On Change, pt 2

Sometimes, teams fail to account for change happening to them even when they have, as Agile Learning Centers do, explicit expectations and systems for responding supportively to changes in their students’ goals, clients’ visions, or the enveloping environment. In theory and practice, the team members embrace change, design for it, and may even be loud about this being a defining characteristic of their organization. No fear or resistance here! And yet, they risk waking up one day to the startling realization that everything has become different and it’s past time to adapt. 

A common trap is anticipating that the potential for change comes only from actors in certain roles. Or that it’s okay and important to work with only in specific domains. In a complex and dynamic system, which an organization is, this narrow imagining means practices for learning, growth, and adaptation in place at one scale of operations aren’t being supported with complimentary practices at other scales. This failure to account for the interrelatedness of people and processes can lead to tricky situations where contrasting ways of being and working hit up against each other. Maybe there are well-established protocols for on-boarding new folks, but key responsibilities, knowledge, and power are allowed to accrue to one or a few people with no legacy planning, so when those people can’t or won’t continue in their roles, their replacements have to step in without any training or notes to support their transition. Maybe there’s an established and productive conflict resolution process that works for everyone except the director, and so issues get resolved except when they involve the director. Then more and more energy goes towards some version of “making it work” around that person, energy that could be going towards helping the project work better as a whole. Maybe the team working directly with students or clients has co-design processes that really work for them, but those team members answer to funders or board members who are rigidly focused on them quantifying their work, who insist there need to be reports and ways to measure impact in numbers whether or not putting energy into creating and generating those kinds of outcomes is aligned with moving the co-designing folks towards success with their goals. Sometimes this will work out fine; sometimes it’ll stretch the facilitators too thin as they try to manage the different priorities of the two groups. Sometimes the students, clients, and other on-the-ground stakeholders end up feeling frustrated or undermined by the dissonance of participating in a supposedly collaborative and emergent process with one group of people then being tasked with generating data-focused documents for another. 

Someone versed in organizations and specifically applications of Agile, as in the software management Agile formally defined in the 2001 manifesto, could argue that typical corporate institutions can only encourage innovation and responsiveness to change at the client-consumer level, and to a lesser extent within project teams. There’s some truth in this. Leadership in a project that depends on specific products being released on specific timelines for its continued existence, or that works with an institution, such as a university or government, organized into complex and rigid hierarchies, has to be practical about the limitations this places on their ability to innovate. Even in these situations, though, there can be value in playing with thought experiments where pieces, processes, and people presumed to not be movable, to not be changeable, actually do change. Such play reminds us how creative we can be and reveals information about our assumptions, desires, and fears… helpful preparation for meeting real life situations where we need to adapt at the edges of what we previously thought possible.

Assumptions and the disconnection from the parts of ourselves that we don’t intentionally call on often are just some reasons why people, teams, and organizations may struggle to anticipate change or meet it well. Other common reasons tend to change over time, differing with new and established projects.

In young projects, the excitement of being newly real and the shine of so many possibilities on the horizon can make it hard to imagine that no start-up stays young and new forever. Here are some of the kinds of changes that can startle organizations that are or that relate to themselves as start-ups:

