Warning

This work represents a few years of personal studies of a wide range of fields, roughly: lean management, systems thinking, strength-based change approaches, cybernetics, and an ounce of psychology.

I am not an expert in these fields in the sense that I don’t own a diploma from any of them.

Yet, I claim personal first-hand experience of that which is explained in this book, both in work and personal life, assorted of self-reflection on my part upon:

• what I witnessed;
• how my personal perspective could have shaped the meaning I attached to what I witnessed;
• what others might have witnessed themselves;
• and how their personal perspectives might have shaped the meaning they seem to have attached to their personal experience of the same event… given what I saw of how they expressed their meaning.

This is circular and I know it. Yet, this is precisely what I would like to talk about in this book.

I am a radical constructivist, which means that I’m convinced that I can only know the world out of my personal experience of it, and that I will (probably) never know for sure whether the meaning I attach to my personal experience of it is close to reality (what’s happening outside of my body senses) or not. I accept the fact that I might be totally wrong about what’s written in this book and that someone may have a totally different opinion of how things work.

Or maybe this is just the opposite? At least, as Solution Focus experts would say: it works for me, so I intend to continue on this line.

Bear with me :-)

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the great systems researchers of life. Without their previous work, the insights I couched down in this book would never have been made possible.

Some earlier researchers took the systems of life apart to understand them, before knowing about systems. That was the first wave of insights into life.

Some more recent researchers took some more (w)holistic views of life and made different discoveries. That was the second wave of insights.

Then came “pure” systems thinkers that discovered that some of the previous insights could be generalized and were indeed applicable to other disciplines as well. They created a new science called “Systems Thinking”; the third wave of insights.

The latest wave of systems thinkers went so far as saying that we need to hold the three kind of insights in mind at the same time. As complex as this might be, I consider this to be a fourth wave of insights¹.

This book builds on all four waves of insights. It doesn’t claim to be of a new wave, but only to check against all the preceding ones and tries to apply what I think might be the consequences of these teachings to the field of Change Management.

Thanks

This book would of course not have been possible without a host of other persons. Some are close, some are less (physically) close, but I feel close to them if only just because I feel like standing on their shoulders.

My family for having a sometimes (often?) dad and husband more in his head than at home on evenings. I did try to reinvest some of my systems and strength-based knowledge into family stuff. I don’t know if I succeeded. Honey? Kids?

Sallie Lee for my initial training in Appreciative Inquiry and infecting me with that benevolent virus: your workshop and training was so good that I felt like we, participants, were about to create an organization out of the Design and Deliver parts on the concept of “Trust”.

Michaël Ballé is the man that unwillingly started my journey in Systems Thinking. Indeed, I found out that he wrote a book titled “Managing With Systems Thinking: Making Dynamics Work for You in Business Decision Making “. Willing to know more, I asked him about Systems Thinking, only to be heard that I shouldn’t go that path because Systems Thinking is like “digging in sands: the more you dig, the more you find something”. Being someone I highly respect, I decided to go nonetheless… because I wanted to know more about his background, why he was successful, and also because I felt like he pressed my resistance button: how couldn’t I go that “dangerous way” against which he was warning me? I suspect he might have done this on purpose…

Franck Vermet for our phone exchanges and few meetings about how we could improve Lean to put back the “Respect for People” that should never have gotten out of it. Congrats for all the successful experiments you did in your plant: gemba+deep respect at the same time, all with a dose of gamification!

David Shaked for our excellent exchanges regarding strength-based change, and for his managing of the LinkedIn Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma group (http://bit.ly/SBLSSLI). David has a very soft and opened way of re-framing questions into a positive stance with Appreciative Inquiry and Solution Focus. A gifted guy! David is also the guy that made me start this book for real.

Jeremy Scrivens for his strong stance on Positive Psychology and Strengths and how he’s trying to mix that with more traditional Lean and Six Sigma approaches. Also, for mapping my own strengths and encouraging me in using them in all I do.

Gene Bellinger for his dedication to constantly updating his web sites (Systems Thinking World), YouTube channel, LinkedIn discussion group, InsightMaker models, etc. His dedication to making Systems Thinking known to a wider audience is commanding and humbling at the same time. I wish I were as irradiating as he is!

Alexis Nicolas for our regular exchanges and lunches around “all that work for us and how couldn’t it, damn it, work for others too, and what can we experiment to change that?”. Alexis, although a fertile ground beforehand, was my first turn-over to strength-based approaches. He consequently registered for an Appreciative Inquiry training (with David Shaked) which directly rushed him in the AI world in France and Europe. I look forward to the great things you’ll soon build.

Bernard Tollec for his energy engaged in making strength-based approaches a success in France (AI and SF) and in wanting, like me, to change the world all-at-once-on-a-as-global-as-possible-scale.

Members of the Systems Thinking World LinkedIn group for their numerous feedback and open mind when it comes to answering my questions, whether dumb in the beginning, and more obscure later. Did I really learned something with respect to Systems Thinking? They’ll tell you…

Members of the Strength-Based Lean Six Sigma LinkedIn group for the open-mindedness too and the wonderful exchanges in order to build a better approach to change in organizational settings.

My different managers for letting me experiment with all the stuff mentioned here. I probably wasn’t sometimes as efficient as they expected me to be, but I hope these investments in experimentations and learning did result in some lasting positive change in the organizations. At least I tried not to hurt anyone in the process…

And my colleagues for

1. gently listening to me (sometimes during commute when they had the bad luck of sharing the same transport lines than me)
2. letting me experiment on them. Hopefully it has been respectful… or so I hope to have learned a bit along the way… yes?

And finally to all people (most of them renowned in their respective fields) that published fabulous work. It inspired me and I borrowed from it without pity. I now understand what it really means to stand on the shoulders of giants. The view’s far better here when you make the effort to reach it.

Deep thanks to all.

Introduction

This book is about change management. But, unusual to such books, it won’t give you a new method to manage or lead change so as to overcome that so-called “change resistance”. Indeed, that book is based on the premise that the traditional ways to approach change are fundamentally flawed. What’s more, the traditional approaches to change are deeply ingrained in how our mind works.

I will use the science of Systems Thinking and Cybernetics

to explain why this is the case and what we can do about it. I will then review some proven and successful approaches to change that are as much respectful of people and their view of the world as can be.

It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. So here’s below a picture of what I would like to talk about in this book: what’s usually done that is not working, what consequences this has, why we keep doing it and what I propose should be done instead.

The Orange form is a metaphor for the work that is the target of the change.

Blue represents the people working with Orange all day long and who know best about it (at least on a first approach). To them, Orange is a square and whatever is said, there’s no way to make them change their mind about it. Indeed, would you like to make them consider the triangle part, they wouldn’t follow you as they don’t see the point of considering their square from another side given that they’re convinced that it’s a square. Furthermore, viewing Orange from a Square perspective has proven to work for them until now.

Green is the change leader. It might be the top management or some external consultant with an expertise on the field of Orange stuff. To Green people, Orange is a triangle from their own perspective.

There’s no point in arguing whether the truth is a Square or a Triangle or some other form. The fact is that a Blue or Green perspective provides a vision of Orange that is what it is to them, and, most probably, this perspective is the truth to them (for there may very be some reality behind that perception).

We can see that Green, most probably because of his position of power or expertise thinks that his vision of the situation is the right one and that Blue somehow agrees with it. Consequently, it asks Blue to change and act upon Orange as if it were a Triangle. Two consequences usually happen at this stage:

• Blue doesn’t perceive the difference between his Square and the proposed Triangle (doesn’t detect the difference in assessing Orange) and just goes on with the change plan. Once Green leaves, though, Blue will go back to how things were done before, because, unconsciously, his previous work habits better fit a Square than those imposed by Blue that were directed at an (undetected, unfitting) Triangle.
• Blue does perceive the difference between the blue vision of the Triangle and his own vision of the Square and just resist the change because the proposed image doesn’t match his view of reality.

Wrestling between Green and Blue occurs with most probably collateral damage (disengagement, valuable staff leaving, etc.) and, in the end, the situation either is worse than before or it ends up reverting to its initial state; the organization just lick its wounds and cries over its losses (people, motivation, finance, opportunities…): that was the change method of the month.

About the colorful metaphor

Some readers might wonder about the book’s title. There’s a small story behind it. As is clear to most people (and this book is indeed related to this), your knowledge is evident for you. But when it comes to explaining to others that don’t have the same background as you, it’s often difficult to ensure they understand what you’re talking about. It might be a construction of mine that I think people won’t understand me but then I usually try to take a lot of precautions to avoid giving too complex an explanation.

So one day it came that David Shaked and I exchanged on that topic of Change Resistance and here how it went:

— “Hey, I have this (e)book I’d like to write on the subject of change resistance, wanna hear about it?

— Sure, said David.

— Ok, so… err… hmm… (Damn, I don’t even know where to start!)”

So there I was trying to speak passionately about something that was filling my mind since quite a few months, and unable to utter a word (in a language that’s not my mother tongue, which furthermore didn’t help…) So I came up with this metaphor, and since it seemed that David understood it, I decided to keep it. Of course, it might be that David just smiled to reassure me and that he didn’t understand a word, and being a gentleman as he is, he would never dare to say my explanations were… lame? So here is what I came up with.

The metaphor

Suppose your mind is painted in just one color (say: blue). Whatever you see is always painted in blue, and whatever you do always has this blue color. This is your mental model: blue. It turns out that if people talk blue to you, you will fully understand them as they speak what you are able to understand. But as soon as they try to use another color ith you, you will immediately spot it since it is blatantly different from all you are accustomed to (blue). So this obviously has two consequences:

• You will immediately notice any color (of mind) different from your own,
• Any different color will appear “wrong” to you since you’ve always been raised in a blue environment. Your experienced truth is blue, so all things must be blue to be true.

It also turns out that if people want to show you things of a different color, you will either be blind to it (you’ll only see the blue parts of them, the rest will be blind to you) or you will reject it as being wrong (of the wrong color, true being blue ). So if people want to teach you to see things of another color, they have only two possible paths:

1. Show you that even your blue as some different nuances and that what they propose also has these kind of nuances
2. Or show you that what they propose, although of an overall different color, it still has some blue here and there and that it can connects with your own blue mental model.

Incidentally, A. just sent me this TED video showing how we sometimes misinterpret colors or how the context changes how we perceive colors. Literally.

Starting the book

There it was: all my wonderful theory in splashes of color. All I had to do now was to put it in words on paper. As I hadn’t the fainted clue where to start, David could have pushed me to start writing the book (indeed, he started one himself at that time). Instead, since he knows better than me, he gently coached me in a solution-focused way and our discussion went on that way:

David: — “What’s the smallest step you could do to start on your book?

— Well, I suppose I could just write down what I just told you (which I didn’t take note of, of course… bummer!)

— What’s an even smallest step?

— Maybe just jot some notes down?

— And an even smaller step?

— Maybe I could just create an empty file with a title?”

And there I was the next day: I had the current title in mind and I created an empty file with that title. I sticked a “version 1.0” at the end of it and that was the beginning of the journey.

Many, many thanks, David, I owe you much on this one!

So, I’m going to present hereafter the principles that David used to put me in motion in order to write this book.

What this book will talk about

The Color of Your Mind sets the context. Here I explain how our mental model forms over time and what consequence this has on how we see the world, interact with it, and what kind of system this creates between the two (our mind and the world). Here is introduced the notion of cybernetics.

