Changing is Hard

I have come to the conclusion that resistance to change must be somehow built into us. Or at least it seems to be very natural. That's probably why there are countless of good and bad management books written about the topic. One of the best I know is Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson. The plot in short is rather simple: there are two mice and two little people in a maze. Every day they go to a specific place in the maze to eat cheese. Until one day the cheese runs out and they need to adapt to the changed circumstances. Now I found out that there are even multiple videos made of the book. Here's one that I found:

Another short book about change management is John Kotter's Our Iceberg is Melting. This book is a fable telling about a penguin society. The penguins encounter a crisis when one of them notices that their iceberg is probably soon going to shatter. The book describes the steps for one possible way to carry out a change initiative. Amusingly, the reader may be able to recognize certain stereotypical (penguin) characters also in his/her own work environment.

Of course here I could pull Systems Thinking from my sleeve and simply say that it's the system that resists the change. The organizational culture developed during the years and the practices that people have gotten used to. Yes, true. It is the system that resists the change. And just like entropy, getting order to the chaos takes a lot of energy. The opposite happens without any extra effort.

In Systems Thinking management is responsible for the system, since they are the only ones who can modify it and change the rules. But sometimes it is hard to change the system even from the management direction. People are very reluctant to adopt to new ways and need constant reminding, gentle pushing and coaching. Repetition of the message seems to be really important. Otherwise people inevitably will revert to the old habits.

Books aside how do you carry out this in practice? I don't know. What I do is simply experimenting. Trying new ways of doing things and seeing how people react. Feedback is the key and sometimes a little provocation is required to wake people up a bit. And it is good to have a pragmatic colleague who pulls you out of your daily routines and reminds you to think about things that really matter: the big picture. (But it's so soothing to be busy and work on all those tiny details...)

Finally I'd like to share a video that tells about an interesting Agile organization. For me it could serve as a vision of where I'd like to steer my own organization. I think we are going to right direction, but Spotify has just taken a couple of more steps. Thank you Henrik Kniberg, you are an amazing fellow! (Also, just earlier today bought his latest book: Lean from the Trenches.)