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?

Those of us who refuse to be corralled or mesmerised by aristocratic power use our own strategies of influence and build our own platforms of power to disseminate our stories of educational improvement for social benefit via a systematic knowledge base, and these stories are grounded in the evidence that is generated through practitioners’ studies of practice as they find ways of influencing the trajectories of social change.
Jean McNiff

The very lovely people of The Eastlake Group invited me to speak at an event for their customers and prospects. Given that they specialise in creating effective working spaces for their clients, they’d had the great idea to hold the event not in a conference centre or hotel meeting room, but in the shell of a just completed new-build office block.

My talk: Working Towards a Brilliant Life.

Photos to come, and, in the meantime, here’s the flyer - eastlake-brilliant-life-invitation - with what my bio looks like in Welsh…

I’ve been in Shanghai, working in a hotel which was, apparently, the home of Shanghai’s Gangster No 2 early last century. Given the photos of him around the walls, holding court with the statesmen, politicians, actors and business people of his day, he was clearly a very popular guy. Or maybe he was very persuasive.

Monday morning: a workshop that starts by asking this marketing leadership team: what’s the thing you most need to develop that will create a step-change in the work of this team? Their answer: influencing. Creating more effective relationships with their internal and external business partners so that they get the buy-in, engagement, permission, resources - and all those other variants of Yes - which allow their ideas to come into reality.

I’m taken aback by how strongly the team feels about those it has to influence, and mostly those feelings are not positive ones. The default stance seems to be that others are wrong or bad to behave as they do, and that is what makes them difficult to influence. Which sort of explains, I guess, why people think they are going to have to have difficult, fierce and risky conversations to move things forward…

So the first intervention is to change how they look at these ‘problem people’ (Wayne Dyer: change how you look at something, and what you look at changes). To stop making them wrong, to stop making them intractable. To see that the behaviour of these people is perfectly right, natural and justified - from their perspective.

I’ll add a third reason to CW’s list of reasons all business people should have a substantial theatre experience as part of their development. It’s about the customer. That the customer pays our salaries is the truism that many businesses use to sell the idea that serving the customer well is a good idea. So there is an economic transaction: we treat you nicely and we get something we want in return.

In the theatre, this transaction is taken down a few levels, to a place where the money becomes the merest of details. Of course, we can’t pay the actors and the stage crew if we don’t get a paying audience. But there’s something more substantial at risk. Without an audience to witness us, there is no performance. Without the observer, the character does not come into being.

Our customers do not just pay for us, they validate our existence.

In the rehearsal room.

You should see what happens when grown adults learn to play again. When judgement is let go of, and is replaced by ‘what about?’ and ‘what if?’ and ‘let’s try it, see what happens’.

I’ve been given the great opportunity to work in a theatre again, eighteen years after I last stepped foot in one as a creative participant rather than an audience member. It has been wonderful.

On one level, the project was a teambuilding one. Richard Jacobs of Yes asked me to help him out with a client who wanted to explore their corporate values, and in so doing, develop the work-related skills of collaboration and innovation. No big news there. Companies come together on off-sites every week of the year with such intentions. They could have abseiled down a cliff together, or built a raft out of twigs and lemon peel and sailed across a river. But Richard persuaded them that they could just as well generate some healthy anxiety by coming together on Day 1, knowing that 28 hours later, by the end of Day 2, they would be performing - having devised it, written it and (for those who did not want to ‘act’) learnt the complementary skills of stage management, lighting design and so on - a complete one hour play for a specially invited audience of friends and family. And all this in a real theatre, the Unicorn.

On another, personal, level, this has been a journey for me. I came into the business world from theatre, and, here I am, about to take a sabbatical from business, apparently coming full circle. Back to the stage. Back to the magical place.

When I was writing How to Make Work Fun! I went to the States to talk with a man who had written a similar book over there. It transpired that as well as being a ‘fun consultant’ CW Metcalf also had begun in the theatre (and along the way played Bozo the clown in Happy Days - a character I cannot recall but who almost certainly was the spitting image of Crusty the Clown from The Simpsons). Anyhow, CW told me that he thought all business people should have some experience working in the theatre, for two reasons:

(i) that, without any exhortation or theory or coaching to be that way, theatre is inherently a team activity. The guy on stage doing a soliloquy from Hamlet knows that he is no more important or necessary than the guy hidden away in the darkness at the back of the theatre with his hand on the lighting controls.

(ii) that there is nothing in business that - despite its bluster and macho will-power and long-hours-work-hard-get-the-job-done effort - is akin to the extraordinary energy or spirit that kicks in in the final days before curtain up, and transforms a rag bag of doubting actors and suddenly new props and gaffer-taped scenery into The Performance.

This energy is known and has passed into the collective consciousness as the cliché It Will Be All Right On The Night, but I assure you, the phrase doesn’t do the experience justice. And as I stand here in the darkness of the wings at the Unicorn Theatre, I am remembering its power. It is like being held, and lifted…

My belief is that the great untapped potential of Organisational Development is how people talk to each other: what they say, what they don’t say, and how the nature and quality of their conversations creates the ‘field’ which they then say they ‘experience’. The challenge is that this field is a result of the talking, rather than the instinctive understanding we tend to hold that our talking simply describes the field and the experiences therein. The clearest demonstration of this is when I ask you to tell me about your company, or its culture, or the problems it is facing: you can’t do that without including some stuff, and leaving other stuff out. And in this natural, often unconscious, editing of ‘reality’, you have your company be as you want it to be, for whatever reason you have for doing that. So you tell me about the problems, and you describe and justify those problems with data - and of course I do that too when I want you to know how unique and special my own personal problems are -  and what we all end up with is the story of a problem-saturated company.

It may even be ‘true’ that your company faces these problems, but even if it’s true, it’s not especially helpful or empowering to talk about them in this way. On the contrary, it probably results in us both being agreed that there’s an awful lot of intractable problems in your company, and dismayed that we’ll ever be able to do anything about them.

The work therefore becomes exploring what is left unsaid, what is being edited out. And that’s where the potential comes alive again.

So a good question to ask is: “Tell me - what’s working around here?”

On the verge of our move, and in the midst of what might be seen as my second mid-life crisis, I am in the wondrous, glorious, precious position of being able to stand where I am and look back at my life to date as an OD consultant and reflect on what, above all else, has made any difference at all. From those reflections, I have compiled this one page.

I heartily recommend anyone reading this to carry out the same process, whatever your field of practice: what really worked for you, and what, in the end, turned out to be so much puffery?

A necessary side effect of such an exercise, perhaps, is the realisation that so much sound and fury has apparently been wasted on stuff that didn’t actually work at all. Ah well…I wish I’d have had access to this single page of text when I started…

what-works

…all sorts of stuff, really