The Colors of Changes defines the problem. I explain how we see change, whether it is some change we would like others to be, or change that it imposed on us. I also explain why is it that most changes start wrongly (ie, provoke resistance), that it is a normal consequence of how our mind built over time.

Painting a Change of the Right color is where the principles of working solutions are exposed. This is the core of the book: how to address, manage and lead change so that it starts on the right foot, goes well along the way right to the end, when all’s done and everybody’s safe and happy because the change was respectful.

In Other Aspects of Change I will review some of the most often encountered problems with change, namely NIH (Not Invented Here) and WIIFM (What’s In It For Me?). I will also review a few well known change approaches, and explain how related they are to the model presented in this book and what we might do to improve them if we want to avoid changing these change approaches (!) too much. I will also review other approaches that I think are perfectly in line with the principles outlined here and that indeed seem to work better.

I have also provided some appendixes to allow you to deepen your knowledge about specific aspects.

Change Maturity Model is a tentative model to assess the maturity level of your change initiative in terms of respect, and how you can improve move up to a more mature level, ie. to a more respectful level of change.

The chapter on DSRP (Distinction, Systems, Relationships and Perspectives) shortly describes “The Minimal Concept Theory of Systems Thinking (MCT/ST)” as proposed by Dr Derek Cabrera and how to use it to propose a change or assess (and challenge) a change being imposed onto you.

I’ve put a lot of References in a last chapter so that you, dear reader, may also dive deep into highly interesting resources in order to stand on the shoulders of some well known giants like I feel I did.

A Few Questions

Each chapter will end with a few questions for you to reflect on. Here are the first ones after your reading of this introduction. Please write your answers for reading back at the end of the book.

• What does “respectful” mean to you?
• What does “change” encompass for you?
• What does “respectful change” mean to you?
• How “respectful” do you think you are when it comes to introducing a change?
• Does the word “complexity” strike a chord in you?
• How do you react to complexity: fight or flight? Something else?

The Color of Your Mind

In this chapter we will start at the beginning: how your mind is modelled by your life.

All the knowledge you accumulated, your particular way of thinking, what you distinguish first in any situation, what you attend to, what motivates you, etc. make up that thing called a mental model. In short, all that which makes you who you are.

Every mental model is different from all others, because they are not you.

What we call “mental model”, others call perspective, view point or weltanschauung, a german term for worldviews.

The world created you as you are

When you were born, you were like a blank sheet of paper. Of course, you came with your own genetic pool, itself coming from that of your parents. But what’s important is that your brain, holding your mind, developed as you go.

In the beginning, unable to coordinate your own body, you were just a receptacle of sensory information. Steps by steps, your mind started to make sense of your environment. Indeed, your mind was modeled according to how it physically perceived the world.

And then you were able to interact with the world: first by catching objects near you, then babbling, then finally walking and speaking. Mostly out of first reproducing what you saw others doing.

Indeed, what’s important here is that the world shaped your mind or, metaphorically speaking, the world colored your mind.

From then on, you were able to interact with the world.

Yet as important as the preceding point is the fact that all you did not experience shaped you as well in the sense that your mind, although maybe aware of it, might not be as knowledgeable as if you personally experienced it. Another way to state this is what you didn’t experience (nor even came to know about) hasn’t had a chance to influence your mind, which makes you a very specific person with respect to it, with any possible attached benefits and drawbacks. Back to our metaphor, that which you don’t know hasn’t put any colored stain on your mind, for better or for worse.

On second-hand knowledge

Now, being able to “know about” something without experiencing it is both fortunate and a curse.

It’s fortunate (thanks to language) as it allows you to come to know about something and then let you decide whether you want that information to influence your next actions² or not. Yet, that knowledge is rough since it’s second-hand knowledge (if not third-hand or more).

It’s also a curse because people tend to confound words or ideas with the things they represent³ . People tend to think that because they can talk of something or because they know about something, they have some knowledge of it and that somehow qualifies them to speak about it and let others think they have some sort of expertise of that something.

Surely, knowing about something makes them a different person than those that never heard of it.

Yet there’s a huge difference between surface knowledge and deep knowledge acquired through personal experience. And the more deep and recent personal experience, the more thorough that imprint is on your mental model.

A consequence of that is a manager shouldn’t assume he knows what the work really is like if he has not been involved deeply and recently in it. A parent should not assume he knows what kid’s life is because he was a kid before: the world changed since then, and the kids are not their own parents.

By exploring, manipulating and acting upon the world, you gain far deeper knowledge of reality that what can be expressed through words only⁴ .

You change the world by acting upon it

Of course, the relation between the world and you isn’t unilateral. As surely as the world influences your mental model, you too can influence the world by acting upon it. Indeed, there are two occurrences where you influence the world:

• When you deliberately decide to act, you influence the world. Whether that action will have a persistent effect depends on a huge number of factors not addressed here. This is the most evident way to influence or change the world.
• Also, when you fidget with the world to enhance your understanding of it, as described in the preceding section, you influence it as well! This kind of influence goes mostly unnoticed from you and others (since it’s of a limited impact) yet it does happen.

Indeed, we can start to make a first connection with the preceding section:

Or, stated more shortly:

And conversely:

So we can start to see how the world influenced us, and how we influence it back. Or the other way round. This is a circular affair and whether this turns out to be a vertuous or vicious circle is an important consideration to make. We’ll come to this point later and indeed this book is also about making sure that how we influence the world turns out to be for the good rather than for the bad.

When you act, the world feeds back to you (cybernetics)

Wait, don’t run because of the big words! I’m going to explain this one (cybernetics) and it’s really simple.

I probably stated the obvious in the preceding section. I’m not going to argue the opposite. Yet, there’s an important consequence I would like to stress now:

As soon as you start to act on the world, the world sends messages back to you.

Ah! Now you’re asking yourself whether I’m dumb or something, because you knew it already.

Well, what I really wanted to convey was the idea that :

The reaction you experience from the world when interacting with it is called a feedback. For instance, when you touch a very hot surface, you have a reflex to remove your hand: this is a feedback from your nerves to your muscles (indeed, this one even bypasses your brain). The first systems thinkers studied feedback systems and discovered interesting properties and they named that whole new science of systems and feedbacks “cybernetics”. As said in Wikipedia⁵ :

Cybernetics is applicable when a system being analyzed is involved in a closed signaling loop; that is, where action by the system generates some change in its environment and that change is reflected in that system in some manner (feedback) that triggers a system change, originally referred to as a “circular causal” relationship.

That constant feedback between your mind (your mental model) and the world means that there’s a deep, structural relations between the two, as pictured below:

Now you might wonder whether there’s a chicken and egg problem regarding which came first: the mental representation of reality that you decided to act upon, or reality that made an impression on you to which you reacted.

Well, I tend to think the question shouldn’t be asked that way. In fact your past experience of the world molded you (remember the beginning of the chapter when I talked about when you were a baby?) and that influenced your actions now, which will make the world react later. So it’s true that there are constant interactions between your mind and the world but that interaction is spread in time.

A note on delays

There’s a last note that I would like to make and it is related to delays. When you act on reality (whatever it might be), there are two things that might happen:

1. You get instant feedback on your action (by way of senses)
2. And there might (though this is not systematic) be some reaction triggered that may make itself visible to you only later… or not.

Cybernetics has lots of things to say on delays, but we won’t enter these considerations here. What’s important for our purpose is to note that sometimes we might be subjected to actions that is delayed feedback from previous actions we initiated (long) before. But since the original action from ourselves is far in the past, we usually forgot about it and/or don’t make the link between the two. This is illustrated below.

On self-fulfilling prophecies

Let’s continue in this exploration of mental models, the world and feedback in between. Indeed, we talked of feedback from the world onto you, but the opposite is true also: when the world “touches” you, you generally feedback to it.

There’s another aspect to feedback and cybernetics that’s important to notice here and is a direct consequence of the preceding section.

When confronted to a certain situation and provided we give enough time to think it through, we usually have more than one possible answer to it. The answer we choose depends on what we know of the reality we’re going to act upon (the mental model of it that we hold in our mind), and, consequently, what reaction (or feedback) we expect from it.

And it turns out that most of the times humans are usually quick at (consciously or not) making assumptions about what triggered visible behaviors. Whether these assumptions were right or not is an entirely different affair. Remember the section on second hand knowledge? Here we are. If you want to know more, I urge you to read about the ladder of inference from Chris Argyris.

For now, I would like to focus on a specific consequence of the ladder of inference, namely what has been well studied under the expression “Pygmalion effect” or “self-fulfilling prophecies”. Quoting Wikipedia again⁶:

The Pygmalion effect, or Rosenthal effect, is the phenomenon in which the greater the expectation placed upon people, often children or students and employees, the better they perform. The effect is named after Pygmalion, a play by George Bernard Shaw.

The Pygmalion effect is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, and, in this respect, people will internalize their positive labels, and those with positive labels succeed accordingly. Within sociology, the effect is often cited with regard to education and social class.

How can we explain that in simpler terms? Well, let me give examples:

• You encounter someone you never met before. He’s smiling and you find that person friendly. This makes you start the conversation in a friendly manner as well, thereby beginning a probably very fruitful relation.
• Suppose you encounter someone else who’s making a frown. Wondering what’s happening there and that this person looks like she’s against you, you answer in a cautious way, which triggers a similar behavior from the other person. Although a wide range of possibilities exist for the next exchanges, the beginning of the conversation looks a lot less encouraging than in the previous example.

But now for the funny part.

Coming back to the previous example, it could be that the person making the frown is well intentioned toward you, but she’s feeling sick, or has a personal problem of some kind to which she was thinking when you both met. Yet, your cautious reaction influenced her, made her wary and negatively influenced the beginning of the exchange in a detrimental manner.

Or, it could be that the smiling person of the first example was simply happy because she had the assumption that you were somehow naïve and that she intended to abuse you in some way. But since you were so friendly, she changed her mind and this was the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration.

Or, because you’re feeling sick yourself, you tend to think the other one may have a similar problem as well, and you feel compassionate toward her. Acting accordingly, the person feels valued and answer positively to you.

Or… well, you get the point.

What conclusion can we draw from all of this? I see a number of important points here:

• Your mental model influences what you notice.
• What you notice influences your assumptions.
• Your assumptions influence what you do.
• Your actions influence others’ assumptions (just like it did for you).

And:

• You can’t know for sure others assumptions beforehand.

And:

• You can decide how you will act, whatever your initial assumptions might be

And now for the useful part: in the same way that the Pygmalion effect can be triggered unconsciously, you can deliberately make use of it!

Whatever frown or smile the other person is doing, if you take a conscious step to display some specific behavior in your encounter with that other person, chances are that they will react to it (indeed, there’s a whole field behind this called Neuro-Linguistic Programming).

• What if you deliberately made a frown when encountering the person?
• What if you deliberately smiled when encountering the person making a frown?
• What if you smiled always?
• What if you assumed you didn’t know and then took a welcoming stance to each and every encounter?

So it turns out that there’s a nice lesson here that always assuming the best intentions on the part of others is more beneficial to you than assuming the worst or even being neutral.

As Paul Watzlawick said: “you cannot not communicate”, so you might as well go for the positive, don’t you think?

Structural Coupling

Here’s the central point of this book. Or the beginning of it all.

