Barely a month into the New Year, I can already feel my resolutions shift beneath my feet. Institutional change can be elusive, and personal transformation downright brutal.
If life were otherwise, we would always reach our ideal weight, consistently complete our projects ahead of schedule, and embrace Daylight Savings as a natural augmentation of our circadian rhythm.
Too many years ago to admit, I was prepping to hit the road for my first Business Process Reengineering assignment at the consultancy that actually trademarked the term. There was just one problem. Still in the throws of writing what became the international business best-seller on how companies change, the firm’s principals had yet to agree on any kind of formula for success.
“The good news is there are only two ways to transform an organization,” my trainer confided to me before sending me out to undermine the undergirding of a television network studio. “The bad news?” he whispered, “Nobody knows either of them.”
From that day to this, I have not ceased to research, revise, repeat, restate, reject, and rewrite my own formula for how change works. The unpublished pages fill a dozen cartons in my basement that I’ve lately had a mind to feed to a hungry AI, preferably one with a sense of humor and a penchant for irony. I have concluded that the challenge of changes is that since no one can say what makes people tick to begin with, how will we ever recalibrate our clocks to keep up with the times? The best I can offer is a smudged window into my life’s passion—I know, sad—that these days I call …
The 10 Breakable Rules of Human Transformation
- First, Change Everything. When we claim to transform a company or a person, do we mean the whole enchilada? Resilience is such an overwhelming force—see Rule #10—that if our change program does not sop up every last drop of the human character, like the leftover tail of a resilient hydra, the untamed beast will inevitably come roaring back as before.
- Don’t Change. (Be Changed.) There is too much to us and the organizations we inhabit to change all by ourselves. Fortunately, the biochemicals that form and transform us are governed by systems that know a thing or two about leverage. If we can figure out how to trigger the change machine that is us, ‘we’ will change as if in our sleep.
- Come Undone. Kurt Lewin, the German-American pioneer of social, organizational, and applied psychology, held that to change any human system, we must first unfreeze it. By melting “our blocks, our stones, our worse than senseless things,” we effectively scrape the paint from our self-portraits to get a closer view of the art beneath. Darwin essentially confessed, “Should anyone arrive on the scene whose glass peers deeper into the cell than my own; there goes my Royal Award!”
- Stop the Clock. Like a surgeon who bathes the beating heart in potassium chloride to operate on it at rest, what those who know call our metacognitive perspective uniquely allows us, like Hippocrates, to “Declare the Past, Diagnose the Present, and Foretell the Future. “When we alter even one of those temporal dimensions, the rest will fall over themselves to get in line.
- Lose Your Mind. Transformative learner Jack Mezirow asserts that the fastest way to alter a human system is to articulate its uncritically assimilated worldview and then blow it to bits via some sort of disorienting dilemma. Winston Churchill said the same but without the mambo jambo: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”
- Change Like a Leopard. (Not a Lightbulb.) Because the head bone is connected to the heart bone, when you change your mind, it nudges your heart in a similar direction. Thus piqued, your heart presses on your will and before you can say ‘a leap of leopards’, your entire body springs into motion. Aristotle invented the word salience (to leap) to describe how a human cell jumps apart to differentiate itself. If change is a wave, best to get a running start.
- Change This to Change That. Ever wonder how the tiniest pill reaches the correct body part? More often than not, the medicine we take sets in motion a chain reaction that only indirectly impacts its destination. What are the precursors to institutional change that, once triggered, work the night shift while we see to our dreams?
- Change Like a Lightbulb. (Not a Milk Truck.) The B-side of wave-particle theory, if properly primed, change lights up with the flip of a switch. Engineers call it a moment. For the rest of us, presto change feels like magic. Because human systems are wired for perpetual motion, it’s easy to forget that, as human beings, we are primarily human changings.
- Change Downhill. Pumped up on blood, we are ‘venient’ beings. Change is, therefore, either with us (convenient), away from us (inconvenient), or aimed in the opposite direction (contravenient). Like the heart, our job is to make change flow as conveniently as possible. Consider how the gravitational field continuously adjusts to enable the earth to ‘fall’ around the sun. When we set it up to run downhill, change becomes frictionless.
- Two-time Resilience. When we change, resilience (from salience; to leap backward) alternates between two faces. Like a jilted lover, resilience will snap you back in place at the first sign of betrayal. But once you break free of her jealous grip to reach escape velocity, you can count on resilience’s possessive side to hold your new direction tight and never let you go.
- Never Play by the Rules. The ’10 Rules of Change’ are based not on hard science but lived experience. I accept that given its plethora of options, change choice comes down to style more so than substance. That’s because there are as many ways to transform an institution or an individual as there are organizations and people. So never apply the rules of change ‘unchanged.’ Adapt them to what we observe about their underlying forces that form and transform us.
This post is from a LinkedIn Newsletter called The Indirections. Subscribe on LinkedIn.