• Trends change. Using the moment’s buzzwords, seemingly ubiquitous website colors, and hot social topics, a project can catch precious attention and inspire trust or excitement that helps it grow. Awesome. As long as someone is making sure the project can change as fashions do when it needs to in order to avoid coming across as dated or obsolete.
• Novelty-dependent attention and funding runs out. A new school can only be “new” for so long. A cutting-edge, innovative approach can, by definition, only be cutting-edge and innovative for so long. At some point, if a project is going to survive, the team needs to make a shift from hyping their vision to early adopters and investors to telling stories of their actual experiences to audiences more interested in impact and organizational learnings. 
• People die… and are born. The elementary school I attended was over 100 years old, in a town where people used to stay for generations. At some point, little me was having feelings about a community member tragically dying young, and an older woman gently explained to me that if you stay long enough in any organization or community, you will inevitably encounter terrible losses. You will also, she reminded me, be part of celebrating arrivals, unions, successes, and many many seemingly unremarkable days. The leadership lesson I still carry from that conversation is that if my goal is to keep my organization alive for many years, I have to prepare for all the realities of life to be part of our story at some point. Celebrating and cultivating appreciation for the mundane supports community resilience, as does doing what one can to organize disaster response plans and supplies in the peaceful moments before they’re needed. 
• People leave… and join and grow. People’s lives typically have multiple seasons. Their self-concepts, abilities, dreams, and frameworks for understanding the world change as they grow. Sometimes they’ll be with an organization through multiple of their seasons, in which case the challenge is to figure out how to adapt their role and supports, growing with them and positioning them based on both their and the organization’s needs. Sometimes, people will decide their journey is taking them away from your organization. This can happen quickly or slowly, with people who you expected to move on quickly and with people who were generally expected to be around for a long time. Sometimes, leadership will need to tell someone that it’s time for them to leave. And sometimes you’ll have a new person show up and surprise you with just the skills and energy you were trying to find from within your current collective! Expecting these changes, and having on-ramps and off-ramps designed to guide folks – in all roles – through them will help make times of transition feel smoother, even when the changes required necessarily involve some amount of discomfort.

In established projects, complacence and familiarity can make it easy to forget that once everything was experimental and many things likely will need to be again if the project is to survive long-term. 

“Do I remain a revolutionary? Intellectually – without a doubt. But am I prepared to give my body to the struggle or even my comforts? This is what I puzzle about.” 

– Lorraine Hansberry

Here are some of the kinds of changes that can sneak up on organizations that have established their culture and ways of working:

• New opportunities arise, but without ways of recognizing and pursuing them the organization starts missing out. Finding ways to stay tuned in to changes in the landscape and experiments across a few different fields, with willingness and even commitment to always being willing to be a novice again somewhere, can help an established organization and its teams avoid being caught off guard.
• A problem that people work around instead of addressing, sometimes known as a “squeaky step” problem after the situations where people using a staircase adapt to a squeaky step by stepping over it instead of fixing it, turns out to be real problem and without attention worsens, beginning to create bigger problems for the organization. Humans are exceptionally capable of adaptation, and sometimes this leads to us convincing ourselves to minimize, accommodate, or overlook things that don’t really work for us or our goals. Often this is harmless or even helpful, like when we just make peace with other people in our homes loading the dishwasher or arranging the toilet paper in ways that… just aren’t our preference. Sometimes, though, we adapt to dysfunction or adapt in ways that cause dysfunction. In these cases, recognizing and addressing the source of the problem is key in order to avoid a breakdown of the system’s functioning or the ongoing loss of good people who can’t or won’t adapt. However scary the necessary changes may be, they’ll only get worse the longer they’re avoided.
• A change-averse organization becomes fragile. Resilience depends on an ability to grow and adapt, which requires coordination, effective information assessment, creativity, and practice. When comfort is allowed to lead to passivity and stagnation, or when fear is allowed to lead to change attempts being resisted or even sabotaged, the result is a loss of resilience. For those interested in sustainability, it can be helpful to practice asking if there are changes that the team is afraid of or trying to avoid, why if so, and what might the consequences be.
• An organization that isn’t listening, reflecting, and regularly realigning its people and practices with its mission across levels of operation could miss signs it’s becoming obsolete. With awareness and an experimental mindset, an organization can sometimes recognize change coming and rebrand, upskill its people, or adjust its mission and strategy to be better able to weather whatever is coming next. Missing this window, though, can mean having to dissolve the project due to it no longer providing something that’s needed or wanted in its context. 

And of course, teams and individuals have similar tendencies at the corresponding seasons of our cycles of engaging with ideas, entities, and projects. Given all this, it can be helpful to make time to periodically pause and check in on where change is a needed medicine – or already a present force to be worked with – at these more personal scales as well as organizationally.