Or, as Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela have explained (albeit with more sophisticated and justified explanations): you are structurally coupled with your own world. What does this mean?

Well, it means that there’s a circular relationship between your mind that drives your actions, which influences the world around you (including other people) which influences what you see, which influences your mind.

The main consequences that you can draw from this seemingly evident fact are:

• Every mind is different.
• The differences with other minds reside in the specific past experiences this mind has had.
• These past experiences explain how the current mental model makes meaning of the world. This, cannot be guessed or understood by someone else.

So the main lesson here is that it’s unlikely (indeed impossible) for someone to exactly know what someone else is thinking, what would suit him/her best, etc.

It means that in the same way someone can’t know exactly what’s the best change that would suit you best, you also cannot know exactly what’s the change program that would best suit someone else, lest an entire department or worse, an entire organization.

So it’s better to stop trying to push change onto people and better let people design the change that would work for them.

Your perception of the world is colored by your mind

Then, as sure as the world colored your mind each time you’ve experienced it, the color of your mind influences how you experience the world on each and every encounter.

As your mind color taints your experiences, it reinforces its own color, on two accounts:

• Because it goes preferably toward those colors in the world that mirror its own (it distinguishes more easily in the world what it already knows how to distinguish).
• Because what’s pulled out of the world is preferably what is of the same color of it already, since this is what it can manage anyway.

And conversely…

Two blind spots of your mind

The previous section made the link between your past experiences and how you select present ones according to your current mental model (which I named “color of mind”). Indeed, the natural tendency is for the mind to reinforce what it already knows (ie reinforce it’s current color).

I’ve thereby stressed out two blind spots of our mental models:

1. That to which we are so habituated it becomes oblivious to us.
2. That which is so alien to us that we just can’t imagine and is therefore invisible to us.

What does this leave us with? Well, things that are not so habitual but which we are still capable of recognition because we (almost) continually put our conscious mind on them.

But beware: the more you put your consciousness to work on a subject, the more habituated you will become, and the more it will taint your mind, making it less and less obvious, thus unconscious.

Later in the book, we will study ways of making the unconscious back to consciousness. Although this isn’t a trivial affair, it is possible to achieve that with a bit of method, and this is a fateful thing to do.

Now we’ve seen what looks like two extremes of a continuum of consciousness, from unknown to all too well known. Now the question is: what’s in the middle?

Consciousness and detection

You might have thought that there’s some ambiguity in what precedes. I mean:

• Either you don’t know something, and I said it jumps to your consciousness when you first encounter it, or you just miss it altogether, totally blind to it.
• Or you know something, and you see it when you know it, or you so habituated to it that you don’t see it anymore.

It might appear like paradoxical only if you don’t know how to squint. When you squint, things that were one become two. That’s the case here, there are two different realities behind each proposition.

To make myself clearer, I would like to introduce you to the psychological explanation of the four stages of competences. Here’s an extract from Wikipedia:

1. Unconscious incompetence: The individual does not understand or know how to do something and does not necessarily recognize the deficit.
2. Conscious incompetence: Although the individual does not understand or know how to do something, he or she does recognize the deficit.
3. Conscious competence: The individual understands or knows […] something.
4. Unconscious competence: The individual has had so much practice […] that it has become “second nature”.

So how someone reacts to the world or to a change depends on the level of “competence” s/he has with respect to two aspects:

• What he’s doing now and the level of competence is has achieved in it (what he needs to change from) on the previous four stages of competence.
• What he’s supposed to do instead (what he needs to change to), again on one of these four stages.

Each stage mandates a different kind of intervention or management to be effective in moving things forward.

Of unconscious detection

The mind has the faculty to consciously direct its attention onto specific subjects of interest.

What’s implied is that what’s unconscious is in autopilot mode and can stay in the background for as long as it fits what the autopilot can manage, which means it must conform to behaviors as learned previously by the mind. As soon as what happens in the environment deviates from the mental model of the mind, an alarm is raised and consciousness is directed back to it.

So when it comes to unconscious knowledge, you only notice what’s different from your own mental model, which lets your mind available to focus on whatever you find interesting in the moment.

From here, we are bound to conclude that we have a natural (or unconscious) ability to spot differences between reality and what our mental model of reality is. So our mental model for this “difference spotting” revolves around:

1. Doing this spotting unconsciously and
2. The spotting has to do with differences between reality and our mental model.

What I really mean by the second point above is that we have a natural talent for spotting differences, and not similarities to ourselves.

This explains why we’re natural “problem” spotters and that we define a problem as anything that is not like what we expected [what our current mental model is] (whether we’re right or wrong in thinking it should be some thing or another is totally out of consideration here).

Of conscious detection

The preceding section dealt with how can we spot what’s different than our mental model. As we saw, this is pretty straightforward. Now the question is: can we spot what’s conformant to our mental model? Now, this is a tricky question.

Indeed, you unconsciously evolve in a world made up of your assumptions regarding how things should work and happen. When they do, you can conduct “business as usual” and don’t take too much attention to what’s going on. This is fortunate, as it allows you to go into autopilot mode and direct your mind to other activities.

But if we want to find a way to identify what you do right, we need to find a way to make the unconscious competence back to consciousness. How this can be done will be explained later in the book.

Summary of chapter

In this chapter, we introduced the following concepts:

• Structural Coupling between your mind and the world made you develop your own specific mental model of reality.
• Nobody can know exactly what someone else’s mental model of reality is.
• The best way to know about the world is to play with it.
• Yet how you interact with the world is influenced by your pre-existing mental model of it.
• This can have beneficial and detrimental effects through selffulfilling prophecies.
• Interacting with the world changes it.
• But the world feeds back to you as well (this is learning).
• Your knowledge of how the world works goes along a continuum of four stages of competence.

Questions

• What do you love to do?
• Where are you successful in what you do?
• What are others telling you excel in?
• How are the answers to the preceding questions different? How do you explain that?
• Think of a time where you convinced someone of one of your ideas. Was it difficult or easy? What argument won the exchanges? How could you have settled faster on a common position? Why wasn’t this option considered at that time?
• How did you build your current mind? What made you who you are now, with your current vision of the world? What have you learned to be “true”?
• What didn’t you experience personally about the world but you still know about?
• What new would living these unknown teach you? What would it teach you about you?

The Colors of Change

In the preceding chapter, we set the context of how our mind builds itself over time. Or more precisely, how our mind and its surrounding environment or reality build themselves (are structurally coupled). The main conclusion was that our perception of the world, what I named our mental model always feel that its vision of reality is true and that the rest is consequently false.

This chapter now addresses the consequences of this context on how we perceive change. Indeed, this chapter will address the two cases of change:

• Change that you want others to do.
• And change that you’re supposed to achieve yourself (ie, change that is imposed on you).

But first of all, we need to work out some acceptable definitions related to change.

Definitions

Definition of Change

The compound definition given by a Google for “define:change” is as follow:

change

/CHānj/

• Verb Make or become different: “a proposal to change the law”; “beginning to change from green to gold”.
• Noun The act or instance of making or becoming different.
• Synonyms verb. alter - exchange - vary - shift - convert - transform noun. alteration - shift - variation - exchange - mutation

Definition of Change Management

The Wikipedia entry on Change Management starts as follows:

Change management is an approach to shifting/transitioning individuals, teams, and — in general — organizations from a current state to a desired future state. It is an organizational process aimed at helping change stakeholders to accept and embrace changes in their business environment or individuals in their personal lives.

I would like to stress out the last part of this definition which reflect exactly what this book aims to dismantle. Since Wikipedia is a communautary encyclopaedia, we can assume it somehow reflects what the majority of people think about a topic. The last part reads: “It is an organizational process aimed at helping change stakeholders to accept and embrace changes in their business environment or individuals in their personal lives.”

We can clearly see how common Change Management lore is about making others accept change. How respectful is that? In my mind, it is not. While if we are in a position where we must impose change onto others, I highly respect the traditional practice of change management to ease that necessary move that people must go through.

But this books aims at going much farther than that by explaining how:

1. Forcing people through a change never is the best solution (neither for them nor for the change agent or the organization).
2. Self-awareness about change can indeed much better address the changes organizations need to go through so as to respect all involved stakeholders and at the same time provide the best results for them all and the organiztion itself as a whole.

So for the purpose of this book, when I write about change, I mean the following:

This defintion is close to that of what Google gives, but I want to emphasize the ‘information’ part in addition to the action. As soon as someone gives some information, advice or hint to someone else with respect to how something should or even could be different, it’s a change and the first person is a change agent.

If you state a fact, it’s not change.

If you state something about a property that could be of a different value with the (stated or not) assumptions that the other value could be better, then you’re entering the field of change management, whether for yourself (no harm expected) or others; and this is the purpose of this book to address that aspect of change as best as possible, which is in a respectful way.

Definition of Respect

This book is about “respectful change management”.

Again, the Wikipedia definition of Respect is as follows:

Respect is a positive feeling of esteem or deference for a person or other entity (such as a nation or a religion), and also specific actions and conduct representative of that esteem.

When I write about respect in this book it usually means one or all of the following:

• a respect for the way people see reality from their perspective;
• a respect for experience people have or gained in a situation that is the subject of the change.

How the mind detects a need to change

As I have explained in the previous chapter, your mind built itself out of your past experiences. Out of this, it acquired some knowledge on how the world works, which spreads on a continuum from unknown incompetence to unknown competence.

What we are interested in here is how a need for change is triggered. When you encounter a situation that doesn’t exactly match what your current mental model is, you can make a distinction and separate that experience from you.

More precisely, what you detect are two situations:

• how the world is,
• how you expected the world to be.

What you do in such a case depends on context, but it mainly boils down to the following four possibilities:

• Change your mental model to adapt it to what you encountered in the world, meaning you abdicate to a change you perceive.
• Change the world to make it more conformant to what your mental model expected it to be, meaning you impose your change on the world.
• Go for a bit of the two possibilities, meaning you seek a compromise.
• Tenuki ie, do something else.

Change resistance

In the presence of a difference between your mental model and the world, it’s important to notice that your mental model is always right. Not necessarilly right in the sense of representing the truth, but right in the sense that it’s what represents you, who you are. You are at ease with how you think and how you see the world. It’s right from your own perspective.

Indeed, your mental model has a certain form of cohesion and acceptability to yourself that is built around a form of logical arrangement of all the parts of which it is made. Consequently that situation you distinguished in the world triggered a certain aspect of your mental model which is part of the whole. So it’s acceptable too.

Going further, what’s right (in terms of deontology or even with respect to some truth about how the world works) is always first considered from your own vantage point, which precisely is your current mental model.

So any difference you might spot in the world with respect to you triggers some part of your mental model, which also triggers your mental model as a whole through that logical connection and thus reinforces that whole as being a whole and, consequently, as being “true”. After all, you did live your life up to now with that whole, and it worked for you, so how could it be wrong?

Going back to our colorful metaphor: if your mind is a painting of some uniform color, should I make a drop of some other color chosen by me, it will surely be different from that which makes up your mental model. Consequently, you cannot not see it.

Talking of versus Experiencing reality

Indeed, the deep meaning we attach to words differ from one person to another. It’s probably not an issue for casual, everyday life. Yet, this invisibility of the deep meaning we attach to words and the corresponding assumption that we do share meaning ingrains itself in our mental models too. It’s only when we try to talk over the details of something that we bump into communication problems⁷.

