A Human Centered Approach to Unlocking Change
This article was co-authored with Sarah Herberg
In founding Loom, one of our central ambitions is to help people drive lasting change. We know from our past experiences that change only happens when we honor and focus on the human beings within an organization. Our first month in business has only reaffirmed this hypothesis. From helping a Fortune 500 executive team navigate change to helping an entrepreneur reimagine her business, every individual needs support, skills and a safe space to grow. We can’t simply point them in a direction and tell them how, we have to help them find their way and teach them how.
This got us thinking about the need to shift our view of organizations. Often, traditional change management over-emphasizes rigid organizational systems and structures. Yet, organizations are more like dynamic ecosystems. Ecosystems are always evolving. They need diversity to thrive and yet at the same time must maintain a delicate balance. Because change introduces stress into the ecosystem, it must be pursued in a sustainable way that allows for rest, recovery and renewal.
Our desire to fit people and companies into static two dimensional frameworks does not honor this complexity, in fact it diminishes the most powerful parts of it.
A more human approach
Using the ecosystem and the incredible organisms within as our inspiration, we are creating a new approach to navigating change. We’ve developed four practices to help inspire and guide us:
- Support sustained evolution. Evolution occurs through small, incremental changes over a long period of time, yet organizational change asks individuals to transform overnight. Instead, we want to enable people to continually evolve by building skills that will serve them today and into the future. One of the ways we can do this is by working in experiments, allowing teams to start small, test, learn and iterate since change is cyclical, never linear. Another way is working with teams to identify impactful, daily interactions where we can effect change quickly. These seemingly small moments can have outsize implications for shifting culture.
- Engage everyone, including those on the periphery. A thriving ecosystem is built for organisms big and small. Each member plays an important and unique role. To understand any organization we must first understand the people. We need to be curious about what it’s like to live in their world today, listening to the challenges they face and their ideas about the future. This listening work can’t just happen at the top, we must understand the perspective of people throughout a company. As the ecosystem evolves, it’s important to preserve people’s sense of belonging. We can do this by engaging them in the change process and helping them to redefine their role.
- Enable relationships to become symbiotic. Symbiosis is defined as two or more distinct organisms living together for the benefit of one or both. Organizations need both diversity and balance as the people within share — and compete — for the same resources. We can maintain balance by infusing the work with an abundance mindset, facilitating purposeful connection and teaching people how to collaborate and co-create. We can build learning environments where people safely practice empathy, vulnerability and productive disagreement so that together, we can collectively unlock a path forward.
- Reward rest and recovery. My co-founder Sarah and I live in Minnesota where the cyclicality of nature is very pronounced. Each winter we plunge into a snow-covered landscape with temperatures that dip into the negatives. While at times it feels like winter will never be over, each year we are rewarded for our patience when the snow melts, the temperatures rise and our landscapes glint green once again. While ecosystems reward rest and recovery, we often struggle to make space for it in our work. We expect change to happen on an arbitrary timeline and often all at once. In a more human approach, we can honor change as a journey that requires effort, failure and time. We can build a practice of allowing people to process, reflect and rest so that they can renew and continually do the hard work that change requires.
