by Aaron Dignan
Rather than weeks of debate about a plan, our project kicked off with a multiday off-site that included the top forty leaders in the company. We gathered in a circle and questioned their operating system—how it was or wasn’t serving them. We heard and told stories. But we didn’t just talk; we experienced new ways of working through activities and exercises designed to challenge assumptions, and we talked about what we noticed. We moved as much as we sat still. We heard from everyone in equal measure, asking louder voices to step back intermittently so that we could draw out the quieter voices in the room. We asked everyone to model vulnerability and candor. Seventy-two hours later, we had transformed a dozen tensions in their OS into safe-to-try experiments that small teams had committed to testing immediately. No one left wondering what was next. They left with things to do. They left with commitments to one another.
A couple months later, the COO expressed a concern of her own. “We’re doing all these little experiments around how we meet and decide and share, but when do we address the big stuff, like structure or the budget?”
“Well,” I replied, “the things we’re doing now reflect what the teams are ready to do—what they identified as holding them back. As they master these things, they’ll naturally gravitate toward bigger systemic opportunities. When teams start calling for more dynamic budgeting, you’ll know exactly where to try it.”
“I love that,” she agreed. “But people keep coming to me with interpersonal problems that they believe are caused by our structure. I’m wondering if I should just make those changes now and solve their tension.”
“What would happen if you stopped playing the role of fixer?” one of my colleagues asked.
“I don’t know . . . ,” she said. “I guess they would have to figure it out for themselves?” We all looked at one another and smiled.
Two Transformations
Control Inc. and Emergent Inc. don’t exist. But that doesn’t mean the two stories I just shared aren’t real. They happened. In fact, they’ve happened more than once. Over the years we’ve taken part in dozens and dozens of change efforts. Some worked. Some didn’t. And many were somewhere in between. Control Inc. and Emergent Inc. represent amalgamations of these experiences. Emergent Inc. draws from efforts that largely succeeded in their quest to unlock the potential of their organization, sometimes far beyond our expectations and often in surprising ways that we could never have anticipated. Control Inc. draws from the many wrong turns and outright failures that we’ve witnessed and played a part in. Their stories continue as we move forward.
THE FOLLY OF THE CHANGE PLAN
In the popular approach to change, the one you know and have probably experienced, we imagine the future we want and then we attempt to close the gap between how things are and how they should be. Because we are oriented around a specific vision of the future, we tend to view change as finite. It’s a journey from point A to point B, with a beginning, middle, and end. Once we achieve that goal, we are done. To that end, we manage change in a linear fashion, with a project plan, time line, milestones, and all the trappings of a controlled and ordered process.
This is a compelling but ultimately incoherent theory of change. It’s compelling because it reflects what we want to believe about the world and our power to change it. Don’t forget, we’re carrying a hundred years of Taylorism around with us and the wiring is deep. Our entire career, we have been trained and drilled on the importance of planning, control, and finding the one best way. We want to do change by the book.
The most prevalent change framework we encounter, and there are dozens, is almost certainly John Kotter’s eight-step process, from his 1996 best-selling book Leading Change. In his research, Kotter compared failed transformations with successful ones and found that eight specific actions spelled the difference. I guarantee you’ve heard them all before: establish a sense of urgency (what some people call a “burning platform”), build a guiding coalition, develop a shared vision, and so on. In the decades that have followed, these steps have become a kind of change dogma, wielded from the top by executives and consultants who do them to (rather than with) their organizations. Rather than hold these “steps” lightly, executives tend to view them as best practice and attempt to implement them linearly and authoritatively, often with lackluster results. Kotter himself updated the process in 2014, acknowledging that the steps should really be done concurrently and continuously.
The problem isn’t that we use models and frameworks to better understand change (although we need to be careful about correlation versus causation when it comes to defining what “works”). The problem is that we mistake the organization for an ordered system. And so we oversimplify. As a result, we tend to force whatever is happening in the system—in the hearts and minds of our colleagues—into that framework. We start saying things such as “You’re frozen right now, Michael, and we’re in the ‘unfreeze’ part of our change process, so . . . we’re going to need you to change your attitude.” We can guess what Michael is thinking in response.
This plan-driven approach leaves little room for adapting as we go. After all, what happens if we learn something that fundamentally changes our vision (you know, the one we already communicated to the whole company)? Do we start over? At a scale of ten thousand or a hundred thousand people, can we even truly be in one phase together at the same time? Or are we actually experiencing different contexts and realities simultaneously? Aren’t we more likely to experience change locally and asynchronously—in many different places at many different stages? The answer to these questions is simply incompatible with traditional change management.
