Change management is changing: leaders, try on “I don’t know”
How we develop organisations and how we view change have shifted dramatically in the last 10 years – and we are all the better for it.
Traditional management routes were all about planning: writing a business strategy in which you pretend to have infallible, psychic foresight, then achieving those goals through a rigidly top-down approach, with superiors telling inferiors what to do, martialling them into ‘run mode’ and closely monitoring their adherence to the plan. The underlying mind-set was, “We don’t know exactly what tomorrow will bring – but we can create a pretty good guesstimate based on last year's figures. Then all we need to do is add a few realistic but challenging goals in there, et voila!”
The agile business approach that’s the ‘new cool’ is all about learning: coming up with a business model (which is openly viewed as a bunch of testable hypotheses that may or may not be true), then testing (a customer-centric approach to proving or disproving the individual parts of the business model) and adjusting it (learning from the reality of what happened and then repeating the process, taking that learning into account).
This is already a pretty great improvement! The planning cycles are much shorter and there is a higher tolerance for experiments and mistakes.
The overall shift in our strategy has been about:
Valuing getting things done over impeccable planning
Responding to information, feedback and circumstantial changes flexibly rather than following a strict plan
Viewing customers as important people to understand rather than segments to target (Hurray! We aren’t all just walking wallets anymore!)
But speed, a tolerance for imperfection and openness to modifications are not enough because…
WE NO LONGER LIVE IN A WORLD THAT IS ABOUT MAKING THE UNKNOWN KNOW.
We are entering the age of the unknowable.
W. Edwards Deming is a US consultant and statistician who puts it cunningly: one of his Seven Deadly Diseases of Management is, “management by use only of visible figures, with little or no consideration of figures unknown or unknowable”. I would add that the distinction between the unknown and the unknowable is key. 🗝
Where traditional management considered only the unknown, expecting it to be much more predictable and stable than it turns out to be, current best practices view it with more reverence, as a wild-card driver of what is to come. Fancy phrases like “we live in a VUCA world” (VUCA standing for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) are supposed to help explain the chaos.
The future of change management is about deeply accepting the unknowable.
The tech developments that will shape tomorrow’s working reality exceed the imaginable by far, and will fundamentally alter how we work. We can’t even know many of the job types that will exist even ten years from now.
This is where embracing the unknowable becomes crucial to successful change management. But what does this mean for organisations that want to keep up, other than trying to get comfortable with the term ‘unknowable’?
What this means for organisational cultures
For a start, we can encourage a culture of embracing the unknowable as an opportunity to follow our intuition, hinting at the strategies and directions that might emerge from it. When we can celebrate a degree of ‘unknowability’ to the point where we start finding ways to incorporate it into our planning, we really give our business the best chance of being resilient to unknowable variables. Imagine a model in which regular review of the changing business landscape is at the core of our operations, including an intelligent reshaping of infrastructures and processes, before waiting for something to break.
Investing in what might happen
in the unknown
A key part of bringing this into the every day is learning to think of delegation as much more than just assigning tasks. When we notice that someone in particular has their finger on the pulse of a changing dynamic, we can engage that person to develop strategies and drive visions forward, using more of their time to go off on a creative tangent, rather than just asking them to simply implement our own best guess. Through authentic enabling, we invite our people to participate purposefully.
Saying “I don’t know” as a leader
The collectively held belief is that a professional is supposed to know things. When leaders don’t hesitate to share when they don’t know, this is very liberating for the team, who gradually learn by example, to let go of the sense of failure that may be attached to ‘I don’t know’.
The kernel of truth in all of this may be that while saying ‘I don’t know’ is essential at a basic level to working happily, honestly and productively, realising when to say ‘I can’t know’ can be freeing on a whole other level. When we embrace the unknowable, we allow ourselves to imagine whole new ways of working that leave traditional management models in the dust.
The best part of the unknown? It’s a license to have and proclaim unrealistic dreams and visions. And when someone says ‘impossible’, winkingly reply ‘you never know…’.
