Bureaucratic radicals 2: pace and embedding

I wrote about the idea of slow change, working with the grain of Old Power bureaucracy. Prompted by Mike Murawski’s amazing live tweeting and the responses — go and look now, it is better than this post…

… i want to flesh out an idea about on rate and effect.

1. The revolution. A fast and impactful spike of change. Expensive, short-lived activity. Generally led by stars. Press coverage.
2. The evolution. Long slow change, embedded. Long term, generally unglamorous. Unseen outside field.

These two curves show how I think these feel. Going back to high school physics, the height is the change, the steepness of the curve is the rate of change but the area under the line is the total accumulated actual impact – things achieved.

Over a two-three year period, radical change is amazing. But as a sector i think we collectively forget what comes next. The funding dries up, the project team leaves and — let’s be honest — usually the star project leader / change agent / CEO leaves, what happens next? Flatline

We draw one of two false conclusions – the change will continue up at this rate; or that the rate of change won’t drop rapidly afterwards and the organisation ossify around a ‘new stasis’.

Slow change attracts no glamour, is seen as ordinary business (witness, there’s no money for digitisation projects now, that’s just the job) and yet over a ten year lens it can deliver more. See the area under the graph.

The dream I have is not to stop the flashy peaks. They’re the only way of getting major investment, after all. But I want to make Type 1 plus Type 2 — change type 3. Reduce the drop off and make that flat line just a little higher and steeper.

At ACMI we are in type 1 radical change now – but seeking to work on both types of change at once. My focus – with others of course – is almost entirely on the program, underlying enabling activity, and the operational model for the organisation after reopening. How will we operate the new things? (which is how we will deliver on their potential for good, years into the future.)

I’ll let you know in three years how we went with that. But some early thoughts:

• Some staff are already in that headspace. Use them to normalise the future post-change.
• Resource the year after opening differently – staff will work slower because they’re doing the new things. Let them have space to learn – generate new habits – otherwise they’ll revert to the old, easy ways. No criticism – I would too.
• Focus on a future state beyond the radical change. What would the normalising of that change look like. Not how do we operate this new thing? but how does the world look when this new thing is two years old and kinda boring because we’re good at it now so what’s next?’. That spike isn’t the destination. A visionary goal built from its peak is the destination.
• Set the right Outcomes and KPIs. Measuring success in the three months after a radical change is almost meaningless yet we all do it. If funders need it, hell, go ahead. But for the organisation’s real measurement of success, a lens of more than two years is needed.
• Recognise that the goal post-change isn’t to continue in a ‘change mindset’ – there is a consolidation mindset that does smaller scale, local ‘operate/deliver this as best we can’ work.
• Farewell your project stars appropriately – And claim that design award. But share the shiny glamour with the decade-servers who have come on the journey and are going to make the long term effort that yields genuine success.