The truth is that in an increasingly complex world, plans are lies committed to paper. They’re mere horoscopes drafted by the people furthest from the action that diverge from reality the moment they’re published. Change plans are no exception. In fact, they’re worse. Getting everyone to execute in service of a strategic plan using their existing habits and practices is one thing. Getting them to change those habits and practices (and the mindsets that support them) is something else entirely.
Perhaps this is why so few transformations succeed at all. A recent McKinsey study showed that only 26 percent of transformation efforts succeed in the eyes of the people involved. If you ask frontline employees only, that drops to just 6 percent. Based on those statistics, you’re almost as likely to hit blackjack on your first hand at a card table as you are to complete a transformation that is felt and recognized by the front line. Clearly, something has to give.
CHANGING HOW WE CHANGE
We need a new approach to organizational transformation. We can start by accepting that organizations are complex adaptive systems, not complicated mechanical ones. They are living systems, not machines. They are the sum total of the principles, practices, mindsets, assumptions, and behavior of hundreds or thousands of people.
How do you change a complex adaptive system? You live in the now.
A city planner in search of more green space in Manhattan could envision an idyllic future where a new city park is built out into the Hudson River. But her chances of realizing that vision would be slim to none. Even armed with support and funding, construction could take years. The Second Avenue Subway was conceived in 1919. It didn’t open until 2017. Complexity will surprise you.
Alternatively, our planner could look up and notice that an abandoned elevated railway running from the Meatpacking District to Chelsea has been colonized by wild plants, creating what looks like a linear park in the sky. That’s exactly what Joshua David and Robert Hammond noticed before they founded Friends of the High Line, a nonprofit dedicated to the railway’s preservation and reuse as a public park. Upon opening, the High Line was an instant phenomenon, and today it attracts more than five million visitors a year. In an unexpected twist, the buildings and real estate around the park, previously an eyesore, have now skyrocketed in value. The areas along the High Line are am
ong the most desirable in the city. All because someone started with what was (almost) there.
The history of human innovation is a story of happy accidents. Airbnb didn’t happen because of a vision to change travel and hospitality forever. It happened because a couple guys with an air mattress were short on rent. Their idea worked, so they did more of it. As leaders, we have been told we have to imagine a compelling future and drive everyone toward it. While this can gather people to our cause, it doesn’t do much to further it.
Complexity expert Dave Snowden offers enigmatic but essential advice on the matter. “Managing the present to actually create a new direction of travel is more important than creating false expectations about how things could be in the future.” What he’s getting at is the difference between closing the gap—trying to achieve a predetermined future state—and discovering what author Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible. In his words, “The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”
The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.
—Seneca
As leaders, we have to accept that we can’t control whole communities of people—we can nudge them only in directions they are disposed to go. When attempting culture change in complexity, Dave Snowden says, “we manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors, within boundaries.” That’s a mouthful, I know. In the common tongue it might read something like this: we try new things, notice positive and negative patterns, amplify what’s working, and minimize what isn’t. Sounds an awful lot like the process of evolution, right? If you need an approach to change, the engine of all life on this planet is a good place to start.
What is counterintuitive about this approach is that it has the potential to go much faster than the traditional one. While it may feel fast to announce a global org change (complete with org charts), when new behavior doesn’t follow, reality will soon sink in. And the conversation will turn to how people resist change. But do they? Or do they just resist incoherent change efforts?
In a system that’s not overly constrained, changes that serve us can spread quickly. Niels Pflaeging holds a similar view. He contends that “milk in coffee is a more helpful metaphor than the widespread notion of seeing change as a journey from here to there.” Like milk in coffee, the right kind of change can unfold throughout a system quickly and continuously.
At this point you might be realizing, Oh shit, we’re not just changing the organization; we’re changing how we change the organization. You’re right. And it’s every bit as meta as you’re imagining. By accepting that your organization is complex, you are compelled to change both the OS and the manner in which you change it. You can’t blow up bureaucracy with a bureaucratic change process. You can’t build a culture of trust with a program full of oversight and verification. Start the way you mean to finish.
While we can’t pick a specific future state and realize it through sheer force of will, that doesn’t mean we can’t steer in the direction of our values. We want to create organizations that are People Positive and Complexity Conscious—full of humanity, vitality, and adaptivity. That means we should measure the results of our experiments, probes, nudges, and flips according to those ideals. Will a change we make increase our ability to respond to changing circumstances? Improve our relationships or social density? Bring more meaning to the workplace? Or will it move us away from those things?
