The Successful Change Process

Being a leader of innovation, transformation, and change is not easy. It can be messy with many missteps and mistakes. However, if we are willing and able to embrace the uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, change can be easier, more effective, and can create opportunities. And if we leverage the power of our curiosity - individually and collectively, we can continuously increase our understanding of a situation - which leads to better decisions and actions.

“To understand

is to know what to do.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Creating change is a collaborative process of understanding and learning about the constantly evolving environment, people, and dynamics. The better our understanding, and the better our ability to understand, the better our ability to make relevant, valuable decisions that result in desirable and sustainable outcomes in response to – and in anticipation of – those changes.

Creating this business agility is an iterative process that starts wherever people are – including leaders.

• Start wherever you are right now.
• Start with what you've got available to you and the knowledge you've currently got.
• Start with the questions you currently have and are curious about.

The goal is to individually, collectively, and iteratively develop the willingness and ability to continuously learn, understand, and take on new challenges. This continuous understanding-learning-growing evolution will accumulate into resilient and adaptable habits and cultures of continuous improvement.

Table of Contents

1. Traditional Change Approaches are too Mechanical
2. Business Agility Creates Competitive Advantage By Updating Our Mindsets
3. Business Agility is an Ongoing Process of Transformation and Growth
4. Conclusion

Traditional Change Approaches are too Mechanical

Holistic, entrepreneurial approaches can seem messy, challenging, and difficult … if we don’t know how to navigate the environment. However, once we have developed the willingness and abilities necessary, these approaches can make our personal and professional lives much easier, and we can create meaningful, self-perpetuating growth.

We are taught to think in artificial ways, trying to define everything as tidy, linear, self-contained, and mechanical environments. And we are taught to ‘recognize’ problems based on what we learned from textbooks and existing patterns, and then to use ‘tried-and-true’ scripts to try to solve those ‘recognized’ problems. 

This approach is then rewarded in the business environment. Financial advisors often were reminded they ‘won’t get fired for buying blue chip’ (ie safety, but not great performance). Most environments encourage a culture of ‘going-along-to-get-along, being ‘loyal’, being a ‘team player’, and not ‘rocking the boat’ - even when the 'emperor is not wearing any clothes'. And many project environments warn against ‘analysis-paralysis’, and hold a strong action-bias that does not include relevant analysis or reflection.

The mechanical, reductionist, action-focused approach often causes more problems than it solves. And even more frighteningly (given the serious challenges we are facing politically, economically, socially, etc) when the ‘tried-and-true’ approaches don’t work, we are told ‘it’s just the way it is’, ‘nothing can be done’, ‘don’t fight reality’.

If we are willing to develop our abilities to foster relevant change, we can generate much more relevant, valuable, and sustainable outcomes.

Business Agility Creates Competitive Advantage Through Our Ability to Update Mindsets

Our ability to lead valuable transformation depends on our curiosity and our ability to embrace complexity. That requires updating our mindsets that allow us to function and thrive in uncertainty, ambiguity, and complexity. Transforming our mindsets is difficult, but generates the most significant - and the most sustainable - transformations in our leadership effectiveness.

Mindsets to develop can be categorized as:

• Holistic thinking: being able to recognize and map out various non-linear systems, the independence, interdependencies, and dynamics. Holistic thinking allows us to become more comfortable with complicated and complex environments.
• Entrepreneurial thinking: being willing and able to really understand the whole situation (exploring), trying a range of approaches to learn where the most effective changes can be created (experimentation), and then finding ways to generate value (exploitation).
• Collaborative approaches: so we can motivate and engage a diverse range of stakeholders in a process creative conflict which results in understanding new perspectives, developing new insights, learning that results in sustainable and valuable individual and collective transformation.
• Body wisdom: the ability to work with our physiological processes as a source of valuable, non-cognitive information, and to choose better decisions and behavior (such as leveraging stress and compassion, building resilience, letting go of outdated patterns and biases, accessing more rich information and insights, etc).

