????? Two ways to go through change.

We’re absorbing a lot of change these days. Mmm… more than that: we’re having a moment.

For some, the moment is overwhelming, and they find themselves retreating into certainty, wherever they can get it. This post is not about them—and it's not about politics. I'm talking about change in the small routines of our daily lives. The places where we feel the impact of change first, and where getting change "right" can have the most positive impact.

This is about those of us who may teeter on the edge of being overwhelmed, yet continue to absorb what we can, as fast as we can, as responsibly as we can.

For us, I see two paths forward:

1. You grind it out in straight line, slogging through and adopting the mantra, “When you’re going through hell, keep going.”
2. You flow with it, letting go of expectations and adopting the mantra: “Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.”

I'll posit—based on personal experience and a good number of overpriced b-school reading packets—that path #1 becomes overwhelming much faster than path #2.

How do we position ourselves (and others) to flow with change?

Naturally, the question becomes, what can we do to make sure we're on that second path? And as leaders, what can we do to nudge our teams onto that path, too?

To get an idea, I asked in a poll earlier this week how people prefer to be supported through change. It didn’t get much traction, but directionally, what I learned from it was that the thing that most people said makes them calm during times of change was understanding the story behind it. A few said being in it with others was most helpful, and no one chose “being seen” or “being in control of momentum.”

My takeaway from this (with the caveat that the sample size was way too small to be anything other than directional): in times of deep change, people first seek out a story to help them make sense of their worlds, and after that, they seek out a group to share it with. Empathy and a sense of control are—surprisingly—nice to have’s.

Sure, but... what do you actually DO with that? (An example)

Simple: get clear and your “why’s” and remind yourself and your people of them frequently.

Here's a for instance: last week, I had a question come my way from a recruiter who wanted to know if they could have our software screen candidates based on years of experience in addition to skills.

And I think it's in small, reasonable-sounding moments like this where too many people get change wrong and set one another up for the grind.

In these moments, people need something more than an answer, they need an answer that recalibrates them to the story of the change they're making. An answer that sets them up to flow.

In this case, I asked about why they wanted to screen based on years, heard out their (reasonable) answer (which had to do with historical behavior), and once I knew I wasn't missing anything, reminded them that the whole reason they had been interested to have our AI do the initial candidate sourcing was because machines have the processing power to do the pattern-matching required to find actual skills rather than use proxies—like years of experience—as shortcuts.

We talked about what keeping "years of experience" in the screening process would mean in practice: they'd reintroduce inefficiency and, potentially, bias into their process, and they'd prevent themselves from doing the more human—and humanizing—work of personally screening people and building relationships. Was it worth it? Or was working through this temporary learning curve worth the future state they'd been so excited about?

Being reminded of the larger journey helped the person recognize that what they were struggling with was a change management question as opposed to a software question... and it kept them flowing forward.

Magic making

How many small moments like that do we miss in our daily lives? How much less overwhelmed would we feel if someone just took a moment to anchoring and re-anchoring us to the story behind the change?

For all our change strategies, plans, and goals, sometimes it helps to remember that there's really only two ways through change: the grind and the flow... and that all we need to get back to flow is a quick reminder about what got us here in the first place.