Change Whisperer on ProjectManagement.com

 “The whales sing, not because they have an answer. They sing because they have a song.”    —Andrew Stevenson

There is no substitute for getting away from it all.

Displacement is a powerful rejuvenation technique.

For six hours on March 14^thwe forgot everything. We focused only on finding whales. I hope this story will “take you away” for a few minutes.

The power of adventure

This was the first whale-watching trip of the year for the Endurance, the official research vessel of the Bermuda Zoological Society, which runs out of the Bermuda Aquarium, Museum & Zoo (BAMZ).

Every year in March and April, humpback whales migrate from the Caribbean to New England, the Maritime provinces of Canada, Labrador, Greenland, Iceland, and even Norway. They pause in Bermuda on their 5000-kilometre journey to rest and feed (sound familiar?).

We were fortunate to be joined by Lynne, a biologist from BAMZ and, at the last minute, at the invitation of Captain Nigel, by Andrew Stevenson, founder of the Humpback Whale Research Foundation. As we set out (and immediately forgot all of our daily stresses), Lynne told us what to look for (a mist, or “blow” on the sea as the whales come up to breathe), described common humpback whale behaviors such as logging (swimming along the surface) that we might see, and shared stories of previous sightings. Andrew noted that he had seen twenty different whales just the day before.

Captain Nigel let us know that our path would take us on almost a full loop of the entire island in six hours. As we headed east, he tried to manage our expectations: “Finding the whales is a bit ‘hit and miss’?naturally the whales move around so we might see some and we might see none.”

Uninformed optimism and conscious incompetence

We were still incredibly optimistic and scanned the horizon looking for anything that might look like a whale breathing.

Mid-March in Bermuda is winter. The ocean seems like a massive cauldron. Even on this beautiful day, the waves were easily 10 feet and rolled in lengths of 100 feet. The boat that seemed big at the dock became remarkably small. Yet we were undeterred.

One of the guests became increasingly seasick (known locally as “feeding the fish”), but we were glued to the deck on look-out. Andrew and Lynne made their way to the top deck and braved the sea spray for a better view. None of the rest of us were so brave.

The hours and the miles passed and we became a little worried. Was that a whale? Or just a wave? The eyes begin playing tricks with you when you want something so badly.

More time passed. The kids had a snooze in the cabin.

Suddenly initiated

About four hours in, Andrew called out, “Whale! 1 o’clock” (front right of the boat).

We all sprung into motion and crowded at the edge of the boat, straining to learn what a “blow” looks like.

There it was! Smaller than you might think, in the distance. Then a fin, then a second fin! Amazing.

Captain Nigel, half-in the cabin and half-out through the driver’s window kept look, steered, and adjusted the speed. “We have to pace them. We don’t want to over run them or scare them” Lynne explained.

We were breathless. Where were they?

Suddenly the ocean seemed vast again. They could be below the boat or a mile farther away. “They breathe every three minutes,” someone said. We waited and tried to time it. Did we miss the last blow?

There! Ahead! Again, Nigel sped up to get close enough to see but not close enough to scare them, or endanger us.

Wonderful. We watched them as long as they let us. We were hooked. Then they were gone.

We cruised around a while longer but it seemed those two beautiful whales would be it for today.

Perspective

On the way back, I had an opportunity to speak with Andrew. He is a man who has repeatedly reinvented his life?you can read his amazing story here.

By my count, he has lived in eleven countries and it is easy to lose count of the number of his vastly different careers. He says he even has dreams of another country and another career.

The Humpback Whale Research Foundation, his current project, has catapulted humpback whale research: “By the end of 2012 we had obtained 673 fluke IDs, which compares to 145 Bermuda fluke IDs over the 40 years before this project began.”

In 2010, he learned how to film and produce an underwater movie. Amazing you say? Better still, It was an award winning production. If you can give yourself five more minutes, watch this clip from “Where the Whales Sing,”narrated by his daughter Elsa, then a precious six years old.

His advice to me? “Life is short. Follow your passion.” Sounds quaint right? Not so, coming from a man whose own life is a testament.

Secondhand vacation

I hope that in sharing this little story you might experience a break?a little vicarious R&R.

And I hope that if you are considering taking a vacation to rejuvenate, this might be a tipping point.

And if you have any interest in whale watching, Bermuda, or anything else, I hope you will feed your curiosity.

“You can go to heaven if you want. I'd rather stay in Bermuda.”    —Mark Twain

There are, of course, many compelling reasons to take a vacation, but here is one that reconciles with your business objectives.

Go slow to go fast.

