Engine For Change

I just love it when I’m on the same wavelength with Dr. Kotter, author of Leading Change and the famous 8 Step Process.  Once again, he and I posted about the same topic only days apart. [See his post and mine from Nov 2010.]

Yesterday, I posted about the need to refill the tank, in part by stopping some activities that are draining all your time.

Today, Dr. Kotter posted about Why Busy Work Doesn’t Work and included a video.  Anyone who’s sick of staying busy instead of accomplishing something truly important should check out his post.

Let’s not be busy (and drain all our time pretending to change).

Let’s be urgent and drive some amazing change.

Why not try?

With a quick Google search you can find page long lists of blog posts dedicated to complaining about meetings.

I challenge you to find another blog post like this.

Why is this post unique?  Because I intend not to complain about meetings, but about the word meeting itself.

As of today, I’ve given up the word meeting.  I’m writing to ask all my friends to help me strike the word meeting from my vocabulary.

Why such a bold (and odd) move?  Because meeting is a word used beyond its usefulness.

How can I tell? Because one word, meeting, should not be commonly used to describe both of the scenarios below.

Scenario 1: A gathering of a group of excited “get to” team members eagerly working on a project they are passionate about.

Scenario 2: A forced encounter of disheartened workers confused as to the purpose of the current physical co-location, learning and doing nothing of importance.

After reading those scenarios, can you see the disservice we are doing to the powerful difference driving change brings?  Our gathering with other “get to” energized people gets the same word as a sad session of driving people.  No more!

Join me in boycotting the word meeting.

Here’s one way you can carry out this boycott.

When you send your electronic invitation, or make you in person request, describe your gathering in other words.

Examples:

• We need to generate our next goals.  Would you like to come to the Improvement Improvisation Hour we’re holding at 2 on Tuesday?
• I’m seeking volunteers to help me safe-fail test my idea to find the flaws. Would you be willing to attend my Devils Advocate Session at 8 on Wednesday?
• We’ve accomplished a lot in the past two weeks.  Shall we hold a Wins Report from 10 to 11 on Friday in the small conference room?
• It’s time for performance reviews.  My boss and I are taking Reflection and Projection Time on Thursday at 1.

I’m sure I could come up with plenty more.  The options are endless if we cease the mindlessness of calling everything a meeting and start describing why we are gathering people with the title we give the gathering.  These new titles are more enjoyable to read and they clearly tell me what sort of preparation or mindset I should be in when I finally get to join the other attendees.

Imagine the time saved if you knew exactly why you were there (on top of the wanting to be there energy that driving change brings!).  Can you tell this idea excites me?!

I’m so excited, I started to wonder what the non-meeting titles of current driving people sessions could be.  Here are a few examples, included just for fun:

• I have to go to the Listen-to-Bill-Yell-At-Us event again on Wednesday.
• I wish I didn’t have to attend John’s I-Insist-on-Reading-the-Status-Report-to-You-Instead-of-Just-E-Mailing-It gathering every Thursday.
• Will your boss skip the No-One-Knows-Why-Any-of-Us-Are-Here session again on Friday?  I wish I could skip it.

Join me in boycotting the word meeting.

Don’t wait.

Be brave.

Start renaming your meetings today.

Why not try?

[Bonus: If you want to check out one of my earlier rants about language at work, read Why One Blue Crayon Isn't Enough.]

To start off 2012 right I created this one page pdf to illustrate the difference between driving people and driving change.  Those of you who’ve seen earlier versions will notice the old figures have been replaced with my not-so-awesome-but-still-lively stick figure people.  (I’m an engineer, not an artist, so go easy on me.)

If you’d like your own copy of the pdf, just leave a comment and I’ll send the file to your contact information.  In your file I’ll include your name in the permission line at the bottom so you can use the file as you drive change.

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?

When you encounter people who seems lost or dead to change, don’t give up on them.

Instead, drive change and watch how you just might revive them through your example.

You will revive the forgotten man.

Why not try?

Some days you might struggle to find a new idea to spark your creativity, you might drag yourself through a team meeting, you might feel like you are running on empty.

Don’t worry.  We all have days — or even weeks — like that.

The challenge isn’t to avoid those days.  The challenge is in how you refill your tank and start your change moving again.

To get yourself moving again, try these simple steps.

Step 1: Do something, no matter how small (e.g., one e-mail sent, one piece of paper reviewed, one trip to the coffee machine).

Step 2: Smile and congratulate yourself. It may seem silly, but it’ll work faster than you think.

Step 3: Say out loud, “Win!”  Depending on how empty you feel, say win as many times as necessary to get yourself feeling like your needle is moving off of empty.

Step 4:  Do something else, again, no matter how small.

Step 5: Repeat steps 1 through 4 as many times as necessary until you can feel a sense of motion.

