Navigating the Cone of Knowing Shit During Change
A few years ago, I was consulting to large utility company. The organization was very bureaucratic, hierarchical, and slow, with top-down heavy change processes. I was required to use the organization’s change methodology and documentation which were all MS Word documents and processes straight from the 90s. As I started working the sections of the 57-page change plan document, my heart sank. The document asked me to indicate the tactics I would use to manage the change, the number of job aids I would create, the number of training sessions required, what people would “resist” about the change, the number of hours that would be required to manage the change from start to finish, and on and on. For context, this was a 12-month initiative that hadn’t even officially kicked off yet.
In other words, I was being asked to predict the future.
Going through the process triggered a mess of emotions in me. I felt frustrated, despair, lost, confused, and overall, my confidence in my abilities as a change manager took a major hit. Even though I knew better, it was hard not to feel like I should know these things or that other change managers must be better than me if they can figure this out. After all, it was in the change plan, surely it wouldn’t be there if it was just bullshit and people made it all up? Turns out, BS was exactly what it was.
After struggling with the document and the process for a couple of weeks, I went back to the client and told them that there was no way to complete the document with any level of certainty and that most of the content I added was completely made up based on broad assumptions and guesses. Their response? That was fine, they just needed the document to check a governance box and create an estimate for a project budget proposal.
“Don’t let the plan drive the change, let the change drive the plan”
THE LESSON
Every organization is a Complex Adaptive System (CAS) in which change is unique (has never been done before in the context that it’s being done in now), emergent (behaviour change and new ways of working emerge from interactions among connected people) and non-deterministic (the outcome of a change is not predictable from the outset). In a CAS, building understanding is a function of time and the velocity with which you conduct change activities and experiments.
In other words, you need to do shit if you want to learn shit.
When we first start a change initiative, we know the least and uncertainty is at the highest. In other words, we don’t know shit. Ironically, this is where traditional change management processes say we should develop our big upfront plans for managing the change. However, until you act, everything you think you know is just an assumption. The faster you act, the faster you learn and progress through the cone.
MY APPROACH
My approach is simple - don’t let the plan drive the change, let the change drive the plan. What this means practically is that I create a “good enough” plan as a starting point and then leverage progressive elaboration to gradually increase the level of detail of the plan as I gain knowledge, rather than starting with an overly detailed plan. Critically, I frame up my lean strategy then get it in front of stakeholders quickly to validate that I am heading in the right direction.
Here is my high-level process:
I use my lightweight Strategic Change Canvas to quickly organize my initial thinking and frame up my lean strategy
I use a change Kanban board to establish a pull-based system of work to track my change experiments (this is my tactical work plan)
I establish a Minimum Viable Change Process (MVCP) which is my process for continuously executing experiments, inspecting their results, and then adapting my approach based on what I see happening
And finally, I act!
