From Problems to Patterns
CONTEXT
Imagine picking up your remote control to turn on the TV, only to find that it doesn’t work.
What would you do?
If you’re like most people, you’d check and replace the batteries. This is a logical approach because experience has taught us that the batteries are usually the problem. And you’re likely close to 99% confident that replacing them will solve the issue.
Screen shot of the remote control exercise from our Lean Change Agent Workshop
Now, think about your biggest change challenges—the ones that keep you up at night, keep resurfacing in your organization, or simply leave you feeling stuck.
Pause for a moment and jot a few down, or make a mental note.
Next, take a look at some of the tricky change challenges reported by participants in our Lean Change Agent workshops from around the world.
Screen shot of the a collection of change challenges shared by participants in our Lean Change Agent workshop.
Do these challenges look familiar? Are yours similar?
Let’s wrap this exercise up with one final question: What’s the one thing you would do to solve your most difficult change challenge?
In other words, what’s your “change the batteries” solution—the one that would give you 99% confidence in a positive outcome?
Suddenly, your confidence isn’t so high. And for good reason.
THE BIG IDEA
An organization’s greatest change challenges are not problems to solve—they are patterns to shift.
Problems have a clear cause-and-effect relationship. They can be solved by breaking the system into parts, identifying the root cause, and fixing it.
Patterns, on the other hand, are recurring behaviours or interactions that emerge from system dynamics. They cannot be “fixed” in isolation, because there is no single root cause—only a confluence of causes.
Lean Change Agent workshop exercise - classifying change challenges as patterns or problems.
Patterns are the result of complexity—of working in complex adaptive systems where everything and everyone is interconnected in ways we cannot fully understand.
They can’t be solved with a single intervention, because the root cause of the pattern can never be fully known.
Organizational change management patterns generally fall into two basic classifications: patterns and anti-patterns.
Anti-Patterns
Anti-patterns are common responses to organizational change that may appear helpful on the surface but often prove counterproductive, leading to poor outcomes.
What makes anti-patterns tricky is that they’re not always intentional—they happen because people genuinely believe they’re doing the right thing.
From our new HexiChange kit: The Urgency Anti-Pattern
Creating urgency for change is a good example of an anti-pattern—and it’s one of 55 anti-pattern cards in our new HexiChange kit.
Urgency has long been considered a cornerstone of many change management frameworks and has been accepted as standard practice in the change management community for decades.
Yet, it often produces unintended negative outcomes as described on the back of the HexiChange card.
Patterns
Patterns are responses to organizational change that have been shown to contribute to positive outcomes more often than not. They reflect assumptions, mindsets, actions, or system conditions that allow positive change to take hold.
From our new HexiChange kit: The co-creation Pattern
The co-creation pattern is one of 65 pattern cards in our HexiChange kit.
The earlier we involve people in the change, the less we need to rely on “selling” the change—or, worse, pushing urgency to scare people into adopting it.
Once we recognize that our project’s biggest change challenges are not problems specific to the project, but patterns embedded in the organizational system, everything shifts.
LESSONS FOR MODERN CHANGE MANAGEMENT
Modern, complexity-minded change agents aim to identify anti-patterns and shift them toward positive patterns. Few things have a greater impact on a specific initiative—or on an organization’s overall change culture.
Patterns and anti-patterns can be difficult to spot, but we often sense them intuitively. What’s missing is an artifact that helps anchor what we’re noticing. Cartoons are an excellent way to surface patterns, because they allow you to quickly capture and express what you’re sensing in a tangible form.
This is the foundation of our HexiChange system. We’ve taken the best change management graphics and ideas from the past decade and transformed them into a sense-making tool of more than 300 individual cards.
Each card captures a real-world insight: an observable behaviour, a systemic tension, or a belief that shapes how change unfolds.
From Predict-and-Plan to Sense-and-Respond
Working with complex patterns of behaviour requires shifting our approach from predict-and-plan to sense-and-respond.
Because anti-patterns and patterns are complex and entangled, there’s no way to know in advance which interventions will bring about the desired change.
That’s why we need to experiment—trying things out, monitoring feedback, and then pausing or pivoting when necessary, or doubling down when we see success.
HexiChange includes more than 70 intervention cards inspired by the best ideas from Lean Change.
The Pattern and Anti-Pattern cards help you sense what is happening, while the Lean Change cards provide tangible options for experimenting with interventions that can shift anti-patterns toward new, healthier patterns of behaviour.
HexiChange can help you shift from anti-pattern to pattern.
For example, to move from urgency for change to co-creating change, we might take a stance that emphasizes cause and purpose over urgency.
Then, we could establish a big visible wall and invite stakeholders to actively participate in the change process.
Shifting Patterns Through Targeted Interventions
I’ll close with a real-world success story from one of our Lean Change Agent alumni.
This former student shared how she immediately put our Strategic Change Canvas into practice right after completing the workshop.
Fast-forward two years, and now every project seeking funding in her organization must complete a Strategic Change Canvas as part of the business case.
The canvas improved alignment through co-creation and meaningful dialogue, replacing the big, heavy documents that were once standard.
By starting at the project level, she helped create new organizational patterns of behaviour.
This was possible because the same entanglements that make organizational patterns so difficult to shift can also work in our favour—small interventions can spark positive change that spreads quickly.
Her experience illustrates the central point of this article: the biggest change challenges aren’t problems to solve, but patterns to shift.
By introducing a small, well-placed intervention, she didn’t “fix” a problem—she set in motion a new pattern that spread across the organization.
If these ideas resonate and you’d like to explore further, consider checking out the following:
Thanks for reading!
