Immigrants
“That dust was everywhere. It got in your eyes, up your nose so you couldn’t draw a breath. So you breathed through your mouth and the grit was always on your teeth and crunched with everything you ate. The quarry slowed and there were no jobs, and then – America, the land of golden sidewalks beckoned.”
My friend Stella, retold her father’s tale of how he came to leave Carrara, Italy, origin of the famous marble and move to Boston. I’ve heard versions of this story several times, from Indians, Mexicans, and Brazilians. An Englishman once told me,
“Americans just seemed so carefree, not at all stuffy like everyone I knew at home. I came on holiday and resolved to come back to stay.”
My Pittsburgh haircutter Mico told succinctly how his family emigrated from Calabria.
“They had the dream and the dream made what they had seem like nothing.”
Immigrants may be the best example of people choosing life altering change. They reject where they live and move to an uncertain promise of opportunity. These are the three elements of a change mindset:
- Rejection of the status quo (case for change)
- Promise of the future (Vision)
- Choice (people may reject “your” change if they feel it’s imposed upon them, but if they choose, then it’s “their” change).
Of course, you have to act. You have to sell what you own, get visas, buy tickets, get on the boat. No change happens until you do something, but action without the right mindset is unlikely to succeed.
Those who’ beat addiction through the AA 12-step process know the importance of steps 1-3:
- “Admit you are powerless over alcohol”(acknowledge “rock bottom” reject status quo)
- Believe a higher Power can restore us to sobriety (a powerful vision)
- Decide to turn our will and our lives (buy the ticket – commit to change)
The remaining steps are all about actions, but the mindset is critical.
The Formula
This formula for change is usually credited to Richard Beckhard who published it in 1977 in Organizational Transitions. The formula was developed by David Gleicher while at consulting firm Arthur D. Little.
Dissatisfaction (rejection of the status quo) the push of change, times the pull of change (vision), times first steps must exceed resistance to change. In the original it was the cost of change, In 1980 Catherine Dannemiller changed cost to resistance and in 2014 Steve Cady added an S for supporting capability to sustain the change.
What I like about the formula is that it lays out the mindset (push and pull) and actions necessary to overcome the inertia of status quo. Also the formula is not additive, but multiplicative demonstrating the exponential difficulty of change.
There is both the dissatisfaction (rejection of the status quo) and the vision (future promise). The dissatisfaction if often called the “compelling case for change – the why and why now, and what we can’t stay the same. I described this as the “burning platform” till I worked in the upstream oil and gas industry where that term is too painful.
I have seen leaders in business and politics lean into the threat of not changing -the ‘road to ruin,” end of life as we know it pitch. Danger can scare us into action, but over time constant threat gets normalized, doom and gloom depresses people, fear freezes people and action is forgotten.
Vision led change is always better and more lasting than threat-driven The grit of marble dust might wear your teeth and spirit down but without the “golden sidewalk” you don’t get on the ship. Wallowing in rock bottom does nothing without the pull of a sober lifestyle.
Vision statements are often emotion laden and sensory rich.
“The land of milk and honey”
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. . .all men are created equal. . .life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. . . We the People.”
“I have a dream.”
Dissatisfaction pushes; vision pulls you. Dissatisfaction, rejecting the current state, is reality-based problem definition. Vision is opportunity and solution finding.
A vision isn’t a daydream. “Pie in the sky by and by” doesn’t cut it for long. There must be a plan and milestones, and mid-journey measures to show your change is proceeding as planned.
What happens when you know you can’t go on the way things are, you must change, but what you are changing to is unclear? How can you “leap empty-handed into the void?” Big change is often like this. We think we know the opportunity, but, if we are clear-eyed, we also see the risk. The phrase ‘jumping from the frying pan into the fire” is a cliché because it happens frequently.
Entering the “unknown unknown” arena, where “we don’t know what we don’t know” relies on values:
- Do what is right –“Clean air and water” “Remove shortcomings. . .make amends,” “Taking care of customers,” “People matter and results count.”
- Resilience – “we’ll get through this,” “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” one day at a time.”
- Support –“ What if the sky should fall? As long as we’re together, it really doesn’t matter at all.”
The push from dissatisfaction, rejection of status quo, the pull of vision and the opportunity that opens to values, must overcome what Beckhard and Gleicher called resistance to change.
Resistance may be to imposed change that people haven’t chosen. Resistance may be fear of loss in the unknown. Resistance may be plain old inertia. Remember Newton’s First Law of motion “A body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.”
That’s why the formula included first steps, reducing friction, ignoring gravity, kicking yourself in the butt to do something – Action focus -Try-it-fix it-try-it-again
Change mind-set first, bolstered by values, followed by action, is the only path. And if you find you’ve jumped from the frying pan into the fire?
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