To bring our best selves forward to complex and high-pressure strategy, we need clear minds and fulsome spirits.

Optimize your rejuvenation

We all need to rejuvenate in different ways, of course. However, it seems to me there are three simple, but key, ingredients:

1. Rest
2. Reflect
3. Explore

The body has physical needs. There is no point disputing this. “Mind over matter” only works until it matters. When we are physically run down, our bodies shut down for us. Let’s not get there.

A few weeks ago, my husband, my two sons, and I took a trip to Bermuda. It’s my homeland; my children were born there, and we lived there for five years in the late nineties. It is at once both familiar and intriguing. For all of us, it was a chance to kick back, sleep, eat, reflect, and explore. It was just what we needed to reenergize ourselves.

Decision One: “Go with the flow”

The first decision we made was to “go with the flow.” We slept every morning until we weren’t tired anymore. Then we ate, healthy, as needed.

Over a couple of days we could all feel our clarity coming back. We became more interested in the events around us, more curious, more demanding. A great golf game for the boys and a little exploring in the city began gearing us all up.

Our conversations turned lazily to the issues we have been wrestling with. For our teenage boys it was about how school was going, decisions around course selection, university options, and summer jobs. But without the intensity that pressure brings, our conversations were reflective and interactive.

Turning over the issues like rocks on the beach, looking at the implications less passionately, more curiously, more resourcefully, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” became “What are you interested in? What is important to you?” One conversation even turned into “If you were going to get a tattoo, what would you want on your body forever?”

Reuniting with our best selves

It has occurred to me before that under pressure of strategy execution or any other major change, we lose sight of who we are. We become a product of that environment. We get wound tighter and tighter. Our best selves fade into the background.

Returning to familiar things and places reminds us of our best selves. This gives us confidence, inspires us, rejuvenates us. All around us are memories of accomplishment and people who believe in us. This is powerful stuff. It frees us of our insecurities and feeds our courage.

Decision Two: Explore

The second decision we made was to explore?to do some things we have never done?get outside our comfort zone. I was born on this little rock, 21 miles long and 3 miles wide in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and I have only been off-shore once before. This year we decided to go whale watching. It was long-time dream of mine and my family humored me.

We were all somewhat intimidated. The sea is vast and even six miles off shore is farther than any of us could swim. The thought of seeing wild whales bigger than our 45-foot boat filled us with both awe and fear. Not to mention the risk of being seasick for six hours…

Curious to hear about our whale-watching adventure? The only thing better than a real vacation is a vicarious one. Stay tuned for Post 3 next week. Want to subscribe? Sign up top left.

Related Posts:

• Leading strategy? The business case for rejuvenation. Post 1 of 3
• Longing for the endless immensity of great leadership
• Breakthroughs in strategy

“Going faster and faster leads either to immediate lift off or eventually to a grinding halt. Slow down to go faster,” —Gail Severini

Executing strategy is exhausting?both physically and emotionally.

It requires double-timing it at very stressful and often long-term initiatives.

Everyone needs to find ways to re-charge, re-fresh, re-juvenate.

The pace of change has changed. We need to change with it

We run our bodies down over time and, most of the time, we really don’t notice. It happens gradually with grueling early morning commutes, grabbing meals here and there as we can, long stressful days and endless commutes home, making precious time with our families, working out, etc. Most of us are busy, busy, busy. Eventually it catches up with us, but until it does we ride the crest of that wave of adrenaline and caffeine.

This takes a toll on our spirits?on our patience, resilience, and creativity. Over time, our tempers become shorter. We might find ourselves exasperated, saying things like, “I told them this a million times,” “This problem again? I thought we solved this!”, “Just make it happen,” and “What is wrong with these people?” This shutting-down process is unfortunate but also normal and avoidable.

Eventually, a weekend just isn’t enough time and space to re-charge. A holiday may seem a luxury but I have come to see it differently.

Without sufficient mental elasticity, the brain just has no room for creativity and processing complexity. Under the interminable pressures of long stretches of strategy execution, I have found my own capacity for solutions hits all-time, and embarrassing, lows. One time, I even caught myself saying, “We can’t change it. Just suck it up.” Wow, who was that person?

“Why?” The business case for a holiday

Our organizations need us operating at our best. Executing strategy is perhaps one of the single-most under-rated drivers of the quality of life of our own families as well as our communities and economies. Particularly in the midst of current global power shifts, it is critical that we preserve the viability and competitiveness of our organizations.

The nature of strategic change now is at the highest levels of transformation that we have ever seen: demographics are shifting—buying power and economic growth from West to East; business models are turning upside-down what might have been Business-to-Business becomes Business-to-Consumer; business cycles for new products and therefore business viability are shorter than ever (just ask RIM or Best Buy) and there are more knowledge workers in my network than I ever imagined possible.  

