The messaging around COVID-19 is leading to confusion in NSW.
“It’s the lockdown here…the messaging is to stay home but the shops are open….yesterday I saw a gelato store that was open and had eight people lined up inside.” (msn news)
“We haven’t really learnt because we do everything on a state basis not a national basis…you (Victoria) learnt from the second wave to go in early, go in hard and get out early…. Sadly, we didn’t learn from your experience. We didn’t learn…from Public Health England telling us about the anxiety of Delta.” (Epidemiologist Marylouise McLaws ABC)
I wish to start by saying that I am not using these quotes for political reasons. Rather the dilemmas of making decisions around COVID-19 provide very relatable lessons for businesses on how to manage ongoing change in complex circumstances. Let’s start with Marylouise McLaws commentary and then focus on the significance of messaging in complex change.
McLaws’ statement provides a lesson on the importance of looking for significant differences that create success when we are in the process of change. While consistency and conformity can drive operations when things are stable, accessing significant differences that work are required to adapt to ongoing change. After all, change is about difference.
In this area, many of our business cultures lag behind. We might look at what our competitors are doing that is different, but do not tend to have advertised job roles or job descriptions that focus on what’s changing and emerging in the world and how our business would benefit from incorporating these changes. Sometimes this is out of fear. We still race to conformity often because we fear significant differences personally or professionally. Sometimes it is simply due to inertia. Indeed the research shows that those who fared best in employee surveys during extended lockdowns were the businesses that were keeping pace with technology which made remote communicating easy.
In this search we should venture well beyond, as well as inside the walls of our businesses. UBER would not have got off the ground if they limited themselves to only looking at what their competitors were doing rather than analysing the technological revolution that led to their transformation of the taxi industry. In contrast, Kodak which invented the sharing camera, lost their opportunity as they did not recognise an emerging desire to use technology to interact in new ways.
It is most probably surprising to suggest that we should also be looking for what is different and useful that is emerging inside our businesses. In reality we spend too little time noticing what is working. Instead we just tend to move to the next problem. Yet the fastest way to move forward is to continuously notice what is working to do more of it and this is especially important in times of change. During COVID-19 we have seen restaurants, butchers, florists and delicatessens grow new online businesses from dipping their toe into digital marketing and seeing the significantly positive difference it has made in lockdown. Some now see online as their major business going forward and have reduced their high street presence and capital outlays.
The next important learning from the recent outbreak is a further insight it provides businesses about working in complexity, within which messaging becomes critical.
One of the great successes of managing COVID-19 is that our populations are given a set of rules and our governments trust that we will respectfully interact with each other when we are at home, shopping, working or exercising, in a manner that will honour the rules and reduce the spread of COVID-19. When you think about the complex and random web of interactions that our activity creates as we go about our day, this is an extraordinary ask of millions of people, an extraordinary level of trust given to people and has thankfully saved many lives.
In working this way, our governments have modelled an essential shift for businesses who wish to become more adaptive in rapidly changing environments, which is to move from a hierarchical to a self-organised system. This level of trust in the capacity of people to co-ordinate themselves with others and achieve goals autonomously is essential in responding to constant change. If businesses wish to be responsive to change this is a leap that traditional leaders need to make. A recent article in HBR pointed out that during remote working, employees were increasingly dissatisfied in companies where managers did not accept that their staff would be productive if left to get on with the job. (HBR July 30, 2020. Remote Managers Are Having Trust Issues)
At the same time within a self-organised system, as we saw last week, rules and expectations need to be simple and clear. If there are too many rules our agility to act quickly is compromised. If the rules and expectations are not clear, people (rightly or wrongly) question whether their leadership know what they are doing, trust is reduced, and compliance and goal achievement delayed. While it might at first glance seem counter-intuitive, it is important to realise that if people are trusted to achieve a goal with significant autonomy, they will also be happy to accept and work within an organisational framework that defines rules and expectations. Indeed, as we saw, they will want and need essential rules and expectations defined so they can self-organise and achieve the outcomes being asked of them.
Working in complexity does not need to be difficult. I specialise in making complexity simple using a few principles so that businesses can learn to adapt in rapidly changing environments.
See https://www.changewithease.com/about. I would be delighted to speak to you.
Carey Glass is an expert in change with ease. Her work is based on the simple reality that change happens all the time and is not new to organisations or their employees. She works with individuals, teams and organisations to harness their own capacity for change rather than impose change upon them. Her coaching has been cited by Harvard University’s Institute of Coaching and is particularly effective in limiting the number of sessions required. She is co-editor of the international journal InterAction, devoted to adaptable and flexible approaches to individual, team and organisational change in complex environments.
