The secret to making meaningful change
Simon Holmes
Enabling Human-Centric Software Engineering Teams ☆ Published Author ☆ Engineering Leadership
This is a snippet of an article by John Durrant on our Human-Centric Engineering Substack.
Life is a series of struggles and overcoming struggles. No matter our privilege or poverty we will all have to work through struggles life throws at us. And it’s in the overcoming that we find growth.
People grow through struggle and overcoming, just as teams and organisations grow through struggle and overcoming. Struggle is the magical catalyst. We often avoid struggle and even feel ashamed when we’re struggling yet “the magic you are looking for is in the work you are avoiding”, as the saying goes.
Allen Wheelis, the author of How People Change,?proposed a sequence that unfolds from struggle through to growth.
“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.” - Allen Wheelis
As individuals, we’ll do anything to avoid suffering and cling to our old habits. In teams, and organisations we feel inclined to conform to the existing norms, putting up with suffering rather than rocking the boat. In organisations, where people are often judged on their performative ‘busyness’ we probably skip important steps in Wheelis’ sequence and go straight from ‘suffering’ to reactive? ‘action’. Applying superficial sticky plasters over our wounds, skipping the learning opportunities of the ‘insight’ stage and the commitment of the ‘will’ stage, we miss out on meaningful ‘change’ and go straight back to the original ‘suffering’.
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Insight
What takes us out of suffering is insight, and insight only comes from acknowledging the struggle and creating the SPACE to make sense of it rather than rushing to action.In our personal lives, this SPACE might come through a conversation with a friend, or time alone for self-reflection. SPACE to see different perspectives on our suffering, SPACE for insight and solutions to emerge in their own time.
In our working lives, SPACE tends to be harder to find. Back-to-back meetings, too much Work-in-Progress on our Jira board, the ever-present pressure to act ‘busy’ and seemingly productive. We therefore must be more intentional about creating SPACE at work.