There’s a saying that goes like “People always, always, always do exactly what makes the most amount of sense to them”⁸.

So it turns out that the person having the initiative, or the power, or the authority (or thinking she has any of them, whether true or not) most naturally wants to state her position with respect to the difference between her mental model and the world. And this is a natural thing to do since:

1. She thinks she has some form of legitimity in stating her position
2. Her mental model is right from her own perspective.

Why wouldn’t she act that way? Indeed, isn’t it what we all do in similar situations?

And this is exactly where the drama starts because at the very moment someone states that her mental model ought to be followed, she immediately reinforces the distinction between hers and yours. The more she will then explain why her mental model is right, the more you will distinguish in her explanations what precisely makes her mental model different from yours.

And guess what? It’s your mental model that’s right! Of course it is!

The quick solution to this problem is then evident: don’t do that. I mean: don’t push your mental model onto others. We’ell see in the next chapter how to better lead a change that is therefore respectful of both yours and others’ mental models.

Change others impose onto you

The intention behind the writing of this book was to never have to such a situation where you’re imposed a change that you feel you’re going to resist, for whatever good reasons you may have (and as we’ve seen in the previous section, your reasons are always good from your own perspective).

Unfortunately, this is deemed to still happen quite often. What can we do? Indeed, what your natural first step would be in such a case? Let’s review a few of these common, wrong, steps:

• Lecture people on the good way to conduct change (like giving them a specimen of this book or some other method you might prefer)
• Explain people why their change is bad and what ought to be done instead
• Go on guerilla mode and 1) resist their change 2) advertise your own way of seeing the change to stakeholders 3) lead the guerilla yourself (“if you want something done right, do it yourself”)
• Ask about the root causes and reasons for the change to be that way (in order to counter-argue them)
• Complain to your manager
• Complain to the other’s manager
• Abdicate and follow the imposed change

You didn’t really intended to take any one of these steps, did you? Yes? Oh well.

Let’s review each of these individually and see what’s wrong with them.

Lecturing people on how to lead change.

By lecturing people, you convey the implicit message that their way of conducting change is wrong and that you know better than them. Although I can’t really blame you if you really would like to advocate the approach stated in this book, I think it’s a bad move. Indeed, you’re going to provoke the same resistance that the change agent just provoked in you. Reasons for imposing a change are diverse though we most often encounter:

a) a lack of time to do otherwise,

b) a lack of confidence to go check all stakeholders,

c) a lack of a method to efficiently go around all stakeholders,

d) a lack of solid understanding of how change works,

e) any combination of the precedings, plus a few more.

Whatever assumptions you make about what the real reasons for imposing the change might be, lecturing will only make the change agent resist because she will want to make her case more preeminent, assured that she is that her vision is righter than yours (she’s the change agent, and you’re not). The more you expose your case, the more she will want to show off how her case is better than yours. This is a bad move, try another item from the list.

Unseat their change and propose yours.

In this case you have the same problem as in the preceding option. Any other way to go for the change would just provoke a resisting reaction from them. That’s probably the best case scenario; the worst case would be that they assign you to lead the change, only with just the remaining time and resources available to lead it. Which would mean you have less time and resources than they initially had, to wrap your mind around the problem and propose something. Chances are that you will have no other choice than imposing your own ideas to stakeholders. Go back to the preceding list and expect them to react with one or more of the items listed… Bad move, you failed.

Go on guerilla mode.

Apart from stating the obvious that it’s bad practice in work situations, this proposition would probably create a big mess at work. People will be lost between the “official” change initiative and your own. Some synchronization need will appear and people will sweat more stress and work to accomodate the two. Management will probably get upset and by the time they’ll find out who set the mess up, you’d be grilled (and so will probably be the initial change agent too for not having planned and managed the mess in the first place). The department is now a mess, you have a new enemy (if not the rest of your co-workers) and you’d probably get fired for that. Further, you probably triggered a second wave of resistance and then people might feel like they too are entitled to state their own way to the change. Bad move, go back to the list.

Ask about root causes to unseat them.

Although this approach may appear more thought through, it’s still not a wise shot. You run the risk of agreeing with the root causes of the changes but still disagreeing with how they should be solved (start over with the list above), or, you might disagree with the root causes, in which case advocating for other causes is just stating a different mental model. In other words, this is going for a clash as well. Start over with the list.

Complain to your manager.

If your manager approved the plan it usually means that he agreed with it. So the plan’s supporting mental model is now part of his own, meaning you’re about to clash with your boss’ mental model. Do you really want to do that? If you boss disagrees with the plan but accepted it nonetheless, your intervention will be perceived as a request for him to go for a clash with other managers, including his own. If he accepted the plan, it means his mental model features a part that says “don’t clash with management”, and, with your complain, you come in conflict with it. Bad move, go back to the list.

Complain to the change agent’s manager.

Well, what have been said previously for your own manager also counts for someone else’s manager. The difference is that you end up with more enemy than if you had just complained to your own manager: the other manager, all the hierarchy of management above your own manager and the other one. And since you upset so many people, chances are that you manager will be mad a you too. Guess what? Start over with the list.

Abdicate and follow the imposed change.

This is what a lot of people do in most organizations. This probably is the safest move to play when you more or less consciously think you expose yourself to risks by taking any of the other preceding moves. The situation more or less is the one described in the introduction of this book: on surface you seem to accept what the change agent says you must do, but the more you do it, the more it will probably clash with how you see your work or how you think the change should have been done. As soon as the change agent will leave, you’ll probably go back to doing business as usual. This was a bad move, but now you have no other choice in the list.

Of course, there’s a case I haven’t addressed at all: this is the case when you find the change to be indeed good. Unfortunately, it happens only rarely. If you did accept it, it probably means you’re part of the Innovators or the Early Adopters as featured in Rogers’ innovation curve.

Of course, in the next chapter of this book, we’ll see how to avoid this curve entirely and turn all of a population into Innovators and Early Adopters. Stay tuned.

What to do when being imposed change

After all these possible bad moves when being imposed change, it’s time to review a few of possible better moves (the underlying principles will be thoroughly detailed in the next chapter).

• As a first move it might be good to inquire for the reasons for the change: why is it that someone wants you to change, and what’s the reason for the change. The purpose is to go beyond the solution that might have been thrown to you and inquire into the more general expected outcome.
• Then it might be good to (genuinely and not rhetorically) inquire as to why the proposed solution might be a good one and how the change agent is going to measure whether the solution is going to yield the intended results…or not. Asking about the rationale that connected the goal and the solution (meaning this solution is supposed to help reaching this goal) will give you more information about the change agent’s mental model and his own vision of the world.

It’s only after these preliminary questions have been asked that you can start to reflect about how the change plan and underlying assumptions may match with your own vision of reality. If, on first sight, you don’t see any significant discrepancy between the change agent’s mental model and yours about how things should be done, then, let go of the “NIH syndrome” (Not Invented Here, click to jump to explanation, later in the book) that was triggered by the change agent’s not having flattered your ego first, and go for the change as it has been presented to you. Wait for things to turn wrong before coming back and trying to influence the proposed solution, with sound statistics to back up your proposal. Who knows? The initial change agenda could turn out to be working in the end, meaning that they indeed had a better perspective than you.

If the proposed solution doesn’t fit your own mental model (notice that I didn’t say it was wrong), use the following hints to clarify the situation and let the change agent know his perspective of the world is neither prevalent nor the only one:

• Always state that you describe the situation from your own perspective and that you might be missing some important data, but that you’re willing to be filled in the blanks.
• State what the situation is from your own perspective: what you think belong to the problematic situation, and what doesn’t.
• State what the problem is from your own perspective: what you think should be addressed in place of the proposed plan, or in addition. It may even be that part of the plan is supposed to address something that’s not a problem from your own perspective. Do state it.
• State what relation(s) you think are missing in the proposed plan between components of it (techniques, organizations, people, etc.) State how some relations in the plan might be different than what’s assumed, from your own perspective.
• State what component is missing from the plan, or should be excluded (and for what reason).

As a rule of thumb, use the following quick-n-dirty DSRP⁹ process to review the proposed plan.

1. Describe the proposed plan using DSRP aspects: Distinctions, Systems, Relationships, Perspectives.
2. State your own Perspective: position, knowledge…
3. Review each of the proposed plan’s D, S, R, and P and see how your own Perspective might change the vision that the plan proposed.
4. Assess whether some other Perspectives might benefit to the plan (typically: other stakeholders’ view). If relevant, find a way to involve them to get first hand knowledge about their own perspective (as a second choice, you can make hypotheses as to what their perspective might be – though you might want to be wary of second hand knowledge).
5. Assess the differences between the two Perspectives, and see how a new plan might be proposed that would embed the best of all Perspectives.
6. With all your complementary informations collected, ask the change agent whether she’s interested in some improvements to the plan in order to raise its chances of being properly implemented with as few as possible unintended side effects.
7. If the change agent is interested, make documented proposals (ie what you proposed to change to the plan according to the preceding analysis, and the reasons for those changes to the initial change plan) and what improved outcomes might be expected.

For a more thorough usage of DSRP to propose and review change, see Appendix on DSRP.

For the parts of the change plan that you think are not implementable as-is, you might want to ask yourself one last question:

• “When considering that non-implementable part as a constraint, how can I achieve the intended results, in my own way, and still respect the constraint?”

In all cases, you might want to document, publicize and trace your analysis of the initial change plan and any reservations you might have had as to possible misfits and/or unintended consequences.

Change you impose onto others

As a rule of thumb: don’t impose change onto others.

Let’s make it clearer:

Ok, now why shouldn’t you want to impose change onto others?

As I have explained in the preceding sections, our mind constantly adapts itself to the world it encounters, and his interactions with the world constantly make it adapt to itself. As a consequence, being totally adapted to the world around you and the mental model you have of this world, any difference you spot between your mental model of the world and what someone else might say or do is going to trigger an alert for a difference. That difference might be resolved in only three ways:

1. Rejected as being unimportant with your mental model and the situation being left unchanged.
2. Accepted as legimitate with you updating your mental model.
3. Rejected as “false” your mental model not being updated; instead a change is sought to modify the world to make it conformant to what your mental model says it ought to be.

The fact is that the first and third options are the ones most probably automatically triggered, because they don’t need a lot energy to be dealt with: they occur mostly unconsciously. The second one I won’t address here because that’s not the point and it somehow has been addressed in the preceding section.

The third option really is what’s interesting here. We saw previously that the cybernetics relations between the world and our mental model most often make us think we are right and others are wrong because:

• we’ve always lived with our mental model, so it’s right by definition,
• there are self-fulling prophecies at play that, if we don’t take care enough, tend to make us provoke the things we believed in in the first place, thereby masquerading to us what reality really is or might have been.

Still, I hope I have by now given you enough material in order for you to calmy assess whether what you think really is right and that, should you be convinced it is, whether others might think like you or not, and whether they might need time to adapt their mind around that idea for change you’re about to propose them.

I don’t have much else to say here as I’m going to explain how to conduce respectful change in the next chapter. By respectful, I mean a change that is both respectful of:

• your own ideas for the change,
• other stakeholders’ ideas involved in the proposed change.

