I’ve seen several of these situations recently. I suspect you have, too:
- A friend or colleague “retires” from their day job. Within a few weeks, they’re either back at that day job or some other job. Why? Because they have no idea what to do in retirement.
- An organization wants to “transform” the entire way they work to some ideal state. However, they’ve never practiced how to change even the smallest thing about their organization. (I see this a lot with “agile transformations.”) Worse, their organization inoculates itself against change.
- People change something about themselves, and then they hit some kind of a plateau. Losing weight or strength training are examples of this. People initially succeed in creating some changes. Yet, they stop losing weight or they stop being able to increase their strength training.
Many of us expect that once we make up our mind (to retire or somehow transform), that we will succeed by honest effort. That is, if we try hard enough to achieve the end result, we will succeed.
That’s not true. I do not know of any significant and successful change that happens as a transformation without plateaus, setbacks, or practicing change. Worse, I only know about successful change where we create small goals that can indirectly lead to a larger goal as we practice small changes. Those small changes help us learn how to create larger and lasting changes.
Yet, we still think we can create a total transformation without practicing change.
The larger the transformation, the more practice we need.
Large or Total Transformations Require Practice
Some of my dear friends are “failures” at retirement. They say they know what they want to do, but various “day jobs” suck them back into the workforce.
They are not retirement “failures.” Instead, they are doing work that delights them, that makes them happy. When they are ready to “really” retire, they can then experiment and discover what makes sense for them for now.
No one needs to have an all-or-nothing approach to retirement. (Or anything, for that matter.) Instead, they can practice changing specific aspects of their day, week, and month. How much of what kind of “work” do they want to do and when? How can they rearrange their day so they can practice change—experiment—to find what works for them now?
In the same way, organizations that want a “total transformation” have to practice changing small and large things. Many organizations have a system that holds them in place (that inoculation idea). Until they practice loosening that system, they can’t change. In a sense, they need to bend, fold, and mutilate that old system so they can learn what might work.
That’s why practicing change helps people achieve those transformations much faster than trying to achieve that very large goal.
Practicing Change Can Satisfy Our Need to See Progress
The larger our goal, the more we can imagine that goal once we achieved it. However, we need to see progress to see if we are on our way to making the changes we want. But that total transformation—our vision of the end result—often prevents us from seeing progress.
If you think you’re supposed to retire, you might have a vision of “not work.” But “not work” does not tell you what you to do. What is different about your days, weeks, months, and then years? That’s why practicing change works so well for retirement. When you track what’s different, you can see your progress to achieving those differences.
It’s the same for an organizational transformation. Instead of the current system, what does the new system look like? How do people act? What looks different? Then, you can practice change to achieve those differences. And you can see progress at every level.
And when—not if—you hit a plateau on your personal changes? Choose the smallest change that might provide you some value. Then, use data to see your progress.
I would love to just snap my fingers and boom—the change is done. But that’s not how we change. Instead, we need to experiment our ways to the changes we want to see. We can become much more satisfied with practicing change.