People are Different? Really?

People are Different? Really?

by | Aug 28, 2022 | Leading

“That’s why Baskin Robbins has thirty-one flavors of ice cream.”

That was how my friend Brad explained that “people are different” to his six-year-old daughter.

We’ve always known people are different and we humans have been trying to analyze and categorize those differences for a long time.

History of categories of people differences

In 500 B.C.E. Alcmaeon of Croton theorized that differences were due to humors, bodily fluids: blood, water, choler / bile, or phlegm. In 500 BCE Hippocrates – the father of medicine –  calculated ratios of humors, wrote them down and popularized the theory.

This paradigm held power until the 19th century and we still have these words in the English language: sanguine (too much blood, overly warm and optimistic), melancholy (too much water, tears and sadness), choleric / bilious (too much choler or bile – bad tempered, nasty), phlegmatic (too much phlegm, stuffy, stolid, unemotional).

Wilhelm Wundt and William James pretty much invented psychology in the late 19th century, both saying that differences in the human mind explained differences in people.  Wundt, a structuralist, said differences were in the brain and body best studied through  an “Inside to outside” science. James, a functionalist, believed studying behavioral function from the “outside to inside” analysis would yield better results.. Both structuralists and functionalists were concerned with the conscious mind..

Sigmund Freud dwelled upon the unconscious,  basic drives affecting behavior like sex drive and the fear of death, which were common to all people.  He theorized that differences were caused by these drives and the degree to which socialization (super ego) constrained them.

Carl Gustav Jung hypothesized a collective unconscious containing archetypes which guided all people. He also identified two mental functions.

  • taking in information
  • making decisions

Jung implied that differences in these might be inherited.

BF Skinner ushered in Behaviorism, which says that all behavior is determined by experience.  Most of Skinner’s experimentation was conducted with rats in mazes – probably the best analogy for contemporary organization life.

Despite rich experimentation in psychology, early management theory seemed to assume that all people were the same and that motivation was delivered by a method used with mules, a “carrot” dangled in front of the nose and a “stick” applied to the rear end.

We came a long way in management theory in the late twentieth century, although too many are stuck in the “muleskinner mindset” of performance management. “Carrot and stick” still rules.

Psychometrics used by companies

Some companies use the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test to select and sort workers despite the fact that it is culturally biased and measures language, deductive analysis and spatial problem solving not general intelligence.

Some companies use personality tests, Caliper, 16pf, California Personality Assessment, etc. These tests typically measure extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to new experience.

Some use IQ tests and personality tests without the input or interpretation of psychologists trained to administer them.

Tests that show differences between people are a cottage industry. I’m going to highlight four, which I think have some value: Meyers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI), Life Orientations (LIFO), DISC assessment personality profile, Clifton StrengthsFinder by Gallup.

Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)

Carl Jung theorized two conscious brain functions, perceiving or taking in information, and judging, making decisions on that information. Katherine Briggs studied with Jung.  She later expanded the Jungian concept of cognitive function and added research on (internal or external focus) and lifestyle (do you prefer taking in information or deciding and acting.)

In 1954 her daughter Isabel Briggs-Myers codified this work into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,  Each of the functions/ or orientations is a continuum between two different preferences.

The word preference is key. It is like right or left handedness. Some people have such a strong hand preference that their non-dominant hand is quite limited. Some people are ambidextrous.

The four continua are each defined by two poles representing extreme answers to questions:

Where do you get energized?

I – internally – world of concepts and ideas

Introvert–

 

E – externally – world of people and places

-=Extravert

 
How do you prefer to take in information?

S– facts confirmed by the senses step by step

Sensing —

 

N – connections, associations – skip around

 

— Intuiting

 
How do you make decisions?

T – logical ordered process, +/- charts

 

 F – comparing impact on people and values

Thinking- –

 

Feeling

 
How do you prefer to live your life?

J-deciding and acting in a planned way

Judging—

P- earning and experiencing as it comes

Perceiving

This taxonomy produces sixteen personality types, with strength of preference,. For example, I am an ENTP, but I am only marginally an E and P, and at the top of the scale on N and considerably above the mid-point on T

I used the MBTI more than any psychometric assessment in my consulting with leadership teams.. It is well researched and documented as to statistical validity and the reliability of individual questions. Critics say the theory was created from thin air.  Perhaps, but it rings true.