My own wish for this section is that you are convinced that imposing a change onto others is never a good idea for the following reasons:

• What you have in mind regarding how to conduct a change only reflects your own mental model of the situation.
• Your own mental model is only adapted to some part of reality and that it cannot know in details what are others’ perspectives on the change you would like to achieve.
• Further, in case you’ve inquired into how your possible solution might work, you probably triggered a self-fulfilling prophecy that made you believe that what is needed is what you’ve inquired into. This is a very probably false assumption.

As a rule of thumb, each time you would like to change others, first take the deliberate step of inquirying into others’ perspective on the change and only after do take a decision in the light of what you discovered. On the worst case, it will have informed others of the change to come. On the best case, you will have learned something new that might make you revise your initial plans and therefore make a change that will be more respectful.

Before moving on to the next chapter, there are two traps I would like to address: that of being rhetoric only and that of setting up double-bind situations.

First trap: being rhetoric

This first trap I fell often into. And I sometimes still find myself about to fall into it. Despite knowing all the preceding about cybernetics and mental model formation, despite willing to genuinely know about others perspective about some change, we still ask very bad questions.

The questions we ask regarding others’ perspectives on change are often “rhetorical questions”. These questions often take an interro-negative form like “why don’t you do X?” or “don’t you think doing X would be a good thing?” These questions are bad because they are ressented as if you were trying to force a change agenda onto the people being asked. The chances of them resisting you are high because they will be felt like their ego has been trampled. Here are two tricks to help yourself in asking more genuine questions:

• be sincerely interested in knowing what they think of the change idea (and not about your solution),
• don’t ask interro-negative questions.

Some rules of thumbs for doing that are:

• State your mind first: if you have an idea for a solution, tell them, and frankly ask for their opinion about it: “I see a need for change in order to move from X to Y. What do you think of it?”. Then bear with their answer.
• If you want to know why they do certain things and not others (that you feel would be more appropriate), then only ask about their reasons for doing what they currently do: “Why are you doing X?”.

Now if you really want to know what other ideas they might have for doing things differently, then it means you’re ready for the next chapter about how to do respectful change.

A word of caution for managers: beware of people hiding their true opinions because they don’t want to be rude to you as their manager. If you suspect people might hide their opinions from you, then don’t make a self-fulfilling prophecy come true and don’t ask for their opinion on something that they might think come from you. Definitely bury your idea and just ask for their own solution. Trust them, chances are that they will come up with something surprisingly appropriate for the situation. If they do lack some information to make an informed decision, then provide that information to them.

Second trap: double-binds

My personal research in the work of great cyberneticists made me realize that the double-bind theory¹⁰ is probably more often at play in organizational settings than we might have thought, with the unintended effect of making people resist change in a very special way: by avoiding it, consciously or not. This sometimes is referred to as “passive change resistance”.

Quoting Wikipedia on Double-Bind yields the following:

A double bind is an emotionally distressing dilemma in communication in which an individual (or group) receives two or more conflicting messages, in which one message negates the other. This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other (and vice versa), so that the person will be automatically wrong regardless of response. The double bind occurs when the person cannot confront the inherent dilemma, and therefore cannot resolve it or opt out of the situation.

Let me quote Gregory Bateson more extensively in explaining the necessary conditions for a double-bind situation to occur. In the following excerpt, “love” has to be replaced by “recognition” and “child” is “the victim”, the person that is expected to change. In the context of organizational setting, the victim is the person that is supposed to make the change, and “the parents” are played by management.

Bateson gives the following six necessary conditions for a double-bind to occur:

1. Two or more persons. %%Of these, we designate one, for purposes of our definition, as the “victim.”
2. Repeated experience. %%We assume that the double bind is a recurrent theme in the experience of the victim. Our hypothesis does not invoke a single traumatic experience, but such repeated experience that the double bind structure comes to be a habitual expectation.
3. A primary negative injunction. %%This may have either of two forms: (a) Do not do so and so, or I will punish you,” or (b) “If you do not do so and so, I will punish you.” Here we select a context of learning based on avoidance of punishment rather than a context of reward seeking.
4. A secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level, and like the first enforced by punishments or signals which threaten survival. %%This secondary injunction is more difficult to describe than the primary for two reasons. First, the secondary injunction is commonly communicated to the child by nonverbal means. Posture, gesture, tone of voice, meaningful action, and the implications concealed in verbal comment may all be used to convey this more abstract message. Second, the secondary injunction may impinge upon any element of the primary prohibition. Verbalization of the secondary injunction may, therefore, include a wide variety of forms; for example, “Do not see this as punishment”; “Do not see me as the punishing agent”; “Do not submit to my prohibitions”; “Do not think of what you must not do”; “Do not question my love of which the primary prohibition is (or is not) an example”; and so on. Other examples become possible when the double bind is inflicted not by one individual but by two.
5. A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field. %%In a formal sense it is perhaps unnecessary to list this injunction as a separate item since the reinforcement at the other two levels involves a threat to survival, and if the double binds are imposed during infancy, escape is naturally impossible. However, it seems that in some cases the escape from the field is made impossible by certain devices which are not purely negative, e.g., capricious promises of love, and the like.
6. Finally, the complete set of ingredients is no longer necessary when the victim has learned to perceive his universe in double bind patterns.

There’s another worthy note to make about the fact that it’s not important whether management deliberately sets up the double-bind through conflicting messages: it is enough for the victim to understand and believe the messages to be conflicting, as well as believing s/he can’t escape the field. All this is implied by Bateson in point #6.

How does the theory of double-bind translate into management stuff? I am most concerned with double-binds in the canonical form of “be spontaneous”, where the victim is asked to be spontaneous, yet the very act of asking this question denies the possibility of spontaneity. If the victim doesn’t act, she fails. If she tries herself at being, she also fails because it’s not spontaneous. In a management-employee relationship, avoidance of this situation is further impossible¹¹, which completes the conditions of the double-bind.

My bigger concern is when management asks a form of “change spontaneously!” to employees. Let’s take the six points again and see how they transpose into organizations:

1. Two or more persons. We can identify two kind of people for our explanation, mainly management and employees, the latter having the role of “victim”.
2. Repeated experience. There is ample evidence where management requires employees to do things with the – stated or not – assumptions that is should have been done spontaneously.
3. A primary negative injunction. What we often see in organizations is management asking that a change be made. This often takes the form of “stopping” something that’s not working (bad quality, too long delays, financially unsustainable, etc.) and doing something else instead. What’s important here is that the “what to do” is told by management in the form of solving a problem or not to do the problematic things anymore.
4. A secondary injunction conflicting with the first at a more abstract level. This secondary injunction may or may not be verbalized as an assumption from management that employees are supposed to know how to do that, but since they aren’t doing it, they’re not capable.
5. A tertiary negative injunction prohibiting the victim from escaping from the field. This one is almost always implied in an organization: do as I said or leave / forget about your bonus / raise / next interesting opportunity / etc.
6. Finally, the complete set of ingredients is no longer necessary when the victim has learned to perceive his universe in double bind patterns. It’s all too common that employees are wary of management’s requests, so that kind of learning already has occurred.

We can see from the preceding parallel between the theory and organizational settings that all ingredients are present for the double-bind to occur.

To what extent does this situation impacts employees probably has to be researched, but one of the most probable consequence is an avoidance behavior from workers when it comes to change that is imposed on them: that is, employees passively resist the change by not devoting energy into it.

Going back to the “be spontaneous” example above, if a manager makes a request to an employee with the stated or implied (and felt) assumption that the request should have been spontaneously fulfilled, then he’s setting up a double-bind. The most probable reaction to the employee in this (unescapable) situation would be an “Aye, Sir!” answer without further much work on the request, pretexting other more urgent and important work to do in place of the injunction.

Furthermore, work that a manager feels should have be done spontaneously usually quickly falls below that manager’s radar and few, if any, follow-up will happen, making it a de facto lesser priority when compared to other work requests.

The next chapter will address the solution to all these problems, namely: how to successfully lead change in the most respectful possible way.

Summary of chapter

In this chapter, we introduced the following concepts:

• Change resistance comes from encountering mental models that differ from our own and is thus a natural thing from a cybernetics perspective.
• Consequently, being imposed change is a natural (however unpleasant) thing. In such a situation, the best moves are to inquire into the reasons for the change and check whether your own perspective has been properly taken into consideration.
• DSRP (Distinction, Systems, Relationships, Perspectives) is a useful framework (to be detailed in a later chapter) to inquire into a proposed change.
• Wanting to impose change onto others is also a natural thing to do, although now you know you should refrain from it. Indeed, we learned that our own perspective is always incomplete when it comes to confronting it with that of other stakeholders of the change. So we need to inquire into theirs.
• Two traps to avoid: 1) being rhetoric in your inquiries into others’ perspective and 2) setting up double-bind situations that provoke passive change resistance.

Questions

• Go back to what you answered at the end of the Introduction. How was your vision of change and respect different or similar to the ones presented here? What conclusion do you draw from that?
• Think back to some changes you had to lead that people were resisting. What was your position? What was theirs? Who was “right”? How was the other party sure of the rightness of their position?
• When the change was over, how much of the initial plan got implemented? What is resisted at first? If it has been changed, in what way? How has the changes to the initial change plan been devised? What made it a better change plan to be implemented?
• Think to your habitual way of leading change: what you are used to saying, how you behave, etc. and compare with the double-bind criteria. How many of the six criteria do you meet? What does it tell you about yourself or your conception of the world? What might be different? How?

Finding the Right Color for a Change

Ok, here we are. We started this book by stating a situation in the introduction (misunderstandings between a blue worker and a green change agent, whether s/he is the manager or an external consultant). Then we discussed the context of how our mind builds itself over time and how it is structurally coupled with its environment, how the environment also feeds back to it, and how the mind selects or provokes in the environment what it’s already adapted to (self-fulfilling prophecies). And then we stated the problem we face when encountering a need for change and discovered how it is natural for the mind to resist a change for which it isn’t adapted or how it is natural to wanting others to change.

Now it’s time to study what possible solutions exist to avoid triggering resistance and, therefore, embark people (ourselves included) in respectful change management.

In my metaphorical lanscape, that would be finding or co-creating the the right color for everyone involved in the change.

Basic Principle : Don’t Impose Change Onto Others

We already encountered this principle previously, and that is the fundamental premise. The underlying reason is because people won’t embark in a change their mind isn’t adapted to.

The corrolary of this explanation of change resistance is that since we can’t know for sure what would be adapted to someone else’s mind, then the safest way to start a change is to assume that you don’t know how to do that change. Or that whatever you know about that change should be discarded at worst, or be just one contribution out of many others at best.

If we review what’s “true” from our own perspective, we have:

• There is a need for a change from our own perspective.
• Our perception of the need for a change is necessarily incomplete and can’t reflect exactly what others have to say on that change.
• Whatever solution for the change we might think of, it probably isn’t part of others’ mental model about the change and so a very bad idea to push onto them.
• The method to conduct the change has very few chances, if any, of being adapted to the stakeholders’ mind, for the very same reasons.

Now we’re going to see how we can turn this fundamental principle (of don’t imposing change onto others) into pratical advice of how to conduct change.

Let People Choose Their Own Color

This is the logical end of the previous reasoning: the best way to have someone’s mind adapted to anything is to let that person play with the thing long enough to be adapted to it, or to let her imagine or design it in the first place.

So we don’t want to decide the change for them, but let them choose the change that would best suit them.

