Thanksgiving Lessons for Change Management!
Posted by Todd VanNest on Tue, Nov 23, 2010
The overarching theme in this forum is finding power in simplicity and overcoming the trend in organizations and mgt literature to infuse the already-complex thing we call CHANGE with yet more complexity (processes, models, mountains of metrics, plans for plans, etc.). During this holiday week, I offer our readers a brief, slice-of-pie-sized reflection on this dynamic. Share and Enjoy!...
Think about your years of experience with a major holiday like Thanksgiving. Some things have changed year-by-year, some things changed or morphed slowly over generations. Yet other things that stand firm in your memory have never changed, e.g., the smell of roast turkey or pumpkin pie, being with family, football on TV, or even a celebratory loosening of one more notch on the belt.
My own reflection on this led me to consider two critical lessons for change:
a) In our experience as humans, we take on a great deal of change—even change foisted upon us without choice, IN STRIDE (so why so much whining about that in our experience in organizations???); and
b) The most powerful elements in our experience, even when under stress or subject to dramatic, uncontrollable circumstances, are RITUALS…NOT PROCESS.
Here are a few examples from my own experience:
*Sharing an pumpkin-flavored shake with my mother who was in Stage 4 cancer and unable to eat due to the effects of ‘chemo’ (family and pumpkin as ritual; form of meal as process);
*Sending a mail-order pie to my daughter who is away at school; (pumpkin and an expression of love as ritual; mail-order as process);
*Going to a ‘spinning’ class with my sister on Black Friday instead of running outside in the inclement weather (exercise and shopping mall avoidance as ritual; bike v. run as process);
*Celebrating an “early Christmas” at our Turkey Day gathering because more fortunate family members were scheduled to be on a Caribbean cruise over Christmas (family and xmas as ritual; timing & location as process).
In all these cases, process mattered, but we were not slaves to the process. We still had to plan, anticipate resistance among family members, and be disciplined about making sure we got to the right place at the right time and that the events went off without too much stress, but it was RITUAL that mattered most—it was the glue the held us together in unusual circumstances.
A HOLIDAY CALL-TO-ACTION:
Think about how you can honor (and expand on) rituals and demonstrate greater flexibility around process (e.g., organizational change and project management) to make your change stick…
