From A →B: Tristram Shandy and the Nonlinearity of Change

My Every Little Model podcast co-host Tricia Conyers and I throughly enjoyed hosting our workshop earlier this week on The Key Transitional Moments of a Change Journey and we send a sincere “thank you!” to all who attended and participated.

During the session we had an opportunity to run an abridged version of a group exercise where we ask participants to take out a piece of paper (ideally an index card), write down the letter “A” on the left side of the paper and the letter “B” on the right, and draw a line connecting the two that represents the shape of a change journey you recently participated in.

We routinely see participants drawing squiggly lines that capture the ups and downs, choppiness, even recursiveness, of the experience of a change journey.

We have even seen this version:

However, in our experience to date, we’ve never seen a straight and clean arrow from A→B:

The explanation for these shapes ranges depending on the experience.

For some, their drawing depicts resistance to change, due to a lack of stakeholder engagement or even resistance due to the change being seen as a threat (or even the wrong thing to do). For others, the undulating line reflects a lack of planning and coordination or delays in decision making. Still, the participants will say, they learned a lot from the experience.

We have also had participants who gleefully describe their diagrams as experiments or even expeditions. They talk about false starts and having to return to the beginning to reframe the reasons (the overarching “why”) for the change journey. They share stories of experiments that failed as well as of new insights about what might work. They describe examples of emergence in the change journey, moments when something unplanned for and unexpected occurred that made progress possible. They, too, say they learned a lot from the experience.

I’m going to digress for a moment and reluctantly admit that the time I spent in ENGL2103 (The Rise of the Novel) was useful. I wasn’t long into my career as an organizational change consultant when I began to reflect on the reality of the journeys my clients and I were on and how they bore some resemblance to the famous squiggles that appeared in Lawrence Stern’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

This 18th century novel is known for the meandering, comically overcomplicated narration by the fictional character in the book’s title as he tells the reader his life story. As Polly Dickson described the book in The Paris Review:

Tristram Shandy is a digressive meditation on storytelling, an autobiography whose protagonist’s birth itself is delayed until its fourth volume. At one point, Shandy pauses to draw out the versions of the plot line articulated in its first five volumes, each one contorted by bumps, twists, and curls. Seen in these terms, the novel becomes a project in interrupting the conventional narrative line, complicating what he calls “the shortest line … which can be drawn from one end to another,” the simplest, straightest transfer from A to B, from beginning to end. Life, in this text, is endlessly, hilariously tangled. (Source)

Describing journeys as “endlessly, hilariously tangled” might not describe all change programs, but it captures quite a few.

Change rarely occurs in precisely the way it is planned. The reality of organizational change programs rarely meets the original expectations in the precise way it was anticipated.

That’s why we think it’s always worthwhile asking yourself (or your teams) to pull out a piece of paper, draw an “A” and a “B” on either side of the page and to draw a line of how they …

• think the organizational change should go
• think the organizational change will go
• see the organizational change going now
• see how the organizational change actually went

Reflecting on the shapes and their differences will certainly be enlightening.

Before you go …

Are you looking to maximize the chances of making a positive and sustained impact with your organizational change program?

Our new Leading Change program (coming this summer) will build your confidence and capability to frame, define, and successfully navigate your organizational change journey.

You will learn the concepts and craft of navigating the emotional and practical sides of implementing change.

And you will get practical tools, templates, and checklists used by leading change practitioners in the field.

You can learn more about the program and express your interest here.

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