Learning to dance with Change

Why do we have to keep changing? In organisations, I hear: we’ve just had a reorganisation and now we’re already embarking on the next one. Nothing is ever stable here. In people’s personal lives, they realise that the structures and the expectations and the way of life that they have don’t carry into the present.

On a global level, we are confronted with massive crises as we find that the stable world order that we’ve had for eight decades is fraying, is slowly changing, is collapsing. New forces are coming up. There’s a rearrangement of power, and everything gets mangled in the middle.

They all have to do with the same process: change. The honest answer is: welcome to life. Life is change. Life is constant change. That was my great realisation when I spoke on my 60th birthday about transformative thinking. The kind of thinking that makes you change, transform, metamorphize.

If life is change, why isn’t it smooth adaptation: year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day, hour by hour. We just change gradually. Yes, that is our lived experience. We age in every moment. But our society is composed of structures.

Everything that we do is structure. Our language is structure. Our buildings are structure. Our education system, our tax system, our financial system, the money system; these are all structures. The conventions that we have in our culture, large and important ones like marriage and laws and work that define our lives, that define our identity: they are all structures.

The substructures: every company, every organisation is a structure composed of even more structures. School is a structure. Everywhere you look, you find these organisations that are built according to a certain number of rules, that are defined in the same way. Sometimes they have a long history, sometimes it’s a little bit shorter. And yes, they change over time. They lose their impact, they lose their relevance, they get superseded.

But that process of change happens in fits and starts, because a structure doesn’t change daily or weekly, or even monthly. It changes when it adapts, when it is restructured. Every structure came into being at a specific moment, with a specific goal, with a specific design to deal with a specific situation. And the group of these structures became an interlocking system.

Structures change along two axes, and that’s where all the pain lies. The first is evolution versus revolution. Evolution is step change in iterations, a small change that compounds: that’s how natural evolution works. Every generation passes on a small modification so that the species comes to fit its environment, comes to develop a different body, different capabilities, and that’s how species grow.

But it’s a very long, step process. If we refuse to change and keep with the same structures in a world that is gradually changing, at some point we will be confronted with revolution. The system is so out of joint, is so disjointed from the reality, that the only way possible is to overthrow it. That is a very brutal shift , a shift that is usually very violent.

We see it in politics. The old system is put out to pasture or even killed off, and the new power comes in, and within a certain time that new power then takes all the power and becomes the new system. The way we have found in democratic politics is to have elections every four years, to limit the term times, to have this step-by-step renewal so that the system can progress, so that we can move forward in step change.

The other axis is whether we are doing this reactively or proactively. Reactively, you are waiting for the world to change. You are waiting for the pain to become so strong that the only thing that you can do is change. And most systems keep this passive attitude. You’re a company with a certain product, but the technology changes, making your offering less relevant. The legal system changes. Competition changes, with the economy and geopolitical players. And so, confronted with that new reality, you have to adapt your offering; you are waiting for these outside shocks to push you into a new reality.

Most of us wait in this passive state, whether it’s our own lives, when we have to shift from one state of being to another, when we go through these threshold moments of reaching adulthood or maturity, or when we stop working; those are massive shifts which happen to us. They come towards us and we respond to them.

The other option, on the other side of this axis, is to run towards change, to embrace change, to realise that all of life is a dance with change. It’s a dynamic movement because all these structures are interlocking. They are making a very, very complex system. We all have to deal with hundreds, with thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of structures that are all interlocking, that are creating this complex world that we have today.

The speed of this world and the complexity of it makes people anxious. They invent all kinds of acronyms to deal with it. A VUCA world, which is Volatile, which is Uncertain, which is Complex, which is Ambiguous. Or a BANI world, which they describe as Brittle and Anxious and Non-linear and Incomprehensible. So this feeling of being overwhelmed by complexity, by the speed of change puts us in this defensive position, where we realise we’re out of sync with the world. We complain about change happening to our organisation, and we feel put on the back foot. We also see this at the global level with the political systems that we’ve built to deal with the current reality: they are also out of sync.

All this is painful, and some institutions choose to offload that pain onto others. They keep the same structures, even though it’s become suboptimal, it doesn’t serve the current reality. And then they just make a waiting list. We have waiting lists for all kinds of services to the point where we stand so long waiting that the point of being in line has disappeared.

Or we have this nostalgia for times where things were fixed, where the structures were stable, where there were secure foundations we could build on. We had jobs for life. We knew what was going on. Everything moved at a speed that we could handle. And we forget that many of these structures were cages, were prisons where we couldn’t be ourselves. These structures: yes, they were stable, but they were also unchanging. They were inescapable.

The task in our life, therefore, is simple. The main instruction is: deal with change. In our personal lives, it’s our personal structures, it’s our personal patterns which have to change as we age - and life will take us through it. In our organisations at whatever scale: a small organisation, a larger organisation, a part of the system that’s related to all the other parts of the systems, these structures have to change. They have to change constantly, continuously.

And yet we have these two axes on that change. We can decide to do it step by step, or we can decide to have a revolution and make a clean start, a clean sheet redesign with a completely new programme, although that’s going to be much more disruptive, especially for the structure that is now left behind.

We can decide to wait for it, till the pain becomes so strong that something has to give, that a new structure has to happen, that we have to change the way we do things. Or, and this is my preference, we can move towards change. We can accept the reality that life is change and we can dance with it. We can realise that all these structures were meant to be temporary. They were designed for a certain purpose, they had a certain optimality: this is the best structure at that moment for that purpose. And when they become suboptimal, when they’ve shifted, when they are no longer fit for purpose, we need to change them.

A proactive attitude to change is like making a tower with building blocks and realising that these building blocks can be adapted to new technologies, to new economic situation, to a new political reality. Ones that fit better, the demand and the service that we need to provide and the shape that we have for the future.

We become future focused and we are dancing with change. We are engaging with this dynamic constantly. And the great advantage is that we feel that we’re in charge, that this is our creation. We have reclaimed our creative nature. Our creative nature, which is the inspiration for new ideas, for new structures, for new solutions to problems, and at the same time, our capacity to create these, to make these, to turn these ideas into reality, into structures that work in the world.

That creative attitude, that master of our own destinies, shapers of our own future is the reward for addressing change proactively, for running towards it, rather than running away from it, from realising that life is change instead of complaining. I think it’s a far more interesting journey.