Change

If you’ve heard the phrase “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” then you’ve heard of Heraclitus of Ephesus and understand, at least partially, that change is a constant and that nothing ever remains the same. Just to drive the point home Heraclitus also said “All is flux. Only change is changeless.”

I know that the metaphysical slant of his saying appeals, but what does it really mean for us? What does it mean for our everyday life when we, looking back over the years, feel that we have remained a constant while the retrospective look we cast also reveals that everything else has changed around us?

To answer the correctly we need to understand how we operate on a daily basis at a fundamental level. A sizeable portion of our daily activity is reactive. This is true whether the ‘we’ in question happens to be an individual like you and I or a corporation. Because the survival of either entity requires a balance between its internal needs and its external environment and because the external environment is always chaotic and uncontrollable, there are small and constant internal adjustments that are made to compensate.

Take yourself as an example. Today is Monday (because this is a Monday newsletter). You probably started with breakfast and a coffee but the weather outside may be colder than usual. There may be an external crisis or two that do not directly affect you but which impact on your psychology which, in turn, affects your mood and which itself has a neurochemical basis which now changes how you perceive your immediate environment. In order to maintain your functionality you need to adjust your thoughts, ideas and actions to compensate for all this.

A corporation, similarly, starts its day by kicking everything it does internally into gear but then has to face difficult orders, supply line challenges, shifts in the global economy, geopolitical unrest and a dozen other factors (including the weather) that impact on consumer sentiment.

All of this happens all the time. This is what Heraclitus meant.

Change then is a constant. This means that we must all be highly adept at dealing with it. I know that you know for a fact this is not the case. Financial Institutions, for instance, spend each year up to 14% of their annual operating costs on change management. I won’t even dare a guess on what it costs to us at an individual level. As systems seeking equilibrium in order to function with the least possible effort, corporations and individuals are ‘programmed’ to resist change. Avoid it. Until we can’t.

When the change around us is either too small to be noticed or virtually none we thrive by doing nothing about it. We cognitively understand that eventually something will have to be done. But by kicking the can down the road we hope that we will not be the ones who will have to do it.

In that scenario you can pretty much fill in your own blank: climate crisis, immigration, food stability, income equality, social diversity, world peace, energy policies. The list is way longer than I have space for here.

We are, now, in a time in history where we have encountered the proverbial can that’s been kicked down the road. We know that we cannot do the same thing, not because we don’t want to; we’d love for the future to take care of itself, but because we can see that unless we now act there won’t be a future to speak of. Certainly not a future worth living in.

Change Is Inevitable

All of which brings us down to this: the changes we must make and the way we must tackle change itself. Hold no misconceptions. Change is hard because there is always a cost associated with it. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have the smarts required to tackle it successfully. This is something I have written about before, at some depth.

So the real question here for us to address is: how do we become sufficiently sensitized to the need for change so as to tackle it in a manner that will neither keep us locked into a constant change of massive adaptation and exhaustion nor in a state of denial and delusion?

For that I have three requirements that work both for you and I, as individuals, and business entities of every size:

• Listen – Establish a regular and reliable feedback loop that supplies you with information of the change you are tracking. For a company this could be customer service, or suppliers and their price lists or raw materials availability. The point is that you track changes to what is key to maintaining the viability of your business.
• Plan – The only change that catches us by surprise is the one we haven’t planned for. If you track changes to aspects central to your operation you need to plan your response. Plans, break down each response into smaller, discrete, actionable steps and, where possible, viable alternatives that kick in should some variables change.
• Prioritize – All action costs time, effort, energy and money. Prioritize the steps you implement to give you he greatest ROI for the investment you put in. There is never perfect and nothing is ever so decisive as to produce a stasis that lasts forever. So, implement what is necessary first and expand everything else from there in a gradual, evolving scenario.

Make no mistake. Even planned change is a challenge. It tires us out. It moves us outside the boundaries f our comfort zone. It can derail our vision and exhaust our resolve. So it’s clear to know from the start that A. It’s going to be difficult. B. It is necessary. C. Only by adapting will we overcome the challenge we now face.?