Barely a month into the New Year, I can already feel my resolutions shifting beneath my feet. Institutional change is elusive, and personal transformation can be downright brutal.
If things were otherwise, we would always reach our ideal weight, consistently complete our projects below budget and ahead of schedule, and embrace Daylight Savings as a natural augmentation of our circadian rhythm.
Too many decades ago to admit, I was prepping to hit the street for my first Business Process Reengineering assignment at the consultancy that trademarked that ominous phrase. There was just one problem. Amidst the throws of writing the international business best-seller on how companies change, the firm’s principals had yet to agree on the repeatable keys to their reengineering successes.
“The good news is there are only two ways to transform an organization,” my trainer confided to me before shushing me off to undermine the underpinnings 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 principles around 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 The unpublished pages fill a dozen cartons in my basement that I’ve lately had a mind to feed to a hungry AI, ideally one with a sense of humor and a penchant for irony. I have concluded that the crux of the reengineering challenge is that if nobody knows what makes people and organizations tick, how will we recalibrate our clocks to keep up with the times? The best I can offer is a smudgy window into my life’s passion—I know, sad—that these days I am calling …
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 crumb, like the leftover tail of a resilient hydra, the untamed beast will eventually come roaring back precisely as before.
- Don’t Change. (Be Changed.) There is too much to us and the organizations we inhabit to change it 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.” Oddly enough, when we alter even one of those temporal dimensions, the others 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 through a disorienting dilemma. Winston Churchill said the same 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 the same direction, which then piques your will, and before you can say ‘a leap of leopards’, your entire body springs into motion. Aristotle invented salience (to leap) to describe how an animal cell jumps apart to differentiate itself. If change is a wave, 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 a chain reaction primed for change in motion. All it needs is a push from the owner. What are the precursors to institutional change that, if we can set them in motion, will work the night shift as we see to our dreams?
- Change Like a Lightbulb. (Not a Milk Truck.) Like the B-side of wave-particle theory, when the change stars align, all it takes is the flip of a switch for everything to happen simultaneously. Engineers call that a moment. To the rest of us, presto change feels like magic. Because so much of what goes on inside is automatic, it’s easy to forget that, as human beings, we are primarily human changing.
- Change Downhill. Pumped up on blood, we are venient beings. Change is, therefore, either with us (convenient), away from us (inconvenient), or in the opposite direction (contravenient). Like the heart, our job is to make change flow as conveniently as possible. Consider how the gravitational field engulfing the sun and earth reorients itself continuously so that our world constantly ‘falls’ around the sun. Change is frictionless when we set it up to run downhill.
- Two-time Resilience. When we change, Resilience (from salience; to leap backward) will alternate between two faces. Like a jilted lover, one 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 her possessive side to hold your new direction tight and never let you go.
- Never Play by the Rules. The ’10 Rules’ are based not on hard science but on lived experience. I accept that as change tools, they are probably based more on style than substance. That’s because there are as many ways to transform an institution or an individual as there are organizations and people. Our task is not to apply the rules of change ‘unchanged’ but to adapt what we observe about their underlying forces to our evolving resolutions.