Extensive research in a range of fields consistently shows that looking at whole systems (holistic mindset), constantly seeking to improve things (growth and entrepreneurial mindsets) collaboratively, and knowing how to leverage your physiology (body wisdom) can each create self-perpetuating competitive advantage for business leaders.

?This holistic, entrepreneurial, collaborative, and physiologically rooted approach to leading change is the foundation of business agility. Everyone can develop these mindsets if they are willing to. With the help of a coach who is knowledgeable and experienced in developing these mindsets, you can accelerate and deepen your ability to foster business agility. In my work with clients, I use a range of cognitive and somatic/physiological processes.

Business Agility is An Ongoing Process of Transformation and Growth

Updating mindsets is best done through experience and experimentation (being agile or entrepreneurial). This includes:

1. Map the landscape to understand and deepen your understanding of the situation.
2. Based on your current understanding of the situation, define a challenge and prepare an experiment.
3. Run the experiment.
4. Assess the experiment using reflection (cognitive) and reflexion (somatic/physiological).
5. Celebrate big and small wins.
6. Repeat.

Understand and hone your understanding of the situation.

• Understand the situation by creating a ‘landscape map’ to develop familiarity with your understanding of situations holistically. I have helped clients map and understand their stakeholders’ behaviors, the relationships, and dynamics among people and entities, timelines, processes, etc. A range of formalized maps exist that can help you start the mapping process, however, the limitation of formalized maps is that they are static. To help my clients develop and then update/transform their maps and mental frameworks with new insights, I also help my clients understand how to develop their own maps.
• Identify what areas you are familiar with and comfortable with. And then identify where there are gaps in your understanding, and what aspects of the landscape you are uncomfortable with. Don't dwell on the gaps and discomfort, but build and maintain your curiosity about how to fill in gaps in understanding, and what the sources of discomfort might be. Pay attention to what reduces the discomfort, and increases your understanding.
• In subsequent iterations, collaborate with others to enhance the quality of the collective maps and understanding.
• Keep honing your maps to reflect your (and other peoples') current understanding of the situation. Sometimes you need to start completely new maps; sometimes you just need to tweak them. Focus on strengthening your understanding of the whole. And keep exploring your comfort and discomfort. The goal is not to get it 'right', but rather to strengthen your understanding of the various systems (eg people, organizations, processes, etc) and the dynamics among those systems.

Define the challenge for the (next) iteration & develop your strategy for the experiment.

• For your first few experiments, pick a challenge that you can try over the next week that is low-risk, and with a high likelihood of success that you can do on your own. In subsequent iterations make it bigger and gradually add other people to collaborate with. Start with people who are easy to work with, and gradually add more people who have diverse perspectives (ie challenge your perspectives).
• Based on your maps/understanding, identify what the most important actions to focus on that could generate the outcomes you want in this experiment. Write down what you expect the outcomes will be by making those changes. Make a note of your positive expectations, your concerns, your questions, etc. Each subsequent iteration will allow you to develop a better understanding of what the most likely drivers are that will generate the outcomes you want.
• Develop a strategy for the experiment that addresses the individual, team, and organizational level that you believe will get you realistic results in a one-week experiment. Incorporate not only the mechanical business processes, but also the soft skills that accelerate the willingness and ability to create change (cognitive and physiological competencies, mindsets, leveraging stress, letting go to be able to move on, etc).
• Define the length of time for the experiment (eg one week). The cycle should be long enough that some real change can be generated, but not so long that processes and outcomes can entrench so there is a high cost to adjusting the direction.

Run your experiment.

• Run the experiment for the timeframe you chose (eg one week). Don't extend the experiment (unless there is something critical that can't be left hanging). Close the experiment on time, and use the experiences and observations to develop better understanding and to design more effective experiments.

Assess the experiment using reflection and reflexion. 

1.    Factual review: What did you achieve (expected and unexpected)? What didn’t you achieve? What worked well? What didn’t? Was your risk level too high, too low, or just right? Are there metrics or processes that will help you understand the situation and the dynamics better?

