someone to a place they’ve never been, the burden is on you, the change agent, to illustrate the new concepts, no matter the difficulty of that task.

Show them how the sling will fit over their shoulder and help them heal.  Talk them through how a product line will bring benefits to their day-to-day work life.

Sometimes change is scary, but mostly because we’re going somewhere we’ve never been and for many, they didn’t choose to go there.

My daughter didn’t choose to fall out of bed, but once she did, she had to complete the journey to recovery.

Most people don’t get the chance to decide if they want to change with the organization, but once the change starts, the journey can be hard and long, or smooth and short, if only the change agent would explain the concepts, and help them see that it shouldn’t hurt much and it doesn’t have to be scary.

Let’s drive some change together.  Why not start now?

What concept will you try to explain better today?