Too often we get to empty and keep ourselves there because we demand that the first action we take immediately resets us to full and launches us forward at blazing speed.

Life doesn’t restart from stop like a bullet ride at an amusement park.  Instead, it more often starts like an old train building up steam until the wheels finally start turning.

So do whatever it takes to get yourself moving again, no matter how slowly you start.

Why not start now?

No two people will perform a task the same, with the same passion, the same speed or the same curiosity….

…unless you force them all to behave one way.

When we drive people we force our best and our worst to conform to the same standard, often lowering what the best can accomplish to make the standard universal for our worst.

But when you start driving change, you can allow for variability, in fact you are capitalizing on its power.

You no longer define the starting line, finish line, path and speed.  Instead, you offer the opportunity to race and watch to see where people end up.

Some (probably a lot more than you expect) will surprise you with their speed, their choice of path, and how lofty they set their finish line.

If you want to find the best leaders in your organization, stop making them all lead the same.

Allow a little (or a lot) of driving change to happen and watch who takes off.

Harness the power of variation amongst the people of your organization and you’ll be surprised how much you can accomplish.

Just when you think you’ve talked to all the groups you need to talk to, shared your change story with all the important stakeholders, and publicized your change effort to death, you’ve really only just begun.

Whatever the reason, people forget what they hear only once, can hardly repeat what they’ve heard twice and can only sometimes act on what they’ve heard for the third time.

Keep talking. Keep sharing.  You’re never done spreading your message.

So, enjoy the conversations and keep driving your change.

Last May I posted a long discussion about the importance of drawing pictures:

If you want to succeed a driving change, practice drawing pictures.  Specifically, practice drawing pictures of either what the future looks like or what the journey to the future looks like.”

Today I was back at it, drawing more pictures in an attempt to bring two sides of an issue closer together.  We attempted to draw a picture that both sides could see themselves in.  We’ll know next Friday if our picture worked.  I can’t say if it will for sure, but I can say for sure that if either side had stuck to only talking the two sides would never agree.  The pictures in their heads are just too different.

That picture drawing exercise got me thinking again about the impact Dan Roam’s book Back of the Napkin has had on my life.  Before I read his book I rarely drew pictures to get my point across. Now, that seems to be almost all I do.  Why? Because pictures are powerful tools, especially when you are trying to communicate brand new concepts, which is much of what you do when you are driving change.

Here’s a video where Roam discusses part of his premise:

And here’s a video (handheld camera so beware the picture bouncing) of the last five minutes of a recent speech.  Both videos are worth a quick look.

SXSW 2010: Dan Roam on Visual Thinking from Teehan+Lax on Vimeo.

I’ll probably be buying his two new books soon, Unfolding the Napkin and Blah Blah Blah. Why not continue to support an author that taught me so much in one quick book? If you haven’t checked out Dan Roam’s work, you really should. It will help you drive change. I can promise you it will.

Last Saturday some friends and I sat around discussing our various techniques for creating change within large organizations.

During a portion of the conversation we were debating whether or not to create change in a large organization you need to…

A. Change policies from the top of the organization across the whole organization or

B. Start the change with a small group of people within the organization and grow the change from there.

At the start of the debate many of us assumed that top level change was the key to starting a change, so most of our talk revolved around how to get the attention of the right top leaders to get them to change the organization-wide policies.

I participated in the conversation, but something didn’t sit right with me.

In my experience, top-down, organization-wide changes are rarely effective.  The best changes I’d seen started with a few people choosing to behave in a different way and gradually carving out a larger and larger space in the organization where their new behaviors were okay.  I could describe these situations to my friends, but I was lacking a concept that could pull together the theme between all the situations.

Then, the light bulb came on.

If in projects you protect what matters (the due date) from uncertainty with a project buffer maybe what was protecting these start-small changes from failure was an equivalent buffer from the uncertainty of the organization: a policy buffer.

When a new boss announces he is changing the standard and X, Y, and Z behaviors are now expected, regardless of what the rest of the organization is doing, that boss is creating a policy buffer around his group.

When a small group of like-minded coworkers bands together to improve their team meetings or agrees to bring in only healthy treats to share, they are creating a policy buffer around their informal group: no bad meetings or donuts here.

When a community of practice shares their lessons learned, maintains standard behaviors in essential processes, and leads their people in empowering ways, they are establishing a policy buffer between them and the other communities.

A policy buffer is a set of explicit behavior and/or policy differences between the group changing and the larger organization or system.  The group’s maintenance of this policy buffer is essential in protecting the new behaviors or policies from the influences of the old ways of doing things.

Use of project buffers revolutionized projects.  Inventory buffers advanced logistics.  No one knows yet what policy buffers will do for change implementations, but I have a hunch we’ve found a big piece of our grand solution.

I can’t wait to get started.  I’m off to build my policy buffers for my important changes.  What are you going to do?