We are all working more hours with more personal risk than ever. And, concurrently, the demands for resilience and creativity have never been higher. Seems to me that the pace of our work has changed from a marathon with a two-week holiday to an endless series of sprints.

What are the three key ingredients to rejuvenating? And what is the story of the whale sighting above? Stay tuned for Post 2 next week.

Related Posts:

• Leading strategy? The three key ingredients for rejuvenation. Post 2 of 3
• Some change is about holding on to who we are
• Stuck: 10 questions to break a mindset. A strange conversation with a stranger. Post 2
• Longing for the endless immensity of great leadership

“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”—Aristotle

A couple of years ago I was working with a great team of consultants (externals) on a major strategic change for a national bank.

It wasn’t going well. Two change management practitioners had tried and failed before me to help the project get traction.

In a team meeting, one of the consultants bleated, “It’s like organ rejection: they need us, we can help them, but they keep rejecting us.”

What does “organ rejection” look like?

The symptoms included: tolerance of briefings and assessments; polite acknowledgment of principles, best practices, and theory; lip service to the consultants’ recommendations; requests for more justifications, explanations, reports, and plans (which were summarily filed), and…no action whatsoever. It seemed like plans went into black holes.

I think there were several reasons for this:

• Some of the project work had been falling short for a while and the credibility of the team was decreasing, exacerbating an already poor relationship.
• The senior partner on the consultant side was unwilling to keep confronting the client on core issues and hold them accountable. It also seemed likely that the client was not accepting the partner’s assessment of the risks. (To do so would have required uncomfortable changes.)
• The relationships between most of the internal resources (internals) and the consultants (subject matter experts in various fields) were inconsistent and often perfunctory.

Turnaround

We got a very lucky break: the person assigned to lead the “Transformation” workstream changed. The new leader was inexperienced and the lead consultant immediately invested in and built a strong relationship.

The workstream consulting team agreed to make another change: we would make the change management work eminently pragmatic. This meant changing our language (talking “turkey,” not theory) and generating very tangible chunks of work (i.e., meeting the client where they were). 

It worked: we got some small wins and the relationship between the consultants and the internals in the Transformation workstream began to improve.

Optimizing internal and external resources

The global conference for the Association of Change Management Professionals is April 14 – 17 and I will be moderating a panel entitled “Perks and Perils: Optimizing Internal and External Change Management.”On the panel: Supriya Desai, President, ASC Advisory; Richard Batchelor, Change Management & HR Strategy; Garrett Gitchell, President, Vision to Work, Inc.; and Ania Szpakowski, Change Director, Zurich Insurance.

Combined, we have 52 years of internal experience (AIG, Air Canada, Bank of America, Cisco, Chevron, Coke/Odwalla, CIBC Insurance, CN Rail, Danish Post, Ericsson Communications, JP Morgan Chase, Lowe’s, Pepsico, and Pratt & Whitney) and 55 years of external experience (Conner Partners, IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers and independent practices).

As we have been preparing for the panel we’ve shared stories like the one above. We have all served as both internals and externals (i.e., we have been on both sides of the fence).

We have condensed our shared observations into a brief presentation which I will share here after the event. The learning objectives we identified are:

1. Understand the trend toward building in-house change management capabilities
2. Gain perspective on the nature of typical internal change management entities
3. Explore the success factors of working as an internal or an external change practitioner
4. Explore scenarios for optimizing internal and external change management practitioners for success

Different roles, different advantages?the importance of synergy

While both internals and externals can, and should, bring deep understanding and experience in change management methodology, tools, and skills, it quickly became clear to the panelists that either role creates important systemic dynamics.

Internals tend to have advantages like:

• Deep knowledge of the organization and its culture,
• Established reputations, and
• Existing relationships of influence and trust.

Externals tend to have the following advantages:

• More access to senior leadership within the organization and fewer political barriers for difficult conversations (in fact, there is often explicit contracting to have these difficult conversations)
• Objectivity and equanimity
• A wide variety of experiences with other organizations on which to draw
• Access to thought leadership that can be brought to bear

What became very obvious is that we are less effective independently. Together we are formidable.

Raising up internals

On a side note, I have also observed that we externals can raise the status of internals when we consciously invest in making the organization stronger.  In fact, we are often referred into organizations by internals who know that the organization needs to put more priority on their role. 