Where Ghandi said “Be the change you want to see in the world”, which implies that others will get a chance to see the change in action and adapt their mind around it, I personally prefer to somehow reverse the quote and say “Be the world you want to see change”. This formulation implies that you first need to come close to the people you initially want to change so as to better understand them and their situation. Before any change begins. Who knows, you may well discover that the change isn’t needed at all or that your initial plans are just not what’s best for the people involved. Here are also three other consequences when living this motto:

• It forces you to see others’ perspectives regarding a change, and possibly change your own mind before making the wrong step of trying to change that of others first.
• It forces you to deeply listen to others, and exchange with them, so that, by adapting your mind to them, you will be better at connecting your change ideas with ideas really of their own, and not assumptions on what their ideas might be.
• It let others understand you and adapt their mind to your ideas. This indeed is a great opportunity for you and them to embark on cocreation.

Fortunately some paths to such respectful approaches to change have already been explored by numerous people, and I will shortly introduce some of them hereafter.

Yet, however new to you these approaches may be, I invite you to try them a few times before departing from them. Mastery only comes out of experience (which is another way to say that you must give time to your mind to adapt itself to them). Then only will you be able to wander the Shu Ha Ri learning path:

Shu

is when you learn the techniques by practicing them.

Ha

is when you start to experiment with your own variations of the original techniques.

Ri

is when you become a master in your art and build your own path.

I will try to make my best at explaining the underlying principles of these approaches and how they fit with the cybernetics explanation of change resistance so that you will hopefully be able to master the principles early in order to develop your own path as soon as possible.

The Case for Strength-Based Change Approaches

So you can’t force a solution onto people. You can’t ask them about what they think of your own solution. You don’t even have time to let them ponder your wonderful idea (which will never have the traction you’d expect anyway) apart from the 16% of Innovators and Early Adopters (according to the diffusion of innovation).

So what?

Well, the working path I propose here is that of so-called “strength-based” approaches to change. These rely on you leveraging people’s own strengths and ideas to move forward.

It’s not about pointing a deficit on their side and asking them to fill it. It’s about finding the best in them, and helping them do more of it.

It’s an entirely new paradigm.

Or is it?

Think back to the previous chapters where I talked about these blind spots in your mental models; the one where you do things without even noticing. What else could you have done without noticing if that’s not exploiting your strengths? What you are already atuned to? What do you excel at?

If you don’t look for it intently, you won’t find it (blind spot), but when you act out of your habits, you use it unconsciously. It would be funny if not for the tragic part of how it results in oppression of zillions of workers and people throughout the world. People that are asked, required or forced to think through problems (including their own weaknesses) to solve them with innovative solutions¹² when they could have (re)used ones that they’re already good at!

And it’s only when you have helped someone identify his or her own color of mind that you can propose that both of you merge your different colors to create a new common one by co-constructing a change that is as respectful as possible of you two.

A Framework for Strengths Revelation

It might be difficult for someone new to the strength-based world to identify “what works” for someone. It might also be difficult for someone to identify “what works best” for himself if he never gave it a thought. So I propose below a small thinking framework to help in making those hidden strengths more visible.

So we want to find out what works best for someone. Where do we start? The best answer is “anywhere” that fits, and wherever works for you! Kidding aside, let me introduce a personal construction of mine of how I see strengths acting in people. It’s only a personal construction, so your mileage may vary; feel free to adapt it to yourself!

The framework is a combination of viewing a person from a time perspective (past, present and future) and from her positive aspects (what she believes in, what she does and what she dreams of).

The premises on which the framework is based on are the following:

Your beliefs are what you acquired in the past. Your current behaviors are driven by your beliefs. And your dreams are what pulls you in the future. This is represented in table “Strength Revelation Framework” below:

Strength Revelation Framework

	Past	Present	Future
Beliefs	The mental model
	you gained from
	your past experiences
Behaviors		What you do now
		that is driven by
		your past experiences
Dreams			What you dream of
			based on where you
			come from

In the next sections we will review some principles that could make change for one or many persons work best and we will come back to that framework just after.

Change for One Person

How do you manage change of one person? The basic premise is that you are the change agent, and you would like someone else to change. How are you supposed to do that?

The first thing to remember is that whatever your reasons are for the change, they are precisely this: yours, and only yours. The color of your mind made you realize that the other person should change but as I said earlier, this is the natural way for us to approach change, not necessarily how it might work best. But, as you noticed, you are two in this boat, so your first step should be to find out what the other think of the change idea.

Here are three ways to present a change to someone, according to the principles laid out in this book:

The bad way

would be to ask the other person why she’s not already doing what you imagined for her. This is rhetoric and also asking for trouble. If you ask for something, expect to find it. So if you ask for reasons why something is not done, chances are that this person will find and give you such reasons. This is also absolutely not respectful of the other person’s mental model (not even talking of demoralizing her). If she’s doing things the way she does them, that’s because of her mental model and because this is what works best for her and the situation as she understands it now.

A better way

would be to inquire into the reasons why the person does the things she does, and state the objectives she’s expected to reach. Then an inquiry about her thoughts regarding these objectives and how she can adapt her current way of doing to maintain the good stuff and find in her past experience what has already worked toward similar objectives. Hopefully, this should be how Management by Objectives (MBO) is done, when it’s the most respectful. This gives the changee an oportunity to reflect on and prepare for the change, but in the end, it’s still imposed and somehow disrespectful.

The best way

would have the person constantly associated to the co-development of the vision of where the work ought to go so it could be best for her, for the clients and for the organization as a whole.

Coming back to the Strength Revelation Framework, the purpose of the proposed actions above is to enrich the beliefs and behaviors of the change agent about what works for the current situation in order for everybody to do more of what’s already successful. The basic methodology to achieve this would be:

• to ask for behaviors that are proved to achieve successful results. This will help clarify beliefs that might otherwise have been kept hidden, and
• to ask for the future the person is headed to so as to clarify what best behaviors will help reach it.

The new and more detailed framework becomes the following one:

	Past	Present	Future
Beliefs	The mental model	Clarified beliefs
	gained from	about what works
	past experiences
Behaviors		What is done now	What new behaviors
		that is pushed by	will help
		past experiences	move forward
Dreams			What is dreamed of
			based on past
			experiences

How the (currently) empty cells get filled is through a cyclic movement: your beliefs informs your behaviors which drive you toward your dream. The results you get on the way will influence your beliefs, making you adjust your behaviors accordingly and thus direct you toward a corresponding, clearer vision of your future.

Change For Many Persons

When there are more than one person that’s supposed to change, the problem you face (that of your mind not having the required variety to match the minds of others) is exponentially increased. Not only are you supposed (in the traditional way change is usually managed) to know what would work best for each and every person involved, but you also are supposed to know how all the relationships between people need to evolve as well, and control how the evolutions of these relationships will reverberate onto the people as well, how these evolved relationships will influence them again, with other riddles on others relationships, etc.

I think I’ve stressed enough previously that knowing in place of one person is just impossible. How then are you supposed to manage change involving tens, hundreds or even thousands of people?

The short answer is that it’s just impossible using the classical “command and control” mental model. So how is it feasible to apply the precedings principles we’ve seen for one person to lead change for many?

Well, I see three possibilities:

• split the change,
• change the whole system at once,
• or setup a “viable” structure to manage the change.

Let’s review these one at a time.

Splitting the Change

The most evident option in the analytical way of thinking is to split the change according to meaningful boundaries (from the Change Agent perspective!) and manage smaller change programs, one for each “territory”.

Although this option does reduce the variety to be managed, it’s still hard (if not just impossible) to properly command & control such a programme, for the reasons invoked above (variety of each territory and variety of impacts on relationships). And I’m not even speaking of how disrespectful this option is, less the bandwidth it requires from the Change Agent.

What usually happens in such a configuration is that smaller change agents are identified (usually the managers of the smaller perimeters) and they are made accountable for the change in their area with few, if any, training in doing that.

The initial change agent then awakes one morning finding s/he became a “Programme Manager” in the process, which is a new job altogether (if it is to be done according to some best practices with good results), that, although related to “Project Manager”, is an order of magnitude more complex. Not saying s/he still has to find respect in this approach.

So it turns out that arbitrary splitting (from a stakeholder perspective) reduces visibility, increases uncertainty and consequently forsters even more “command and control”. So if splitting isn’t an option, what about not splitting at all?

Getting the Whole System to Change at Once

If splitting the change initiative looks too cumbersome, then changing the whole system at once might be worth considering. If methods exist (and we will review some of them in the next chapter) unfortunately, very few people are skilled in using them. Further, whole-system change approaches are still so rare (as of writing this book) that it usually is not an option for the top manager in charge (be it a department or a whole organization). The idea of embarking everybody in an event all at once is just too big a concept for them to just consider it.

Setting Up a “Viable” Structure to Manage Change

Still, even with whole-system change approaches as mentioned above, the organization might be so big or the constraints so high that it might not be an option to consider having all stakeholders in the same place at the same time, often for many days in a row¹³.

So what are possibilities? Building on both a “split the change” and “change the whole at once” options, we propose below a mix we named “viable structure” to manage the change. It builds extensively (if not entirely) on the Viable System Model (VSM) as described by Stafford Beer in many of his books¹⁴.

Beer designed a model of how an organization could be made “viable” by taking the human nervous system as a basis. By “viable” he meant being able to survive in current and anticipated conditions.

The model is recursively built with all sub-systems being a viable model in themselves. Although this book isn’t aimed at providing an extensive explanation of how the VSM functions, some guidelines are provided below as to how it could be used to help manage wide respectful change initiatives.

What we do find in this somewhat complex diagram are the following components:

• On the left is the Environment, here for the purpose of the explanation being divided in three parts. The top one deals with the anticipated evolutions of the Environment (aptly named “Future”) and the next two parts below are subdivisions of the Environment and what the corresponding “Operational Units” on their right deal with on a day to day basis, as part of their operations.
• The Operational Units (the two circles in the middle) are where the work is being done. Each one deals with a specific part of the total Environment as described above (the “Embedded Environment” as pictured). Along with their respective square attached (top right of each circle), they form a “System 1” in VSM terms.

  The squiggy line connecting the two OUs is the communication channel where synchronization of work happens and where management of overlapping parts of the environment also takes place.

• The square (numbered “1” on the picture) is the management part of the corresponding, attached, circle. Together with it they form the “System 1” in VSM term, that is an Operational Unit. Each OU is itself a VSM as can be seen inside the circles. This is where the recursivity of the model is visible.
• The top oriented triangles on the right are the Communication sub-system in charge of informing System 3 (management) of what happens in the sub-systems 1 (Operational Units). VSM named this “System 2”.
• In the top square resides the overall Management function comprised of three sub-systems: 3, 4 and 5 (described below). It is to be put in perspective to the Operation function represented by the sub-systems 1 of that recursion level.
• System 3 implements the Management system of that recursion level. It is in charge of giving out instructions (orders) to and negociating with Operations through the descending lines (budget constraints is a typical example of negociations happening here).
• In order to be fully effective, management sometimes needs to have direct inputs and visibility to lower sub-systems 1, and this is the purpose of System 3* ** (three star) to achieve this, also named the “Audit**” system.
• Systems 4 is in charge of investigating the future of the environment and providing management (S3) with all the necessary information so that required changes can be anticipated. As shown in the picture, it is connected to the outside Environment in the “Future” part of it. It is also named the “Monitoring” system.
• Lastly, System 5 represents the “ethos” of the organization. It embeds its purpose and mission and supervises (informs) functioning of the relation between S4 and S3 in order to keep the organization doing what it’s supposed to do now and in the future.