What I like about MBTI  is that absorbing information and making decisions are critical to business and being aware of differences avoids misunderstanding and unproductive conflict.

I also like that the instrument doesn’t portray introverts as shy, broken people. Introverts relate and converse just like extraverts, they just get more energized by thinking and reflecting.

Life Orientation (LIFO)

The LIFO assessment was created in 1967 by Drs. Stuart Atkins and Allan Katcher based upon the psychological research of Erich Fromm, Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. I was introduced to LIFO at Gemini Consulting induction training and we used it with client team.

The LIFO instrument places your life orientation among four categories:

  • Supporting – Giving – people who strive to include others, be helpful, and fair
  • Controlling -Taking – people who strive for competence, results, direct action
  • Adapting – Dealing – people who strive for harmony, know people, are flexible
  • Conserving – Holding – people who strive for the right answer, are analytical , slow but sure

The report shows your primary mode and a fall back perhaps if under stress. For example, my profile is supporting-giving primary and adapting-dealing secondary. However, my controlling/taking score it is close to in normal and stress mode.

DISC Assessment Personality Profile

The DISC assessment was created in 1956 by industrial psychologist Walter Clarke, based upon the 1928 research and theory of William Moulton Marston.

The report places you in four categories with a percentage score:

  • Dominance – Directing -people who use force to overcome resistance
  • Inducement – Influencing -people who use charm to overcome resistance
  • Submission -Steady – people who accept and accommodate resistance
  • Compliance – Cautious – people who carefully follow directions to overcome resistance

DISC theory concerns managing environment and so is context dependent. There are only  four categories. My DIS scores are within one percentage point, making interpretation difficult and strengths and weaknesses difficult to determine..

Clifton StrengthsFinder by Gallup (CSF)

The Clifton Strengths Finder was created in 2001 after much research by Donald O. Clifton at the University of Nebraska. Clifton’s intention was to study the personality traits of  the “best of the best” so that companies could hire according to those strengths. The Gallup Organization, known as a pollster, but having deep survey data expertise, acquired Clifton’s company Selection Research Inc and together they created the Clifton StrengthsFinder.

The CSF has been widely adopted by the coaching industry. Building upon your strengths to overcome your weaknesses is a positive approach. The current version has 177 paired comparison questions over 34 strength domains.

The report urges the respondent  to pay most attention to the top five identified strengths. My top five strengths (Learner, Empathy, Achiever, Strategic, and Communication) aligned with my perception, but that shouldn’t be surprising as I answered the questionnaire.

Issues with psychometric personality assessment

Theory base, reliability and validity

Critics of these and other psychometric personality assessment often focus on the origins of theory or the statistical reliability and validity studies of the instrument. It is true that many of the theory origins are subjective and some instruments are better tested for reliability and validity than others, but there are other issues.

Subjectivity

All are self-report questionnaire data, that is my perception of myself. Therefore the answers are inherently subjective and prone to cognitive biases like finding what you expect and rater bias. Some start in the middle and never move more than one point; some use the entire scale, but are skewed to one side or the other, which makes comparing results  problematic…

Non-predictive results

\Some companies use such instruments to hire, staff teams, promote and sometimes fire people who “don’t fit.” The results of these tests by themselves do not produce the objective predictive data to justify those decisions beyond a reasonable doubt.

Best Uses for personality assessment

Personal development

A good use of these instruments is to learn about yourself. Will you only learn what you already know?. Maybe, but treat results as a starting point. For another view, talk with others about them – a significant other, friend, teammate,  coach, or your boss.

For example, I score myself particularly low on LIFO Conserving – Holding  and DISC Compliance – Caution a fact that my wife says doesn’t ring true especially on my “cheap” days.

Team formation

I wouldn’t use these instruments to select members for a team; that should be based on capabilities and connections.  However, comparing and discussing  results can help a team for a working approach that  respects differences and capitalizes on strengths.

What about career planning?

Could knowledge of one’s strengths cause us to pitch a job? Yes. Could an MBTI type or a DISC or LIFO profile guide you in what jobs to seek. Yes, but interest, skill base, and opportunity might be more important.

