The Journey of Change

From Nigel Higgs of Pragmatick Change Management.

I’m Nigel Higgs and I work with businesses to help them deliver disruptive change in a less disruptive way.

What is Disruptive Change?

Disruptive change comes from activities that are either unexpected or unusual, which contain a significant number of unknowns - things that you haven’t had to do or haven’t experienced before. Activities that are challenging, time-consuming to resolve, that may well cause anxiety and stress to those tasked with carrying them out.

One indicator is when it’s difficult to figure out where to start…

Which brings us to the concept of approaching change as a journey…

Defining the where, the how, via, when, what, and probably most importantly, the why, will sort out what needs to be done to get your journey booked.

The Analogy of a Journey…

…is useful, because, when you’re delivering Business Change, the vision of what you want your business to be, or how you want to change it, follows the way a journey needs to be thought through to make sure that you get to where you want to go by the day and time that you need to get there.

The first decision - you have to decide what your destination will be. Where do you want or need to go, and why you want or need to be there?

And you will also need to consider the ‘Values’ that will affect you once you’re there.

What do you imagine it will be like when you’re there? What are your expectations of how you will feel? What will you be doing during your stay? What will you need? Where will you stay? Do you know what the climate will be like, the clothes you’ll need, the activities you may do?

And then you also need to understand the best way to get there…

Are you travelling by yourself, or do you want or need companions? Or is it mandatory for you to have companions?

How will you travel – will you walk, cycle, go by car, train, boat, plane? Will you need to get there a particular way, buy a special ticket, or use a special vehicle?

What’s the route? Is it one ticket, or are there lots of changes and breaks along the way? How will you cope with stopovers - could you stay with friends, or do you need to find somewhere to stay - a hostel, a hotel, or will you need to take a tent?

How much will all this cost? After all, your journey may be outside of your budget…

What’s the Point of this Analogy?

The point is, that whether your process of change is about you, your life, your family, or your business, it will entail a number of decisions and, with all the pressures on us, those decisions can get lost in the mist of Other-Stuff-We-Have-To-Get-Done. Sometimes, just getting the day-to-day things done at work takes enough of our energy.

If dealing with the tasks we know how to handle can take all our time, how do we find time to deal with the things that are opaque, that contain unknowns, complex concepts, and lots of decisions. All those things that can end up pushing us into avoidance and procrastination.

We do things that are easier first, then, “We’ll get to that difficult thing later today…” Then, “Later tomorrow…”

Then we’ve left it so late that we have to work longer hours and place more stress on ourselves to try and get it done.

What’s the Point Really?

Well, as you may have noticed, I coach and help usinesses to manage change & transformation and help them deliver projects of change.

So, the point is, when delivering any type of change we need to identify as many unknowns as possible - the things that will stop us or divert us into a direction we don’t want to go. The things that trip us up and send us flat on our face in the mud.

I work with each business to analyse those unknowns so, together, we can figure out better ways of managing them. We work to identify and manage risks before they turn into something that derails the change, or worse, derails the business.

We do this by making sure that all the aspects of a change are understood – where the business wants or needs to be, why it needs to be there, what the values surrounding that destination are. This allows us to identify and understand the benefits and outcomes the business will have once it’s there, and the things that need to be in place for that destination to exist. This will also include all the connected impacts that will ripple across the business. That way, we create a detailed understanding of the steppingstones that need to be in place to achieve it all.

This is why understanding all the unknowns that could trip us up on that journey is so important…

What is it about Risks (or Unknowns)?

Some of the unknowns we encounter will be completely new to us. They will probably reside in decisions we need or have to take about our lives or our business. They will emerge from the areas we don’t understand clearly enough. They can hide behind activities we believe we understand, and turn up when we least expect it…

“Things were going so well, and then…”

We end up firefighting – trying to solve the problem we don’t completely understand whilst also trying to do the other day-to-day work we need to complete for clients or customers.

Other unknowns sit within the things we do regularly – the processes and interactions we’ve done a number of times, but we just get in the habit of taking shortcuts, because we assume we know something to be true, and then it turns out that that it isn’t, or there’s something we forgot to include. We can end up doing extra work to put it right, extra work we aren’t paid for!

Uncontrolled Unknowns Feed Disruption

Having a clear vision of your destination means it’s easier to define the goals you need to achieve to get there. Those goals are the steppingstones, the way markers, to achieving your vision. Some of those steppingstones may sit within shadow – not every detail will be obvious.

That ‘vision’ of what your change will deliver could be something that seems simple. Something you think will be a piece of cake to put in place. ?

Read that last sentence again… “Something you think will be a piece of cake to put in place.”

This is a good example of an assumption. It may be right… but it may be wrong. The point is, if you assume something will be easy, you probably haven’t looked at it in enough detail to know whether it will be… or whether it could kick you up the proverbial and leave you face-down, spitting mud.

That’s the point – knowing – or at least having greater certainty.

Creating Greater Certainty

Sometimes, when you look at the change you’re planning to do, it may look like a big, black hole that has no defining landmarks. You can’t see where to start, because there’s so many murky bits, you can’t make out the best route.

This is fairly normal when dealing with change. There will be unknowns, there will be dark and murky areas, there will be black holes.

But there are ways of making those dark and murky areas clearer.

And that’s where people like me come in. We have experienced similar dark-and-murky-areas and have some insight into how to scrub away the darkness, and we know how to throw a beam of light onto it to reveal the pools of clarity needed to move things forward.

So, if any of the long hours, stress, pain, anxiety, that I’ve touched on is at all familiar, please get in touch. One of the reasons I do what I do is to help people manage business change and get rid of as much as we can of the negative stuff it can produce. I’m happy to have a 20-minute call, Zoom, or meet up face to face to see if I can help. LinkedIn profile: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/nigelhiggs/

Thanks for reading this article and I hope the rest of your day goes very well.

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