An important aspect of the VSM to notice is that it doesn’t prescribes functions (systems 1-5) to be done all by different persons. These are merely “roles” with attached responsibilities as described above. Whether they are embodied by one or more persons entirely depends on the specifics of the organization under consideration.

The basic principle of the VSM is identical to that of this book, although I haven’t mentioned it explicitely until now. The proposed VSM structure is built in order to respect the Law of Requisite Variety as expressed by famous cybernetician Ross Ashby: “Only variation can force variation down…”¹⁵

What this means in layman terms is that the VSM structure aims at ensuring all levels are organized so as to let them manage themselves according to their expertise as structurally coupled organizational units with the part of the environment with which they repeatedly work.

So, if we imagine a big change program in some organization, then the Change Agent would need to fulfil the role of the Management function (systems 3) and supervise other parts of the organization as corresponding Systems 1 (Operational Units) in their respective fields of intervention¹⁶. Each and every sub-system 1 would then be a smaller part of the organization. What constitutes this sub-part depends on how the organization usually sees itself and how the organization would be best segregated according to the change initiative to be done. The VSM doesn’t mandate the sub-part to map to the hierarchy of the organization’s departments.

In this vision of a VSM-based change management structure, each sub-system 1 (Operational Unit) would manage the change as decided “upper” by its Management function as represented by System 3, and would then transfer the orders “down” in its own viable sub-systems. Consequently, the overall direction of the change would be continuously refined from top to the inner parts of the organization, down to where the work is done, to ensure the local change agenda is adapted as much as possible to the specific local conditions, while remaining aligned with the overall direction of the organization as a whole.

The overall guiding principle of managing change in such a viable manner would be for management (system 3 at each recursive level) to give directions and ask for periodic reports of how things are moving forward and what unresolved problems might be (through Communications/System 2). Sub-systems 1 are supposed to manage their respective local part of the change themselves, tailoring it for their specific part of the environment and their own sub-systems 1. Care will be taken to manage properly overlapping parts of the environment with the corresponding other sub-systems 1 and synchonization of the change agenda with other parts will be manage at their own level as well (the squiggy line between systems 1).

That was a huge section to swallow. Here’s a small drawing that we hope will make things clearer as to how to do it concretely.

Summary of chapter

In this chapter I presented my most fundamental principle of change: “dont impose change onto others” with its corrolary which is to let people choose the change that would work best for them (ie, which will be most adapted to their own mental model). Strength-based change approaches were then introduced because of their strong reliance of what works best for people on three accounts: their beliefs, their behaviors and their dreams. Some general principles were then outlined about how to lead change for one person or a bigger system (organization) with the proposal to setup a “viable structure” to manage the change as best as possible with respect to local specificities or the organization.

In the next chapter, we will review some successful approaches to change that also are respectful and explain why we think they work better than other, more traditional, approaches to change.

Questions

• Think back to some successful change initiative you were involved in (either as an agent or a “changee”). What, according to you, made the change a success? What did the change agent do that helped or support the success? What did the changees do that helped as well? What else?
• Think of a time where you felt most respected for who you were, what you did and/or what you wanted to achieve. What did the other person do that, retrospectively, made you feel respected? What else?
• When you want to acknowledge others’ strengths, actions or desires, what do you usually do? What else? How do others react, then? How do these reactions influence you back?
• Do you feel at ease with praising people? Think of a time when you did. How did you feel afterwards? How did the person feel? How long have these feelings laste?
• Looking at all your answers above, what small thing would you like to repeat more often? What results do you expect from it for you, others and the rest of the organization? What is the smallest easy step you can take right now to begin on the path of doing more of it?

Please do yourself and the world a favor and do that small, easy beginning step on that path… now.

Change Approaches that Work

In the previous chapters, I exposed the principles that, according to cybernetics, explain what makes a change plan succeed or fail. As we’ve seen, it mostly depends on the plan to be adapted to the people that need to change. Very rarely though does this happen, as the change agenda is most often decided unilaterally, on unchallenged assumptions and without much inputs from impacted people.

There are probably a host of good reasons why this is done as roughly described above, but I’m not interested here in detailing them. Moreover, the reasons are probably different for each of us… meaning that we all have working reasons for each of us, because we all have different mental models. Which is precisely the point on which this book is built on.

Despite all the studies showing that change fails a lot and that it is resisted, I wand to show here that it’s not doomed to always be that way. I’m convinced that only bad change gets resisted and that good change isn’t, for good change is always decided with all stakeholders and designed by them to work for them.

Let’s first work out the classical syndromes attached to change, namely NIH and WIIFM.

I think these two syndromes really are triggers which show you that the change initiative you’re trying to drive is derailing from being respectful to people.

NIH syndrome (“Not Invented Here”)

This syndrome is often evoked when people seem to resist a proposed change agenda in which they haven’t participated. Change agents often explain you that people resist any change that’s not been devised by themselves, just for the pleasure of flattering their ego.

What it means.

People seem to argue with the proposed change because they haven’t participated in its conception. The meaning really is what’s conveyed in the three words: since the change hasn’t been invented here (by themselves), their mental model isn’t adapted to it, so they don’t understand it, or they would like more time to analyze and get their mind around it, etc.

What’s happening underneath.

What’s really happening is that because the change is alien to their mental model, it clashes with them and people see all the reasons why the change plan differs from how they think. So the more you’re pushing for that NIH change plan, the more people will see how it differs and, logically, why it’s not a good plan.

What to do.

If you feel that people are showing a NIH syndrome, then it’s time to stop what you’re doing and question yourself about how people really are resenting the change : how is their mind adapted to the proposed change? Given that the best way to be adapted to something is to have think about it, or to have built it, how close to this premise are they? Moreover, a change isn’t only about a what or a how. It’s also about a why. As Simon Sinek put it: people don’t buy *what you’re doing, they’re buying why you’re doing it*.

So if people start to show the NIH syndrome, stop immediately and ask them about the why, what, how and who of the proposed change, and please do listen to them and do take their (informed) advice into consideration!

WIIFM syndrome (“What’s In It For Me?”)

This syndrome often appears when people understand the proposed change and what it can bring to the organization, yet don’t see a personal benefit for themselves.

What it means.

People don’t see the reason in doing the change, despite understanding it from other contexts (management, clients, etc.) This syndrome is then probably less serious then NIH, yet it nonetheless needs to be taken into account.

What’s happening underneath.

People’s mental models are only partially adapted to the proposed change plan. If they can understand what it means and why it might be a good plan, they have yet to see reasons for themselves to embark on it. Will it harm their work condition? Will it ease their job? These are questions that need to find answers that suit people.

What to do.

You need to make the link between what you have in mind (your own mental model) and what they have in their mind (their own mental models). Since they haven’t make a personal connection with the change, it also means they haven’t got their mind totally around it (adapted to it) as much as they would like to. Also see solutions for NIH above as all probably apply to this case as well. The best step here is to take the necessary time to work out, with the people, how the change plan could be beneficial to themselves on a personal scale as well as on a more wider scale (win-win between people and the organization). Some also talk about the ecology of the plan: it needs to be suitable for the people and their environment.

Strength-based approaches to change

Next, I would like to introduce you to a host of approaches that are designed to address the two previous symptoms (NIH and WIIFM) by explicitly not raising them at all. The first ones are generically called “strength-based approaches to change” and the following ones are either methods or principles that proved their usefulness in having people change as respectful as is possible.

Appreciative Inquiry

Appreciative Inquiry (AI) was co-developed by Suresh Srivastva alongside David Cooperrider at the Weatherhead School of Management during his thesis on organizational change when it appeared that the questions asked during the interview phase of the change indeed produced immediate results in the same direction that the questions inquired into. By then deciding to carefully craft the question to seek for what gives life to people and what works for them, change could be made to start at the very moment the questions were asked.

AI is based on 8 principles¹⁷:

• The constructionist principle where words create worlds: this recognizes that our perception of the world is subjective and arises out of conversations with our peers.
• The simultaneity principles where inquiry creates change the moment we ask the first question.
• The poetic principles that reminds us that we can choose what we study in the endless source of study of human systems. What we study then makes a difference for the change to come.
• The anticipatory principle show how images inspire action and that human systems move in the direction of their images of the future.
• The positive principle where positive images lead to positive change.
• The wholeness principle shows that wholeness brings the best by having all of a system (all stakeholders) in the same room at the same time builds collective momentum.
• The enactment principle describes that acting “as if” is self-fulfilling. By enacting what we want of the future during the workshop, we increase the chances of it realizing.
• The free choice principle which states that people are more committed when they have freedom to choose how and what to contribute.

Although AI can be lived as a mental posture toward life in general, the traditional way it is done is through a workshop of more or less three days where the “5D” phases process is used. This probably also is the best way to understand how it works:

• Definition: before the workshop, a definition phase is organized with a small team to reframe the problem to be solved to an appreciative version of it. Usually, this consists in 1) rephrasing the problem in its positive opposite (what we seek instead of the problem) and 2) imagining what “further more of the positive” could mean for that situation. For instance, if the problem is that of discrimination in the workplace, the positive opposite could be “useful differences”, and the further more could be “generative differences”.
• Discovery: people are interviewed for times when they experienced the further positive opposite of the problem and invited to describe it to one another
• Dream: a collective work is elicited where people connect all their positive experiences and what allowed them to design a dream of “what might be”.
• Design: then people are invited to create provocative proposition of “what could be”
• Destiny: finally, people are encourage to take ownership of the action plan and refine it to create “what will be”.

Solution Focus

Based on the work of Brief Family therapy pioneered in the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute out of the work of Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer, Solution Focus appeared in the organizational perimeter as a way to help people improve their situation, by doing more of what worked and works for them, in their context (see this paper on the history of SF).

Not as formalized as the 5D process of Appreciative Inquiry, authors Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson nonetheless provided a nice picture of how it could work:

Although there’s no definitive starting point in the above picture, for the sake of clarity, we’ll begin at the Problem:

• Problem is first reframed as a platform: what is already there instead of what is missing (glass half full instead of half empty).
• A Future Perfect image is then built of what success would look like as if is had already been realized.
• A scaling question is then used where 10 is the future Perfect and 1 is the worst situation. An assessment of the level at which the Platform is helps then move onto the following questions.
• A step of Affirmation is used to focus on what is currently working (the Platform) and makes the client be at whatever level s/he gave for the Platform before and not below.
• This then allows the identification of very Small Steps that can be achieved quickly to starting moving up the ladder, where
• Counters can be collected proving that things indeed improve and that the client is capable of doing more. These Counters are then Affirmed in later session and the work pursued up to when the client is satisfied with this situation.

Coert Visser listed 21 techniques to coach and interview the clients to help them move forward.

Positive Deviance

Positive Deviance is an approach to behavioral and social change based on the observation that in any community, there are people whose uncommon but successful behaviors or strategies enable them to find better solutions to a problem than their peers, despite facing similar challenges and having no extra resources or knowledge than their peers. These individuals are referred to as positive deviants (Wikipedia).