What to do about differences between people

In ancient Greece the Oracle at Delphi was a kind of psychometric testing and leadership coaching center. To help the leaders who came from far and wide to ask her advice the Oracle had a measurement system, (animal entrails divination), and a theory base, (147 maxims of the Oracle). She also had a contractual disclaimer in three maxims enshrined on the entrance, which are not bad advice for those evaluating themselves and the differences between people.:

  • Know thyself – get the opinions of others in addition to self-report.
  • Nothing in excess – don’t overuse assessments, pigeonholing people.
  • Surety brings ruin – allow for change of circumstance, personal growth, and adapt. People will always surprise you.

Brad’s daughter has now graduated from university, but I used his Baskin Robbins “people are different” analogy with my six-year-old granddaughter. She said “I know, it would be a very boring world if we were all the same.”

Yes, it would.

How to “Feel” CI in 30 Minutes?

How to “Feel” CI in 30 Minutes?

by | Aug 21, 2022 | Consulting

Some Just “Don’t Get Continuous Improvement (CI)”

I was always dumfounded. I used to say “Continuous Improvement (CI) isn’t rocket science; it just takes a little discipline.” Then a solid fuels scientist told me how “hard” CI was for him. I began to realize that comparing CI to anything rarely worked. The process is deceptively simple.

Measure-Improve- Measure gain, (repeat).

It helps to think in process terms to see tasks in terms:

Inputs — Activities —- Outputs

Still some people didn’t get it. “We do this all the time>” “Ah yes. . . but are you improving?” “Er.”

Then I realized people might think about how they do their work when they first start. They might even track how well they are doing each task then, but soon work is a collection of habits. You “feel” whether it is going well or poorly and adjust.

At the front line work documentation was seen as “busywork.” A point brought home with my favorite line of all time given by a maintenance tech at a chemical plant:

“Paperwork never turned no bolt!”:

At the top level, executives often didn’t view their work (management) as a process and as a result saw the absence a series of tasks -some that workers did and some that they failed to do. When the plant manager heard the maintenanc3e tech above he completely missed the opportunity to show how documentation of maintenance, “paperwork,” allowed him to improve mean time between equipment failure. Instead he sputtered “It’s part of the job!”

I needed a way for people to “feel” improvement, to feel the excitement of practice focused on improvement in a team setting.

The Tennis Circuit Exercise

I hit on this simple but powerful exercise to introduce the concepts of Continuous Improvement (CI) to a team or in an introductory CI workshop. I even used this exercise in an executive overview after which more than 50 percent of the executives signed up for additional training.

In this exercise, participants experience continuous improvement success and failure. As a result, teams understand how process focus and teamwork leads to improvement.

The exercise starts by sharing this objective:

Objective: To create a process and improve it in a sustainable way

Timing:

35-45 minutes. Some groups have such a good time that they will want to keep “playing,” but if the exercise extends to an hour some may lose interest and learning declines.

Required Materials:

One set of three tennis balls for each team (teams of six to nine each work best, but try not to have less than five members per team) plus one stopwatch and flipchart  or whiteboard large enough to make the recorded goal and results visible for each team.

Set up:

Introduce the exercise by saying, “I’m going to give you a chance to experience Continuous Improvement. Please form ___ teams of ___ people each.”

Then show the first instructions:

Create your current-state process – a pattern of how three tennis balls will go through a circuit of each team member, returning to the first person.

You must practice the current-state process at least three times, recording cycle times, before making any process improvements.

Practice each subsequent process improvement at least three times, documenting improvements and times.

Then say,

“Let me ask team 1 to demonstrate.  Form a circle with each person three feet apart.”

Throw the three balls to one person, saying: “Move the balls one at a time from person to person. Remember who you pass to and who you receive from. Okay, have you got that?  Now that is your ‘current-state process.’ Let’s time it.”

Record the time on the flipchart for all to see.

(Note: Throw the balls to the first person. This often sets a pattern of the group throwing the balls between people, which they soon discover isn’t required and limits improvement.)

Continue by saying:  “Okay, now I want each team to practice your current-state process three times, timing it each time before you make any changes.”

