From Chess Boards to Ice Fields
If you are of my generation you would probably have been brought up on concepts like Total Quality Management (TQM), Projects In Controlled Environments (PRINCE2) or something similar like Kaizen. These change methodologies, while all valid, were born out of industrial-age thinking, which I’d argue is no longer serving us quite so well.
Often in my work I find myself in conversation about the nature of change these days, and I end up painting two pictures that seem to help, so I thought I’d do that here. I’m no expert on any of these topics but that doesn’t normally stop me hopping up on to a soap box. In making the case for new change methodologies for the post-industrial era, my sources are my own experiences managing change in the 90s and 2000s, followed by time spent consulting with the good people at Relume, who know a thing or two about this stuff. It goes a bit like this.
Once upon a time, the world was a slow-moving, certain place, in which change occurred between prolonged bouts of stability. In this environment change could be planned and priority was given to planning processes, strategic thinking, critical paths and dependency mapping. The visual image for me was like a game of chess, though not my standard of chess but more like proper grandmaster-level games. In chess the board is fixed, the pieces have specific, predictable capabilities and the goal is clear. Players can spend hours thinking five, six, ten moves ahead – not a great spectator sport and one of the reasons clocks were introduced.
This is an industrial-age methodology for change. No one moves a muscle until the goal is totally clear and agreed, and the path toward the goal is laid out in the form of milestones, dependencies, contingencies, risk and dependency definition. I want to make clear I think there is a place for conventional project and change management; it’s just we’ve become programmed to work only in this way. Before you jump in, yes I appreciate there are more modern methods, agility-based, for bringing change, but these are largely confined to IT development in my experience. In mainstream leadership, we still place too much value on planning and thinking, and not enough on getting into action.
Compare chess to the metaphor I tend to use for post-industrial change methodologies.
Imagine you are in an ice field that has just broken up. You are stood on a block of ice that is moving. On the horizon is the ship you wish to get to, and it is moving. Between you and the ship are a series of other blocks of ice, and they are all moving. Everything is in motion and not in the same direction, and the blocks of ice are also breaking up. If you stand on your block for too long trying to plot a path back to the ship it’s a waste of time. What’s more helpful is to take a quick look at the ship, find your courage and make a move. Then look again, recalibrate and make another move, and so on. It’s a model for change that prioritises action over thinking, movement over planning and agility over continuity. If you’re interested in attitude you might also say it requires a growth mindset more than a fixed mindset (thanks Carol Dweck).
In this model the ship is no less important than ‘check mate’ in chess but there is an acknowledgement that old methods of getting to it are less helpful than a more dynamic approach. And what also happens is that learning happens in the midst of action, with constant recalibrating on each ice block. In the old days Post Implementation Reviews (PIR) were king, in other words we do the change, then we do the learning afterwards. The world is no longer stable enough for that approach. If we wait until reaching the ship until learning then (a) we may never reach it and (b) it won’t help because the next time everything will be different.
A phrase I often use to support this is Dream big, start small, learn fast. Dream big – visualise a north star, a ship on the horizon. Start small – get into action quickly. Learn fast – often fail fast – notice what happened, reflect in the moment (often called reflexivity), adjust and move again.
How might you be playing chess when you need to be dancing on ice? What changes do you need to make and what might a first step be? Where have you become immobile or paralysed, waiting for clarity and certainty before acting?