The approach is somewhat similar to Appreciative Inquiry but with a focus on finding and replicating the positive deviants’ behaviors:

1. Define the problem, current perceived causes, challenges and constraints, common practices, and desired outcomes
2. Determine the presence of positive deviant individuals or groups in the community.
3. Discover uncommon but successful practices and strategies through inquiry and observation.
4. Design activities to allow community members to practice the discovered behaviors.
5. Monitor and evaluate the resulting project or initiative which further fuels change by documenting and sharing improvements as they occur, a

More can be read, including field cases and a basic guide on the Positive Deviance Initiative website.

Storytelling

Storytelling is one of those old practices that humanity used to practice for ages and are nowadays gaining traction especially when it comes to making people change (see for instance the work and free ebook of Get Storied. How come?

I think the most interesting fact about stories is that, precisely, they don’t feature facts only. The corporate world is crumbling under loads of PowerPoint slides overloaded with numbers and facts. Yet people don’t identify with numbers. They can support an argument, but they don’t live with numbers in mind. We use numbers to describe things like what an adjective can do. But it’s not the crux of it.

Stories, to me, lies in the delicate spot between facts and personal mindsets where listeners have enough of fact-based information to understand what’s happenin wrapped up in a narrative that help them make sense of it. And that’s precisely in this capacity for the listener to make sense that allows it to make what’s heard his or her own story and either relate to previous experiences or fantasize about what could be. In either case, the listener is given the opportunity to turn back and make use of his own mental model about whatever the story is about.

It would seem the sweet spot is between too few facts that would make the story dubious and too much that would not allow listeners to insert their own mental models. Indeed, it seems the simple story is more successful than the complicated one¹⁸.

Clean Language & Symbolic Modelling

Clean Language emerged out of the work of therapist David Grove in the 1980’s. Where he noticed some renowned therapists continually shifted their client’s frames of references, he wondered what would happen if he just did the opposite, namely only use a client’s own vocabulary and words.

He achieved this by carefully crafting simples questions that fully preserved and honoured clients’ experience. Indeed, the less he would interfere with a client’s mental model, the more this client would experience his own metaphors and frames of mind and the more lasting were the resulting changes.

Here are the twelve basic clean language questions (source)

DEVELOPING QUESTIONS:

• And is there anything else about (that) [x] ?
• And what kind of [x] (is that [x]) ?
• And where/whereabouts is [x] ?
• And that’s [x] like what?
• And is there a relationship between [x] and [y] ?
• And when [x], what happens to [y] ?

MOVING TIME QUESTIONS:

• And what happens just before [event x] ?
• And then what happens ? / And what happens next ?
• And where could/does [x] come from ?

INTENTION QUESTIONS:

• And what would you/[x] like to have happen ?
• And what needs to happen for [x] to [intention of x] ?
• And can [x] [intention of x] ?

[x,y] = client’s exact words

Lean management

From the time the book “The Machine That Changed the World” was published in 1990, a lot of books and papers have been written on this topic. Most of them addressed the tools of Lean that allow performance to continuously improve toward best in class. Yet, few books addressed how Lean should be introduced to people and, most of it, executives. Michael Ballé’s books are an exception in this since, behind a facade of tools, they really deal with the human aspect of introducting Lean and making “Respect for People” a central part of it. Indeed, his latest book (in french only, with Godefroy Beauvallet) “Le Management Lean” has a whole part dedicated to this.

Central to Lean coaching is the fact that a Lean senseï (japanese term for “master & teacher”) is supposed to lead from behind and never give someone a solution to a problem, even if the solution is obvious to the senseï.

Far from alienating employees, Lean can be a tremendous opportunity to make them thrive and flourish at work. The only condition is that improvements are done by them, not on (or worse, without) them.

Core to the method of introducting Lean is a coaching posture where the senseï relentlessly coaches through questions and encourage people to find answers that work for them. This has been formalized in another book “The Toyota Kata” by Mike Rother (check the excellent material available at hiw website). Uniformly applied, this would have everybody ask give simple questions that would elicit answers from people’s own mental models, not those of a manager or (worse) a consultant.

General Semantics

Alfred Korzybsky published a seminal book in 1933 titled “Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics” which described a new discipline that he named “General Semantics” (not to be confounded with “semantics”. The book’s quite heavy and a lot could be said about it. I would like to just point out Korzybsky’s point that language cannot convey the essence of reality, only describe it, and, consequently, “the word is not the thing” (also known and expressed as “the map is not the territory”, a quote which has also been used by Gregory Bateson).

What I retain from this is that, since people’s mental models cannot be transmitted through language, and only (partially) described, it’s just useless to try to understand them. A better way to have a change done according to stakeholders’ mental models is to have participants act by only asking them questions and letting them design what would work for them.

Carl Rogers

According to Wikipedia, Carl R. Rogers (January 8, 1902 – February 4, 1987) was an influential American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or client-centered approach) to psychology.

He is also known for practicing “unconditional positive regard,” which is defined as accepting a person “without negative judgment of …. [a person’s] basic worth.” (Wikipedia, again).

As of 1951, his theory was based on 19 propositions, most of them being related to the fact that a person’s mental model is mostly a mirror of his or her own environment and that, by practicing “unconditional positive regard”, a person can be made to resolve “psychological tension.”

Self-Determination Theory

According to Wikipedia “Self-determination theory (SDT) is a macro theory of human motivation and personality, concerning people’s inherent growth tendencies and their innate psychological needs. It is concerned with the motivation behind the choices that people make without any external influence and interference. SDT focuses on the degree to which an individual’s behavior is self-motivated and self-determined. […] SDT is centered on the belief that human nature shows persistent positive features, that it repeatedly shows effort, agency and commitment in their lives that the theory calls “inherent growth tendencies.” People also have innate psychological needs that are the basis for self-motivation and personality integration.”

When change is decided and imposed by someone else, the basis of what makes up SDT is violated. These are:

• Autonomy is violated, because change is decided and imposed by someone else. The persons that are supposed to change can’t express their own sense of autonomy.
• Competence is also violated because the change that comes from other persons is supposed to be better than what could have been devised by the people expected to change, and, their own skills or competence has not been used in devising the change.
• Relatedness is also impaired since the order for change is unilateral, coming from one way. There’s no relationship when only one side of the relation can express itself, and the other one is denied that right.

On the contrary, when change is devised with the very people that are supposed to change (through giving them direction and letting them structure their own change), the SDT bases are respected:

• Autonomy is acknowledged and can be expressed.
• Competence is expressly sought out to devise the change.
• Relatedness is nurtured as there can be a dialogue between the person desiring the change (most often management) and the one that are supposed to change (most often the employees).

The World Café

“The World Café” is a group conversational facilitation technique that strive to cross pollinate ideas from people to people so as to provoke the emergence of a group-wide consensus of a topic of inquiry.

People are seated in small groups (usually of 3 or 4 persons) in an hospitable space that looks like café tables and asked to exchange around a specific topic. After predetermined times, all but one participants of each tables switch with someone else. The people that move cross-pollinate their ideas to other tables and the host staying at his table makes the links between the previous round and the new one about to begin. After a few rounds, most if not all participants have a shared picture of the topic of inquiry.

Reversal Theory

Reversal Theory (RT) “has been developed primarily by British psychologist Dr Michael J. Apter since its inception in the mid-1970s by Dr Apter and psychiatrist Dr Ken Smith” (Wikipedia). Although RT isn’t mentioned in the rest of the book, I find it interesting because, unlike some other theories, it acknowledge the fact that different people are triggered by different things and may react differently. RT is a theory of personality, motivation and emotion and explains how people regularly reverse between psychological states arranged in four domains:

• Means-Ends (Serious or Playful): whether one is motivated by achievement and future goals, or the enjoyment of process in the moment;
• Rules (Conforming or Rebellious): whether one enjoys operating within rules and expectations; or whether one wishes to be free and push against these structures;
• Transactions (Mastery or Sympathy): whether one is motivated by transacting power and control; or by care and compassion;
• Relationships (Self or Others): whether one is motivated by self interests (personal accountability and responsibility) or by the interests of others (altruism and transcendence).

Source: http://reversaltheory.net/RT/learn-the-theory/

People can feature one or the other end of each domain, and switch on some domain based on differing factors, each specific to an individual. This happens when we change meaning attributed to a situation or when the situation itself changes.

The theory can, in my opinion, be used for diverse purposes:

• either it is used to detect someone’s state and do the necessary intervention to trigger a reversal in some specific domain (like moving from a Playful to Serious state in a business context);
• or it is used to trigger oneself to be in a similar state than that of other people with who we need to interact;
• or it can be used to recognize that people are naturally in different states, and triggered to change state under different conditions, and that we should respect all of these and make use of whatever state they are in at some moment, and adapt to whatever new state may appear later on;
• or it can be used to recognize someone’s states and seek to provide an environment where that state’s requirements are fulfilled as much as possible;

After reading the content of this book before here, you certainly understand that my preference goes to the last two options.

Further, if an environment isn’t aligned with someone’s current states, negative emotions ensue and change acceptance surely is not at its highest possible score.

ADKAR©

ADKAR© is a change management model created by company Prosci. A somehow detailed explanation of it is available here but a quick summary will suffice to make my point. ADKAR is an acronym that stands for:

• Awareness of the need to change;
• Desire to participate and support the change;
• Knowledge on how to change;
• Ability to implement the required skills and behaviors;
• Reinforcement to sustain the change.

What I find interesting in this model is the 100% focus on the changees and taking care of them before, during and after the change. A connection is sought between the change agenda and people so as help them make sense of the change from their own perspective. Of course, how it gets managed on the ground floor may differ from one change agent to another, but the overall framework is already here to hint at the direction to take. I would suggest adopters of ADKAR to glance at other change approaches (such as Solution Focus for instance) described here to reinforce their pre-existing bias toward including changees into their agenda.

BJ Fogg’s behavior model

According to Wikipedia, “BJ Fogg was a doctoral student at Stanford University (1993-1997), and used methods from experimental psychology to demonstrate that computers can change people’s thoughts and behaviors in predictable ways. His thesis was entitled ‘Charismatic Computers.’ “

He created a model for persuasion based on three components:

• Motivation: when motivation is high, change is more likely to occur.
• Ability (or simplicity): intuitively, the easier is it to change, the more chances for it to happen
• and Triggers: lastly, in order to step out of previous habits, people need to define a trigger (an event) that will rtigger the new behavior so as to be reminded to practice it, and therefore, progressively, change.

His model fits nicely with the one described in this book. Indeed, all three components are related to who the changee is:

• Motivation can only be at its highest potential if the change has been thought through by the change him or herself.
• Ability can obviously only be achieved properly if considered from the perspective of the person that’s supposed to change
• and Triggers are ot be set up in the context of the changee life, so as to make it work for him.

Summary of Chapter

In this chapter I have provided a personal summary of different ideas and change approaches that inspired me. My intention is that you know where my ideas come from so that you can understand my own mental model a bit more deeply. In no way can these quick summaries replace a real book or training (not even talking of practical experience) on the topics, but it can provides initial information to decide whether you want to go down one of these paths or not.

I will provide a short rough respectful change method in another chapter based on these concepts that I hope you will be able to use to taste what it means to connect to other people minds and release the formidable energy that lay unexploited in them.

Questions

• What topic interested you most? What do you like about it?
• Have you searched the Internet about it? What did you discover?
• How are you connecting what you discovered with how you functfion already? What else?
• When thinking in how you usually address change, what have you noticed you are already doing, even if partially? What small step would you be ready to do as soon as possible to go further down the path of the topic that interested you? What else?

Notes