Then share the rest of the rules:

  • Balls must move independently, i.e., one ball at a time.
  • Transfer must take place (i.e., one person should touch each ball one at a time).
  • The metric is total cycle time. Cycle time starts when the first ball leaves the first person’s hand and ends when all three balls are back with the original person.
  • Everyone must touch the balls in the same sequence in the original pattern of the
    current-state process.
  • If a ball touches the floor, or skips a team member in sequence, the circuit must start over with the first ball. The clock continues to run.
  • Record current-state cycle time and improved state(s) cycle times on a flip chart.
  •  When a change is made, write it down next to your times on the flip chart.

Let the groups compete: 15 minutes

After one or two rounds of changes tell them that the record for this activity with groups of this size is_____ (Pick a number about 50 percent of the average group’s performance to spur the group on. Keep track of records as you conduct this.)

Then after another round read out the times and say, “The fastest I have ever seen is ____”.

Again, pick a number that is 50 percent of average group time to spur the group on.

The actual record I observed was .78 seconds for a seven-person group (a controlled drop) with each ball touching everyone’s hands. You can choose to give this record at the end or just use your own observed records, which is better.

At the end, hand out debrief sheets and ask the teams to fill them in.

Debrief:  15 minutes

Ask groups:

  • Starting time, last time, highest time, lowest time. (If the highest time is not the start time, what happened? If the lowest time isn’t the last time, what happened?)
  • What changes did you make?
  • What waste was removed?
  • What factors had an impact (benchmarks, writing down the times, visible metrics, everyone participated, competition, fun, etc.)

What typically happens?

Times usually start out at around ninety to 120 seconds and drop to under ten seconds.

Groups usually figure out quickly that the current-state process is very inefficient if they throw across the center of the group. They typically rearrange themselves in the order of the process (like an assembly line) and move closer.

If a team loses time by dropping a ball and having to start over they may create some kind of “ready signal.” Comment that this is like the pull system called “Kanban” in Lean.

About midway through, teams realize that the rules don’t say the balls must be thrown, just that each person must touch them one at a time in order. This realization leads to creative ways to accomplish that and times drop dramatically.

The debrief

Like any structured experience, most learning comes in the debrief discussion.

The secret is asking questions to connect the groups, e.g., “Did anyone else experience (or try) that?” Did anyone have a different experience?”

At the end of the debrief discussion ask, “What internal processes does this exercise make you think of?  What could you do about that?”

Variations

Goal setting

One variation is to include a goal-setting step after each round. In the beginning, most teams either grossly underestimate or overestimate improvement capability in the next round. Over several rounds the teams tend to get betting at estimating.

Changes to materials:

Bean bags or kushes don’t roll but are harder to catch; the times are about the same. Groups often spend time perfecting the “catch” and fail to move on to creative ways to “touch” the balls.

Baseballs and softballs often start with too hard a throw. Things get broken and/or people can get hurt. Also, people take the balls home to their kids. Using Superballs is just mean. People spend all their time chasing these mega-bouncies and don’t improve much.

A gutter ball is a 1/2” ball bearing and three pieces of cove molding joined to progress the ball bearing from the beginning of one to the end of the third. Good for novelty with those who’ve seen tennis balls, but not as flexible. And improvements tend not to be as dramatic.

Mechanical assemblies. One of the best variations I ever saw was a pressure valve-like assembly that had to be put together with wrenches, micrometers, and feeler gauges. The assembly was used to train maintenance mechanics in a chemical processing plant. The exercise was run the same way except the metric was cycle time and a quality metric arrived at by an “auditor” spot-checking with a micrometer and feeler gauge. Data was entered into Excel, which then produced a graph that showed optimum cycle time below which quality deteriorated rapidly.

Competition vs. cooperation

Often the teams get quite competitive, checking on each other’s cycle time. It’s good to emphasize that you are competing against yourself and draw out the improvement score of the teams in the debrief discussion.

Try stopping midway and give teams an opportunity to share best practices and track high/low and average group time before and after.

Sometimes after debriefing and a thorough discussion of best practices, it’s good to let the teams have “one more go.”  Use the high/low and average group score again and there is almost always an improvement. This shows that there is no plagiarism in CI. So “steal with pride, but share the credit.”

 A simple but effective tool

This exercise isn’t original, some of the positioning and some of the variations are.  It does work. I’ve used it in manufacturing, oil and gas, chemicals, insurance, back office payments in banking. I’ve used it with front line workers to C-suite executives. (In my experience execs are the most resistant to start, but want to keep the exercise going long after the point is made.)

