Creating change that works
An unfortunate reality
Changing organizations, or in modern terms, transforming organizations, has a long history of both failures and being perceived as a painful process for the people in the organization.
A deliberate approach
Our context matters, and there’s no way around that. So we need to understand it before importing set solutions.
Driving change means dealing with a complex reality — systems, processes, and incentives shape behaviors, which then help shape culture.
We must be deliberate. We must bring empiricism to work, have data and research to back our decisions, be intentional. And absolutely refuse groupthink! Do it with data.
Change that works is one that’s communicated with clear goals, hypotheses, and metrics. Change that is testable and verifiable, and that doesn’t pretend that solutions are always right.
Be intentional, be deliberate, have a clear goal and a working hypothesis.
Change as a service
Change needs designing, not in a graphical design sort of way, but the design of systems and rules, how they interact, and how they gain a life of their own as network effects start taking place.
Let’s stop talking about mindset. It is fuzzy and scientifically fragile. Let’s instead discuss how we enable behaviors and run deliberate experiments with clear hypotheses.
Change is a service, and like any other, needs designing and its performance measured.
Understand the life-cycle of frameworks
Don’t blindly buy into set frameworks. Understand them, question them, run away from group thinking — demand of others and yourself empirical evidence or a working hypothesis. Remember that frameworks were created within a specific context and a particular purpose. That context and that purpose may not be yours.
Frameworks, as products, also have a lifecycle.
Group thinking and fake science have hurt the progress of many organizations.
Starting small and simple
Here is how to get started and bring science into the process.
- Start with a clear goal
- Identify your riskiest assumptions
- Run experiments to test them out
- Evaluate
- Rinse and repeat.
Let’s bring real science to the workplace and genuinely enable better organizations!
