Change is never unnecessary.
Change is never brought about when it isn’t needed. No-one initiates a change process where they don’t think it’s needed. You might end up in a change process where you don’t think it’s needed. That’s a completely different thing.
We all have experiences all the time. They’re constantly created by us, from us and with us. Experience is created when you take the bike to your office just as much as when you’re accomplishing something you thought impossible. All experiences are experienced from within. Within ourselves, within our minds.
Sometimes the experience is initiated or triggered by someone else. The experience itself is created within you. It’s easily described by the values cycle:
The experience isn’t really created WITH the external event. It’s created IN RELATION TO the external event.
From this perspective it becomes utterly clear that an initiated change process comes from within a person. It comes from the world view and the values of an individual. The reason to why it’s always initiated of necessity is that change processes are painful, take energy and risky.
You might not experience them that way. You might experience them as utterly gratuitous. That’s because if the process isn’t initiated by you, it’s an external event. If the external event is built upon a very different world view.
The person initiating the change process might see, perceive or experience something different from you, causing them to try to change that very thing. Be it the economic system, the way you conduct meetings in your company or the organisation of the dishwasher. The process comes from a place of need.
That’s also why we at times need to change a winning concept. A win is only a win if it’s perceived to be one. To win, we need to play a game, and give value to the same things. If I were to show up at gymnastics practice and try to count goals, I’d be having a hard time.
The winning concept is only winning as long as we’re counting the points that the concept is scoring.
The conversation on why we change is hugely lacking in my point of view. We’re not talking enough about why we need to change things, we’re giving focus to how we change. If an organisation was to have a conversation with each and every employee on why there’s a process of restructuring, explaining the experiences and world views that drive the change, the organisation would ease the change processes. There wouldn’t be even remotely as much friction in the transition.
I worked extra for a low-budget store as a cashier for a while. We sold almost everything, from horse food to lawnmowers to candy and decorations. The only thing we didn’t sell was food. I once talked with my boss about a conversation she’d had with the full time employees. The management were trying to get some change processes going to restructure the store, and the employees weren’t at all cooperating.
I was stunned, because I see how much competition the store is prone to. As soon as Amazon comes to Sweden, they’re going to be out of business. They’d be heavily affected just by a dollar store popping up in the vicinity. I saw the need for a change process.
The problem was, there wasn’t any conversation between management and on the ground employees. They have completely different ambitions for the store, and even more important, they have different world views. The employees don’t see the same things as management does. Therefore, the change is opposed.
Change processes are never wrong, but they need to be explained in order to be valid. The experience behind the process need to be explained, the world views need to be in sync. As soon as a change process becomes just an external event, something separate from me and my world, it’ll be unsuccessful, discouraged and opposed.