In the chemical plant described above, the maintenance techs themselves  ended up taking responsibility for improving the mean time between failure metric and maintenance documentation ceased to be a problem.

The plant manager said afterwards, “That by itself was worth the fees you charged.” The Tennis Circuit doesn’t get all that credit- it was a five month project, and the maintenance team were stars, but “feeling” continuous improvement was a good start.

 

 

Juggling

Juggling

by | Aug 14, 2022 | Living

Learning to juggle

In my early forties, I decided to learn how to juggle. I asked for the book Juggling for the Complete Klutz for my birthday and my daughter Tegan obliged and gave to me. Her inscription alludes to the “Culler Curse,” which  is a certain clumsiness. I invented the “curse”  in response to my brother-in-law’s constant teasing about how we Cullers were always dropping things, falling upstairs and generally making a mess of things. I joked that this was due to the  “Culler Curse” bestowed upon our family in perpetuity by a witch in medieval times “so the Cullers wouldn’t rule the world.”  “So far,  I noted “that part of the ‘curse’ seems to be holding true.”

I was thirteen and thought that wisdom had nothing whatsoever to do with a quiet and mindful existence, but everything to do with “cracking wise,” being able to deliver the zinger, the killer sarcastic remark. The “Culler Curse” name stuck and is now a family legacy. The other thing that stuck is that I now have children and at least three of my four grandchildren who have assumed virtue in the “smart remark.”

So I asked for the “Complete Klutz” book on juggling. The book came with three bean bag cubes, which early on the authors explain is to “reduce the chaos factor. . .  learning to juggle is really about dropping things.  As you will learn this is frustrating enough without dropping things that also roll away from you rapidly.”

The book was quite encouraging:
“So you’re interested in learning how to juggle, but it took you four years to learn how to tie your shoes, and besides dropping things has always been second nature to you. . . . you’re an original Klutz and you probably think juggling is only for the super coordinated?

RELAX. . . IT’S SIMPLE.”

It wasn’t. But I did finally learn the basics. I even graduated from bean bags, to kushes (A Kush is pictured above – colorful and they also don’t roll.) and finally to tennis balls, fruits and vegetables, even three things of different sizes and shape..

Do I feel I mastered juggling? No way. I never even tried juggling those club things and knives and chainsaws? Not me.

But I got good enough to show off occasionally. I told a friend I was leaning to juggle, thinking he’d ask for a demonstration. He said,

“I look at your life (divorced father of three, starting a consulting business, and training for a marathon), learning to juggle is redundant.”

Perhaps my life at the time was why I wanted to learn to juggle.  I wanted to do learn something physical that was fun. Don’t get me wrong, I loved running, but training for a marathon isn’t fun like a casual Sunday morning jog. And three kids are a different kind of fun. Learning to juggle took focus, took me out of myself, and a dropped ball didn’t have disastrous consequences.  (However I recommend against juggling tomatoes until you are really good)

So why am I writing about juggling now..

My children are now grown and I look at their lives. They all work very hard; some are managing children, some just spouse and/or friend relationships. Working was tough even before the Covid pandemic with its lack of division between work and home, zoom calls, texts from your boss at 8:00 p.m., not having a tech guy when working from home, or overtime and extra shifts that you didn’t ask for, because someone is “quarantining,” if you have the kind of job that must be done on site.

Everybody is juggling now, some better than others and there is no Juggling for the Complete Klutz  for this kind of juggling.

I have read many job descriptions that call for the skill of ”multitasking, juggling by another name.” Most people actually think that multitasking is a real skill and many feel bad about themselves because they have difficulty mastering it.

Multitasking is a myth.

No. I really mean that. Our brain has two different modes:

System 1 (as Daniel Kahneman calls it in Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow) is our conscious brain, with which we focus, solve problems, plan and control and rule the world. System one is really powerful, but it can literally do only one thing at a time. On average most people use the Conscious brain about 10% of the time.

System 2, is autopilot, which most of us use about 90% of the time. This is a good thing because System 2 does a lot of the brain’s work without our conscious attention. The System 2 brain is extraordinarily good at pattern recognition and frequency gambling. It sees a pattern it has seen before, quickly calculates the frequency and makes the same decision it has seen most frequently.