As an example, inspired by the stories I shared in the domain of compensation, we released salary data inside The Ready a couple of years ago. We deemed it safe to try because we had everyone’s consent, and because information symmetry is a People Positive trait (transparency reduces bias and increases fairness). Then we waited for patterns to emerge. If someone got upset because they thought their colleague was overpaid, would that mean the experiment was a failure? Not at all. Our goal isn’t harmony. Our goal is an ever better organization. By revealing a disparity between expectation and pay, we created a learning opportunity. Either the system is right, and the individual can learn more about how and why we value certain skills, or the individual is right and the system can be adjusted. Either path increases knowledge, trust, and fairness. In the short run, it’s easier keeping everyone in the dark. In the long run, a little light goes a long way.
We have a name for what happens when everyone in an organization is engaged and empowered to shape and reshape its operating system. We call it continuous participatory change. Continuous because we need to break the habit of treating change as a rare and hallowed thing. The inertia of the status quo has made change a last resort. We can make small local changes routine and find that progress compounds. And participatory because we need to break the habit of centralized, top-down transformation. We can distribute authority and encourage everyone to steer the organization in service of its purpose.
Every OS transformation is ultimately about achieving that state at scale. Because no matter how brilliant your principles and practices may be, the world will turn, and the organization will need to respond.
CONTINUOUS PARTICIPATORY CHANGE
Everybody always wants to know, “What does a typical OS transformation look like?” The truth is that no two look the same. In 2013 Pixar was riding high on the success of fourteen number-one films in a row. But early members of the leadership team felt that the culture had lost something along the way. In his book Creativity, Inc., cofounder and president Ed Catmull observes, “One of the central tenets of our culture—good ideas can come from anywhere, so everyone must feel empowered to speak up—was faltering.” In the wake of cofounder John Lasseter’s #metoo-related termination, it’s clear this was an understatement. Many employees were so respectful of the studio’s history and track record that they questioned whether they had a right to speak up about anything. In the midst of that, production costs had been rising for years and it was imperative the studio figure out how to streamline and simplify its development process. When the firm’s leadership met to discuss how to achieve that goal, Guido Quaroni, the vice president of the Tools Department, suggested, “Let’s ask Pixar’s people—all of them—for ideas about how to do it.” Everyone immediately got on board.
They decided to close Pixar for what would be known as “Notes Day,” a cheeky reference to the feedback they regularly exchanged around films in development. No meetings. No visitors. Just 1,059 employees focused from dawn to dusk on how to improve their business. The newly formed Notes Day Working Group collected suggestions from the culture that culminated in more than 106 topics and 171 sessions. They created “exit forms” for each session that attendees could use to record proposals, next actions, and who would champion these ideas going forward. Employees were able to choose the sessions they felt inspired to attend, with options ranging from “Helping Directors Understand Costs in Story” to “Returning to a ‘Good Ideas Come from Anywhere’ Culture.”
The energy throughout the day was electric, even for Pixar. Proposals were abundant, and dozens of ideas were implemented by teams in the weeks and months following the session. Catmull recalls, “I don’t know if a metric exists to measure the impact of Notes Day, but from where I was standing, it was huge.” The next day, he received hundreds of emails from employees expressing appreciation and gratitude for what the event had meant to them. One message on a Notes Day bulletin board simply read, “Do this again next year.”
But why wait? Why unleash that level of participation, candor, catharsis, and innovation only once every 365 days? If participatory change is so powerful, why not make it continuous? The knee-jerk response is “We don’t have time.” But I think the more honest answer is “We don’t know how to execute and learn at th
e same time.” Getting an organization to the point of Pixar, where they’re ready for notes, is hard enough. Keeping it going is something else entirely. That’s one of the reasons continuous participatory change is so rare in mainstream organizations—a lack of willingness to figure it out. But if we stop looking for a proven process and start looking for patterns, we can find ways to make change an everyday occurrence. In our work, we’ve noticed six such patterns that, held lightly, are worth encouraging:
Commitment: When those with power or influence commit to moving beyond bureaucracy.
Boundaries: When a liminal space is created and protected.
Priming: When the invitation to think and work differently is offered.
Looping: When change is decentralized and self-management begins.
Criticality: When the system has tipped and there’s no going back.
Continuity: When continuous participatory change is a way of life, and the organization is contributing to the broader community of practice.
Do not mistake these for steps. They’re more akin to thresholds. The order can change. They can be revisited and renewed. They can interact. But when they happen, they help. If you squint, they feel almost like a plan . . . written in pencil.
We’ll explore each of them now, followed by some critical concepts that will help you navigate these moments. By the time we’re done, you’ll be ready to take the leap.
