Fukushima Had A Tidal Wave

Despite years of experience in change, I look at the ads for change roles and realise that I am simply unhireable.

The ads talk about change as if it is something you do to people, to an organisation. All before any change has started, you need to analyse the organisation’s problems, then assess the readiness of the organisation for change which of course means analysing if their people are good enough, and then build change management capability. Oh — and then let’s not forget that you also need to manage and reduce change resistance — well after all that is it any wonder?

Change doesn’t need to be that hard, slow or expensive. I have spent many years doing it differently with some pretty amazing organisations. There are two key points to consider.

You are the expert in your organisation
For a start as a change consultant how can I know your organisation better than you do? It makes no sense. Yet it is conventional for outsiders to come in to analyse your organisation so they can work out what you should do.

An alternative approach is to value and use your knowledge and understanding of your organisation to move forward. You know what you want to solve. The role of the consultant then becomes to use your expertise to get you there.

Over many years I worked with Countrywide Plc, the UK’s largest property group. Whether we were working together on a strategy around business growth, innovation, infrastructure or meeting customer needs they developed and controlled the change process. It’s not that they had all the expertise they needed all the time. For example, if there was new IT, or advice required they brought that on board, but at every stage it was their change process. No one else was telling them what to do.

The differences in working this way are that:

• time isn’t wasted having someone analyse your organisation when you really want to get on with caring for your organisation’s future.
• other people’s solutions are not overlaid onto your organisation; solutions that you are often left integrating or giving up on long after the consultants have gone.
• you have way less resistance to change, because it’s your change and your expertise and knowledge that are used rather than undervalued.

You don’t solve organisational problems by analysing them.
The next way of making change easier is to know that the best way to solve organisational problems isn’t by analysing them. Somehow we believe we must get to the root cause to solve all our problems, even when root causes aren’t easily found or useful. We never question the need to do this, yet you will have had the experience of sitting in a meeting to solve a problem and leave at the end of the meeting knowing lots about the problem, but not a lot about what to do about it.

Let’s say you do settle on one cause of the problem, organisations are such complex constantly shifting places, that the cause won’t necessarily tell you what to do. Analysing root cause to find solutions is useful for an assembly line or in a very structured organisation like a nuclear plant. But even in an organisation as structured and tightly controlled as the Fukushima nuclear plant not everything is predictable. Fukushima had a tidal wave. Sometimes things just happen.

The most obvious example of why you just don’t need to analyse problems to move your organisation forward is COVID-19. We know that the ultimate root cause of the drop in GDP worldwide is the advent of coronavirus. But knowing that doesn’t tell us anything about how to solve our economic woes. Understanding COVID-19 tell us how to reduce its incidence, not how to get our economies functioning. Nor does any amount of analysing what we might have done wrong economically so far, if things have been done wrong, tell us how to move forward in any profoundly useful way. Reversing some of our actions and opening up shops again, while essential, isn’t going to be enough. Because change is continuous, we couldn’t just put our businesses into hibernation and open them up again. The world has kept moving, putting some organisations out of business, growing others and reshaping our lives digitally. Analysing the past isn’t where answers will be found.

Your conversations about what’s not working are also putting your business back in the past. But the past is not where you want your organisation to be. You want to be in a different future where the problem is no longer relevant to your life and the life of your organisation.

You can no doubt already feel the relief just in that idea.

Once you realise that you don’t best solve organisational problems by analysing them, it changes everything: your thinking, your conversations, your actions.

If you would like to do change differently and instead create change with ease, please contact me.

Carey Glass is an Organisational Psychologist and Management Consultant. She has built a career over 20 years spanning Europe and Australia working with teams and organisations who have got stuck or who want to progress quickly. An expert in change with ease, she co-edits an international journal devoted to transforming organisations. Her work in positive change has been cited by Harvard. Australian and European clients include ANZ, Salvation Army, PwC, NHS, Deloitte, the Co-operative Group, Oetker, Countrywide Plc.