For example, I get up I the morning, put what I sleep in in a place, brush my teeth, take some meds and supplements and take a shower. Most days I’m dressed and at breakfast before I am engaging my conscious brain.

“Not me!” You say “I am mindful.” OK. When you drive do you put exactly the same level of focus and attention to every part of driving that you did when you were learning?  Or are there things you do where you describe yourself as “in-the-zone, “ or “perfect flow,” -a golf swing or tennis stroke, things you have learned so well that you “know” how to do them without thinking. That’s System 2.

So most people when they say they are multitasking, typing away on their computer while talking on the phone, or cooking dinner while listening to books on Audible, are really switch-tasking. Switch-tasking is focus on the dinner for a moment  , let the book go on autopilot, switch cut the onions on autopilot, focus on the action in the book.

Switch tasking is like juggling. Focus on throwing one beanbag, SWITCH – focus on catching one-Switch- focus on throwing – switch-  catching-switch-throwing switch -DROP-DARNIT! Focus on picking everything up again.

The trick with switch tasking, like juggling, is not to drop things and it takes some skill to knowing when to switch to System 1. Some things, like driving, like pouring hot liquids, like checking pressures in a process chemical plant, should always be done in System1 and not on autopilot.

Some people are better at switch-tasking than others than others. I’m told that air traffic controllers and jet pilots tend to test better than the general population. I don’t know what the test is like -Whack-a-Mole-on Steroids?

Many women have told me that women are better at multitasking than men. When I patiently explain that “Multi-tasking is a myth; what you’re doing is switch-tasking,” if they are still talking to me, they say something like, “OK then, women are better at switch-tasking than men.”

I have no data on this subject, but I’m smart enough not to discuss this further. It seems true that in many cases women are asked to juggle more than men and switch-tasking, like juggling, is a skill that responds to practice. The more you do it the better you get.

I never got beyond juggling three items. Juggling four is an order of magnitude more difficult. Perhaps that is why many people have such difficulty juggling, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs.

It seems to me that during Covid we asked workers to juggle more, do more switch-tasking. As we come out of Covid I am concerned that won’t change much. So here are some thoughts from my learning how to juggle:

Step 1:  Recognize you are juggling.

In actual juggling this is less of a problem, but the Complete Klutz Guide did have me practicing throwing one bean bag in the air letting it drop to the floor, then picking it up. “You’ll do this a lot so you might as well practice.” Probably you don’t want to practice dropping the balls you are juggling (switch-tasking), but it is good to be aware of them, maybe ask for some forgiveness in advance, ‘cause you may drop something.

Don’t just include work stuff in the stuff you are juggling. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century English writer once said,

“Second Marriages are the Triumph of Hope over Experience.”

I can attest that to be true, but it’s wisdom you should learn from the experience of others rather than go through it personally.

Step 2: Take it slow at first.

The Klutz book had a natural progression 1 bag-2-bagsunderhand -2 bags overhand- 3 bags underhand-3 bags overhand. Then there were a lot of different practice exercises with 3 bags. The book then moved on to 3 things of different sizes, then to clubs and that is where I bailed, never moving to sharp objects, or four, five or six of anything.

Step 3: Know your limits.

I mentioned my juggling limits, no clubs, no sharps, no soft vegetables. (Although I admit to have learned this last lesson with tomatoes over an oriental rug. My sister wasn’t pleased.)

I had a client who repeatedly said “If you need something done, give it to a busy person. They always find a way to get it done.” When I was a consultant, I had a boss who tested this theory with me. We were in a period of extreme staffing crunch -too much work, too few consultants. He kept assigning me to new projects. When I got to eight projects, I began to drop things, make mistakes, and miss deliverables.

Like juggling, we can improve at switch-tasking with practice, but sometimes the practice is more painful. One advantage to actual juggling is all that bending over to pick up dropped balls is very good for developing the core.

Helping People Through Change

Helping People Through Change

by | Aug 7, 2022 | Leading

Leaders are supposed to help people through change, Right?

Maybe. I mean I used to think so . . .

This picture comes from an article I wrote for Transformation Magazine (TM), a publication of Gemini Consulting. At the time, I thought the article was my definitive statement on “everything you needed to know about change.” I was fifty then and wouldn’t have said I was young, but sometimes I am shocked at my hubris. The article was long and I went back and forth with TM editors about what to cut. Of course, I didn’t want to cut anything, (hubris).

