All Change is Good

So I introduced myself at a workshop the other day with name, packdrill, the usual stuff “and two strongly held beliefs: (i) that all organisational change is personal change and, (ii) that all change is good”.

I went on with my opening spiel, and after a little while a delegate put up his hand. From the look on his face, something, clearly, had been worrying him.

“Errrm, David, can I just take you back to your opening statement. All change is good, you said. Can you explain that, please?”

Whereby he implied, I think, that all change is not good, that some of it is good and some of it bad. It’s a common way of thinking. I wrote about it years ago in Smart Things to Know About Change (huge in China, by the way :O) ). We like the changes we like, and don’t like the others. And as our preferences reflect our judgments on the world, therefore there is good and bad change.

But here’s what I think, and here’s what I feel. First what I feel, because we neglect our feelings too often in these matters.

I just feel that all change is good. There. And when I feel like that, I feel aligned with something as powerful and true as life. The force that grows your nails grows mine too. Change is the energy that brings about the great, expansive, unfolding of life. From our limited perspectives - inside our organisations, inside our lives - it is sometimes (often?) difficult to see what is coming down the line. We make a change in the job we do: who knows what possibilities are going to unfold from that? We don’t make a change in the job we do: who knows what possibilities are going to unfold from that decision? We introduce an initiative into our companies, and who knows…Sometimes these changes seem to be working, and sometimes not. But the one thing we can be sure of, change is still unfolding, and whether it’s good, it’ll change, or whether it’s bad, it’ll change. It never stops. And that’s got to be good for two reasons:

(i)    because we get this never-ending opportunity to learn from our experiences, always another chance to apply what we learnt from the past and try something different (or the same with more vigour) in the future. This is never the end.

(ii)    because we get the opportunity to surf the waves of change. I used to think that there was such a thing as a master of change, someone who, far from being broken by change, could shape destiny to his or her will. But everything changes, and so did that thinking about change. Now I believe that we jump on the board and feel the forces beneath us and ride the waves as best we can - and by how we move and use our strength and flexibility and courage and balance we get to guide the board in certain directions above others - but most of all we are enjoying the journey, and the not-knowing and the not-having-to-know of where this never-ending journey is taking us. Change as exhilaration rather than change as pain. And YES, even in organisations can that be possible.

Now what I think about change is this: the idea that there is good and bad change is an error of thinking. I think it’s a result of too shallow or narrow a perspective. To pin a change down in a moment of time and say this is wrong demonstrates that we could do with moving up - to look at the same change from a much higher perspective - and moving forward - to look at it from a moment further out in time. This change we worry so much right now, well, on our death bed…As my Mum always says “Ah, we’ll look back and laugh!”

Which brings me to the idea that taking too narrow and localised a look at a change is also dangerous, since it might encourage us to panic, and thereby constrict our range of creative options and ideas (which is why when a change is deemed to be ‘not going well’ in a company, it’s the time we usually see the most defensive and offensive behaviours). Might we be better bringing my Mum’s future laughter into this present, challenging moment now? [Relax. Breathe...Now, what shall we do next...]

But I’d better stop now. There’s danger afoot. All change is good, maybe. But all change is fun?

Now there’s a thought…

All Change is Good: just turn it around?