Change as a core competency
We aren’t prepared for the kinds of multi-layered transformations we’re going through right now.
Let’s start with us personally. We’re being asked to change on multiple levels: to switch up our personal behavior in response to a pandemic (wear masks, avoid activities we normally enjoy), while reconciling the negative roles we may have played in a perpetuating racism. (And that’s only in the last couple of months.) Our social context is collapsing in on itself, as we ingest and respond to massive amounts of data in practically real time.
As many have written, our brains simply aren’t wired for this.
On an organizational level, leaders in the public, private, and social sectors were already dealing with massive amounts of digital-related change, but the pandemic has accelerated all of those trends. Most organizations take a long time to change direction, even in the private sector. Those that come out of this crisis in a stronger position will have changed quickly without burning out their people.
And finally, on a societal level, we in the U.S. haven’t witnessed this level of social upheaval since the 1960s—or one could argue, even the 1930s, during the Great Depression. The pandemic could reshape American life for decades—in some ways, arguable good, but in many very, very bad.
We have to mention all of these things at once, because we underestimate how much they’re related. Complexity theory would tell us that complex systems adapt and respond to their environments on both an individual and systemic level. Looking at parts without acknowledging the whole, or vice versa, limits our thinking and leads to unintended consequences in our decision making.
What we have to build within ourselves at all levels is the ability to change in response to emergent data all the time. We have to start seeing change as a core competency, something we have to be practiced in.
There are several implications of this kind of thinking:
We have to stop being so obsessed with the destination. It’s not about who we’re changing into—especially not about checking boxes on some ideology—or what we should become as an organization. Those targets will always move. It’s about managing the process, about normalizing the acceptance of moving quickly with new information.
We have to become very comfortable with the tools we use to make sense of the world being critiqued themselves. (Ex: Design thinking is great! Until it isn’t.)
Communications and persuasion have to become central tools in our toolbox, because we’re always going to be asking everyone to switch directions with us. With the availability of so many different worldviews, why should I pick yours—especially if you just changed your mind?
Change as a core competency is about being comfortable in tension. But that’s the world we live in: one that’s not going to stop becoming different.