I wrote the article in 1998, but I left to join Katzenbach Partners at the end of the year, so it was never published. I accidently left the only copy of the article on my Gemini computer when I turned it in. I saved the illustrations, not the text and by the time I contacted TM it was discarded and IT had long since wiped my hard drive. “Instant karma’s gonna get you.”

When I think back on that article, it was all about large scale change that happened all at one time; it had a distinct “here’s how you make change happen” top-down orientation.  Some of my later work in innovation and improvement was more organic and added more bottom-up work with change teams and internal consulting groups.

This drawing originally came from that top-down orientation. I started with Gemini’s Emotional Cycle of Change the curve:

  • Uninformed Optimism
  • Informed Pessimism
  • Informed Openness
  • Informed Optimism

Gemini used this change emotion curve to educate its consultants and client teams about what to expect. It is roughly based upon Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grief, and it fits what some people (not everyone) go through in change.

I combined this with the Scott and Jaffe quadrant model that explained what happened at various stages:

  • If you were in denial, you might be looking backwards and at the way the company used to be.
  • If you were resisting, you were looking back and at you personal situation, what you had lost.
  • In order to move on you’d need to experiment with different personal roles with a future focus.
  • Finally committing or recommitting to the company with a future focus.

My thought in combining these two models was that leaders could help someone focus on the future and the company and then move the change along.

Oh, I was nicer than that sounds. I’ve always believed in listening to people, meeting them where they are and helping only when requested to “help.” What I wrote communicated that I wanted people to get through all this messy emotional stuff and change the company. Yikes.

How I look at this drawing today: People’s reactions to change

Mike Myers and Dana Carvey did a skit on Saturday Night Live called “Wayne’s World,” which later became a movie, about two twenty-ish stoners living in their parents basements doing a video show over the Internet. One of the lines they repeated used was, “We fear change.”

That is a commonly repeated myth. I hear this repeated about children “Oh, he’s just having a tantrum, because I changed his normal lunch.” I hear it said about dogs, “Oh she has her routines and if you don’t give her a bully stick when we go out, she’s all confused.”

People don’t fear change. Think about it. Young adults move away from home to go to college or start a job. They get married, start families. People immigrate between countries. Astronauts go to the International Space Station. People are not afraid of those changes and they don’t resist them.

People fear your change, because they didn’t chose it and haven’t had the time to determine whether the benefits outweigh the loss. People don’t much like loss and if they are looking at the unknown they can only see the loss. So they might push back a little – you know, resist.

Saying to a “resister,”  “Hey, you just need to focus on the future and the company instead of the past and yourself.” isn’t likely to be successful.

How I look at this drawing today: The nature of help.

Carl Rogers, the American psychologist who was a founder of the Human Potential movement, once said, “Help is defined by the recipient. . . . Help that isn’t asked for is rarely seen as help. Most often it is seen as interference.”

Therefore, if a leader looks at this drawing and sees it as a roadmap to make people go through change, it won’t be helpful. It might even prove disastrous.

One of the popular sayings at Gemini, at that time was “Let me help you understand something.” This was  usually the preamble to a project leader telling you what you were going to do and how you were going to do it. I always resisted when I heard this introduction.

I hope I knew better than to promote similar behavior from leaders in change.

How I look at this drawing today: Paths of discovery

The drawing isn’t a roadmap for leaders to direct people, but it could be used by individuals facing a change.

  • I could write down my individual reactions and place them in quadrants, because it is rare that all my reactions would be in one particular quadrant.
  • I could view the past to future as a personal path and a company path
    • What am I/are we leaving behind?
    • What am I/are we carrying forward?
    • What new is created for me/us in the future?
  • What are my choices, options, degrees of freedom?

A team might use the drawing in the same way, if they choose to do so.

If asked, a leader, a coach, a consultant might use this as a process with an individual, or a team.

Remember

Expect people to be different.

Some reactions to change might be predictable, not all.

Change must be a choice.

People need to see the compelling case for change individually as well as for the company.

Help must be asked for.

Some people will work their way through change on their own. Some may talk with their friends. If they ask you as the leader, it is a time to ask questions first more than give answers.