Patterns for change

- As teams begin looping and start experimenting with their way of working, there are some ways of approaching that process that lead to dramatically better outcomes. We think of them as patterns and there are five. The first one is through them, not to them, which is reminding us of this idea that change is not something we're going to issue or mandate or put on other people. We're not going to say this is something I want you to try. We're going to actually turn it the other way and say what do we want to try? What do they want to try? So it's about what's happening through people, through their engagement with the work and through their own questioning of what's in their way that leads to the better outcomes. So the example would be, instead of going to a team and say hey, I think you should try this alternative decision-making pattern and let us know how it goes and kind of sitting in the leadership level waiting for the answers to come back, it's actually saying what would we, as a leadership team, like to try to make our own work and our own engagement better and what do they want to try and let's let them actually go do it. The second idea is learn by doing. So usually we sit there and say well, gosh, is this the right practice, is this the right structure, is the right way to solve this team's problems and we list all the pros and cons and we sit and we debate and we dwell and we don't make any decisions. And instead of that, I'm saying no, no, no, just learn by doing. Instead of debating it for a week, just do it once and if it serves you, do it again. And if doesn't serve you or it drives you crazy, don't ever do it again, but now you know. You know from contact with reality rather than from hypotheses and thinking and projecting and predicting what will happen. And so it's kind of like going from a bike with training wheels, where you're not really riding at all, you're not feeling the feeling, all you're doing is preparing for a spin class, to being on a balance bike, being on a bike where it's like, oh yeah, I'm actually feeling what this is like and it's giving me a better instinct about whether this is going to be good for me or not. The third idea is start small. So, if you think about the instincts of large organizations, people are used to, they're trained, in fact, to move the needle. Big ideas, big programs, big initiatives, that's the only way to get noticed, to kind of stand out and actually to affect the business in a real way. The problem though is that, again, if we're doing this learning approach, if we're finding out by playing, then we don't want to necessarily take that risk, that level of risk of like wow, we just made a huge change to the whole organization. And worse, most big changes get immobilized by the bureaucracy they're trying to fix. So even though you think it's a good idea, how many months or years will it take you to get all of the approvals and all the willing people ready to even try it. So instead, with start small, the idea's like no, no, no, what's the smallest possible place that we can find out? What's the smallest number of people or the smallest blast radius where let's just do it here, we'll do it this week, right. So, if it comes to something like let's blow up our budgeting process and do something more dynamic, well, doing that org-wide is going to take you years, but going to one team and saying for this team, for this quarter, what if we let them budget differently, what if we let them try and then we'll do a retrospective after and find out how did that enable them to be more responsive, more flexible, more adaptive. Did they spend more or less? Did they make more or less margin? Like what is their PnL telling us? That's so achievable and so if we do that in one or two or 10 pockets of the organization, we might be set up for that bigger move way faster than we would have been had we fought the good fight for the big change. The fourth pattern is start by stopping, which is super counterintuitive for us. All you have to open a kitchen drawer or a garage to see that we're really good at adding things, we're not so good at taking them away and sometimes when we're with an organization and we're looking at attention, we're thinking maybe the best thing to do is just get rid of this and just get it out of the way and see what emerges. So we had one client that had 45 hours a week of meetings, on average, for the leadership team, so no time to eat, no time to think, and one solution would have been gosh, let's re-engineer each one of those meetings, one at a time, and long that would take, but the start by stopping pattern said no, no, no, what if we just took two weeks and did none of these meetings and see where it hurt. What'd we miss? What'd we want that we didn't have? And so that's exactly what we did. Two weeks later, everybody sat down and said gosh, I missed this or I needed that or I wish we had a moment to connect and coordinate on x, y, and z and they rebuilt the operating rhythm from scratch rather than trying to fix this broken system. And by the end, it was 12 or 13 hours a week instead of 45. So start by stopping can gives us that freedom, that space to just see what's true and what's real and what we need in a way that I think working on policy and practice and trying to make it better and trying to add, add, add, add, add, can actually not do, kind of holds us back. The fifth and final pattern is called join the resistance because what's easy for us to do as early adopters, as people that are kind of excited about the new, is to polarize and judge the people that aren't playing, right? You're not looping with us, you're not coming to the meeting, you're not thinking about things differently, so you're a late adopter, you're a dinosaur, you're in the way. And the reality is that that's not going to get you anywhere. What gets you somewhere is to go to these people say hey, teach me, what's in your way? What's holding you back? What's preventing you from playing with us and sort of pursuing this vision with us? And they'll tell you, right? I have too many bosses, I don't have enough time to think or to show up to this stuff, I have incentives and bonuses that are pulling me in opposite directions from what you're trying to do. That's insight, right, that's information that you can use to change the program itself to maybe do some new looping on some new issues that help more and more and more people come into the fold and make the space for continuous participatory change.