In Change Is Changing Dave Gray highlights the fact that change management has previously been seen as being a change from one stable state to another target stable state and that this is no longer the case. Rather it is necessary for organisations to deal with constant change.
I think that is an insightful perception worth building on. We need to change the perception of change from something that is disruptive, unpleasant and costly that rarely works to the core fuel that drives the organisation’s relevance and survival.
The ever increasing rate of innovation and change demands that organisations don’t reconfigure themselves once every 10 years but are constantly in the process of adaptive change and that lean and agile response to change and constant innovation are the bedrock for tomorrow’s successful organisations.
I believe that treating change as the fundamental fuel of the business process can deliver more relevant products and services in a shorter time. It also requires a change in mindset which is entirely contiguous with creating more human organisations.
The change fueled business process looks something like this:
There are a number of suggestions embedded above so let me expand a little here:
Change Energizing the Intuition
When change occurs / is perceived it is of two types. Incremental change involves changes in the elements of existing patterns. Paradigm change, or occurrences which do not fit the pattern the brain is currently using for interpreting sensory data results in an orientation response (colloquially known, politely, as a What-The-Heck moment) during which a very rapid search is made for a pattern which satisfies the changed data. Interestingly this state is one of heightened suggestibility, this actually helps us to learn.
Why is pattern matching related to intuition? Gary Klein has been studying intuition for many years in some of the most demanding organisations and circumstances in the world, not least the US Marine Corps.. His findings are presented in an accessible form in his book “The Power of Intuition”. At root it appears that intuition, just knowing what to do and acting on it without a lengthy assessment process, is a common fundamental human skill which is capable of training and improvement. It is based, Klein contends, on repeated experience embedded as patterns along with associated successful responses. This is a model based on many years of studying intuition in decision making.
In my view it is unlikely that this is the only use of these pattern matching mechanisms. The way the Orientation Response seeks to make sense suggests to me that it is likely that the brain can access and sort huge numbers of these patterns very quickly and not just choose one stock response but create a composite which most nearly matches the new circumstances. So during the Orientation Response we do both very rapid pattern matching and become more suggestible allowing new ideas and suggestions from outside our current set to be considered. I think this is the mechanism in play when the intuition presents sudden flashes of insight which help us solve completely new problems or perhaps even more importantly ask completely new questions.
So it’s worth having deeply experienced people who are also great analytical thinkers working in that intuition grid acting as a first filter on the ever changing stream of change. This may require a change in the mindset of both the deeply experienced people in question and those around them. In the case of the people themselves they may well need to be reassured that their intuition is worth using and habits of complete reliance on reductionist analysis may need to be changed (liminal coaching). In the case of those around them the habit of protective insistence on reductionist analytical proof prior to action may also need to be changed (liminal coaching). What serves the organisation best is the sweet spot of equilibrium between the two qualities, but intuition should drive.
Change-energized intuitions driving the heuristic sense of the possible
The sense in which I am using the term ‘heuristic’ here is that which Roger Martin defines in his description of the knowledge funnel, comprised of Mystery Heuristic and Algorithm (The Design of Business by Roger Martin published by the Harvard Review Business Press). “It starts with a question” (page 9) and the author gives the example of gravity or the Mystery of what is it that makes things fall? He then goes on to say (page 10) that “We develop heuristics — rules of thumb- that guide us toward a solution by way of organised exploration of the possibilities”. These explorations may then result in processes which can become algorithms and the example of the McDonald brothers who developed the quick service limited menu restaurant and Kroc who pared I down to the bare minimum algorithm.
Interestingly Martin also identifies that no one has yet succeeded in defining a reliable successful algorithm for pop music (and that is certainly not for the want of trying).
I like the model and the way it describes the different types of thinking which need to be applied for innovation to successfully drive a sustainable organisation.
However I suggest that change is a driving input to the business process and the mysteries that become questions in Martin’s knowledge funnel are a function of the constant flow of change into the organisation. Constant change drives constant innovation.
Martin rightly identifies the predominance of what he describes as reliability thinking though I think it maps pretty well completely onto the concept of linear reductionist analytical thinking. The bias towards this type of thinking for reliability security and safety is what produces that frozen inability in an organisation to respond to significant change in its environment.
As Gary Klein points out in his book ‘The Power of Intuition’, “we shouldn’t simply follow our intuitions, as they can be unreliable and need to be monitored. Yet we shouldn’t suppress our intuitions either, because they are essential to our decision-making and can’t be replaced by analyses or procedures”.
Likewise Roger Martin proposes that there is a deeply creative reciprocity possible between the two different types of thinking that characterize the innovation types and the operational / algorithmic types. The last chapter in his book headed ‘Getting Personal’ is devoted to offering advice on how to bridge the seeming divide between these types of thinking.
Both these books are great and have a lot to offer in terms of insight and practical approaches to improving things but without doubt both identify what people believe and what they think as being fundamental to the disconnect between fluid change, intuition and improvisation and the need for definition, accuracy and algorithms to actually make accessible products and services.
It is in the area of helping people to see the benefits of other points of view and the limiting nature of their particular belief systems that Liminal Thinking as a discipline has so much offer with its systematic description of how beliefs function and how they can both empower and frustrate us in what we want to achieve.
What we do with applied Liminal Coaching will vary greatly from person to person but is successful in bringing about clearer and more considered access to the intuitive abilities and allowing the reductionist linear thinking part of the mind to play its full part as well.
We can help with the change of mindset mentioned at the beginning of this piece.
Entirely contiguous with creating more human organisations
I am happy to assert that this kind of investigation of what we believe and how we think is indeed entirely contiguous with creating more human organisations as it will enable people in organisations to develop greater insight into the contributions that different people may make and to question their own tendency to think they must be right.
I would go so far as to say that the approach would be universally useful in situations where there appears to be insoluble conflict.