2.    Analysis: Why do you believe you got the results you got (or not)? Did you have all the competencies you needed to achieve the results you desired? Go back to your map(s) and see if your understanding of the situation has changed. Are there different dynamics than you originally understood? Is there information you missed, misunderstood, or overemphasized? Were participants willing and able to engage and collaborate appropriately? How can you improve your understanding of the situation? Are there new competencies, mindsets, or processes that need to be developed? Are there mentors, coaches, facilitators, guides, etc, that can help you improve your personal and collective process of business agility?

3.    Gut check: What felt good and what didn’t feel good? Was there anything surprising or shocking? How did that feel? Are you feeling tension or resistance to something? Where is your comfort and discomfort now? What are you curious about now? Leverage your body wisdom (interoception) to access information that is not cognitively available.

4.    Capture your “Stop, Start, Continue” learning. Was the focus of the experiment useful to move you towards the goals you have? Based on your current information and learning, what will help you to run a new experiment? Are there competencies you would like to develop? Can you enhance your mindsets (curiosity, holistic mindset, entrepreneurial mindset, growth mindset, collaboration mindset)? How can you gradually engage others in collaboration more effectively? Are there processes that will help you create better outcomes with the available resources? What else is needed (cognitively, physiologically, and systemically) for better performance in the next round of experimentation?

Seeking additional and diverse perspectives can strengthen your analysis, and deepen your understanding. As appropriate, engage more diverse people from your teams, your stakeholders, and by working with coaches, facilitators, guides, etc.

Celebrate big and small wins.

Check-in on what you are thankful for. What did you do that you are proud of? What did others do that helped you? What helped you move towards your goals? What was enjoyable?

Celebrate the big and the small wins. The power of celebration is not in the quality of champagne, but rather in the intrinsic feelings of joy and healthy pride, felt individually and collectively.

Really feel the joy and other body sensations arising from your celebration and gratefulness as this builds deep resilience, a success-orientation, and curiosity. The more you can tap into the joys of self-mastery and intrinsic motivation, the more likely you will be able and willing to navigate the good times and the not-so-good times successfully.

Repeat: strengthen your understanding, run another experiment, and get a little bit better each time.

Conclusion

To create successful change, embrace the risks and opportunities of change. Think of the process as an adventure, with trips and falls that can lead to learning, breakthroughs, transformation, growth, the creation of more fulfilling ways of doing things, and much more rewarding and profitable outcomes and results.

?The constant evolution of our environments and pressure to change is difficult. However, by committing to continuously update mindsets, improving our understanding of the environment, and continuously experimenting and transforming – individually and collectively – we can learn and create breakthrough, self-perpetuating, meaningful growth.

I would be pleased to help you identify how you can strengthen your change leadership, including deepening collective and individual understanding, and to run experiments to create the outcomes you want. Please connect with me and let me know what you are working on.

_______________________

How do you create successful change? What works for you?

Want to create breakthrough business results? Connect with me and let me know what results you want to generate. I'd love to chat with you to explore how you could increase your sustainable business performance and outcomes.

I have helped leaders and teams of small- and medium-sized organizations (eg technology-based entrepreneurial ventures, fast-growth companies, manufacturing, etc) create breakthrough revenues, client retention, operational and team effectiveness, profits, sustainable performance, and sustainable competitive advantage.

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Catarina von Maydell, MBA, works with leaders, individuals, and teams to facilitate sustainable breakthrough performance improvement and growth.

This article was previously published on .

Other articles you might be interested in:

Mindsets:

• Entrepreneurial, Growth, Holistic, and Collaborative  Mindsets

Collaborative & Entrepreneurial Competencies:

• Effectuation, Creative Conflict,  Graduated Creative-Conflict, Creating Collaboration, and the Creator-Coach-Challenger Paradigm

Personal Super-Powers:

• Body Wisdom, Mitigating Bias, Curiosity, and Generating Better Solutions

Leading Change and Transformation:

• Project Management Best Practices, Understanding Our Systems, Thinking Beyond Simple Metrics, and Deming’s 4 Factors of Change 
• Business Agility is About Humans, Human Dynamics in Organizations, 3-Levels of Leadership, Motivating Humans, Fostering Collaboration, Leadership and Resilience, and Psychological Safety