The positioning to their leaders is often “This strategy is different than the change we normally implement and, frankly, our organization’s track record for this kind of change is not great?just think about projects x, y and z.  I know a firm that specializes in high-risk strategy execution. Can I set up a ½ hour call?”.   After the appropriate tire-kicking and mutual qualification, this usually leads into sponsor and agent training (certification if the organization faces long term disruption), shoulder-to-shoulder execution and re-framing of the contract between sponsor and agent.  Inevitably the internal agent, and the organization, is in a stronger position at the end of the day.  

Sounds kind of funny to deliberately work yourself out of a job but really that’s what every external should be doing.

Related posts:

• 10 tips for becoming a trusted advisor in change management
• Top 10 competencies for change agents

“Be careful what you ask for cause you just might get it.” Refrain from “When I Grow Up” by The Pussycat Dolls

Many organizations are chasing the “innovation” strategy. We want all of the benefits, don’t we?

We want the shiny design, the “loyalty” of our clients, the envy of our competitors, and the bountiful revenue. 

This is “hot” change. Maybe uncomfortably hot.

What price is the organization willing to pay?

What price are you, the leader, willing to pay? How about you, the employee?

Forget easy

If it were easy, someone else would already be doing it.

Real breakthrough (there’s a shiny word) innovation is hard. Anyone who has even attempted it and failed knows how perilous this journey is.

It is perilous for at least three reasons. This post looks at:

• Getting all the right people aligned
• Keeping them engaged
• Succeeding through discomfort

Aligning with the four corners of the “earth”

There are at least four sources for innovation, inspiration, and collaboration:

1. A core delivery team
2. The brightest minds across your organization
3. Your supply chain
4. Your customer base

For some organizations, there may be many more sources. For example, your Board and investors might want to weigh in; volunteers (in hospitals, for example) might have a useful perspective.

The point here is that these are very diverse constituencies with different experiences with your “product” (or service or opportunity) and very different agendas. There are “interests” and polarities to be managed. Their opinions will diverge greatly and converge powerfully.

Engaging them has been referred to as “herding cats” or “riding rodeo.” It requires a certain set of skills. Some organizations call it “stakeholder management” — I actually prefer the term “stakeholder engagement.”

Keeping the team together on the journey to innovation

The status quo may not be brilliant but it is often comfortable. It is known and predictable.

Some might have said that the Murphy beds of the 1950s were more than adequate (see Post 1). Why go through the effort of innovating it?

There are a lot of reasons to get stuck, to resist — for the initiative to stall out or flame out and lots of factors:

• People’s enthusiasm and commitment to the journey cool and wane
• Uncertainty and ambiguity grow and wear the team down
• Fear and insecurity become a plague

The leaders must remain resolute and must be energetic in continuing to engage their teams and constituencies. It takes powerful momentum to keep the innovation freight train moving — it takes all of the change execution skills and resources you can muster.

One of the Conner Partners leadership mindsets about transformational change strikes me here:

“Sponsors and agents aren’t there to make people comfortable during change—their job is to help them succeed despite the inevitable discomfort” (“Realization Mindset for Sponsors”).

 “The inevitable discomfort”

In the previous post, I talked about strategic intent and the clarity leaders gain in that process. It is essential to share and perpetuate that clarity throughout the organization and the constituencies involved. It is only the first step toward managing discomfort.

Many change management approaches rely solely on broadcasting communication for this. You know what it looks like: townhall meetings, webinars, emails, intranet websites. These are good, but insufficient. People need to talk through their doubts and reservations. And, rather inconveniently, we all need to talk through it more than once.

Previously, I have referred to the commitment curve. We tend to think that we help people get on the commitment path and they stay on it. Nothing could be further from the truth. At every point in time, it is human nature to assess new information coming in. We can stall or drop out at any point, and we often do?usually when we become uncomfortable.

When leaders at each level of the organization talk with their people regularly they can head off discomfort by providing additional information and clarification or sometimes by reminding them about the benefits and consequences for the organizations and themselves.

Because innovation is fraught with ambiguity, the need for ongoing conversations is even more imperative than in other change. Information is updated regularly and decisions are made on the fly. It is easy to get left behind and feel out of the loop. Great leaders mitigate this and keep people aligned by sharing updates and discussing implications.

 Innovation is one of the single most important strategies of our generation. It is more than a competitive advantage?the future of our organizations, communities, and economies depends on it.

Innovation is transformational change. Let’s invest in understanding how to do it well.

Related Posts:

• Breakthroughs in strategy
• Honk if you love innovation. Quotes and resources on innovation
• Breakthrough innovation is “simplicity on the far side of complexity”. Post 1

Are you in the midst of this struggle? Let’s talk [email protected]