What's your goal in dealing with change?

If we are to deal productively and powerfully with change, we have to start by asking: What's the point? Here comes a train down the track: A manager causing morale problems with his bad attitude, competition for a major contract, legislation that threatens to cut your revenue by a third or more, a rival organization trying to entice away your top-producing generalist. Before you react, stop and ask yourself: What's my goal? What am I trying to accomplish?

Avoidance

For many of us, when faced with an impending change - whether a new CEO, a shift in the political structure of the town, or a change in our personal relationships - the goal is simple avoidance: "I will not let this change affect me." The thoughts that go along with such a stance often have to do with identity: "I am the kind of person who does things this way. I am not the kind of person who does things that way." As Popeye would say, "I am what I am, and that's all what I am."

This actually works - but only for matters that turn out to be irrelevant. For things that make a real difference, it is a foolish stance. When a train is coming, it's best to get off the track. When opportunity knocks, it's best to go to the door and open it. Rigidity in a turbulent environment leaves you with few options.

The trick is to recognize "the difference that makes a difference" (as Gregory Bateson defined true information), to separate the relevant from the irrelevant. Often, we give too much energy and attention to changes that are far away and have little potential to effect us - national political debates, abstract worries about relationships, the latest technological fads - and not enough to the things that are right in front of us, the task that is at hand.

Acceptance

For other people the goal is merely to accept change, to be flexible, to "swing with it," to say, in the dismissive argot of children, "Whatever." Flexibility can be a good first step in dealing with change but it cannot be the last step. And complete flexibility is usually illusory. If you are saying "Yes" too often and too easily, you are probably fooling yourself, building up resentments and defenses outside of your conscious awareness. These are the easy-going, agreeable people who suddenly walk out on the marriage, chuck the job, sour on the project. The are the organizations that back out of the too-hasty merger or joint venture.

Dominance

For some, the goal of dealing with change is to dominate, to win. But this goal is equally ill-conceived. Winning is about the other: I win if my opponent suffers. In a garden, the plants compete for the available water, sunlight, and nutrients, yet we do not measure the success of one plant by the failure of the plants around it. We measure it in its own terms: its size, the number, size, and flavor of its fruit, the lushness of its foliage, the grace of its shape and color.

In aikido and some other martial arts, there are practices called jiyuwaza and randori, in which one might be faced with many different attackers at once, or by a series of attackers all using different technique - strikes, kicks, grabs. Done well, the defense is astonishing, lovely, and never twice the same, the attackers pinwheeling through space, falling in heaps, or slamming into the mat. Yet throwing the attacker is not the goal. Some attackers are simply bypassed, or deftly waltzed into the path of another attacker. The goal - the point of the exercise - is for the defender to stay on her feet, able to move, in charge of her space. Success is defined not by the defeat of the attacker, but by the continued freedom and potency of the defender.

The reason that dominance, "winning," does not work is simple: It is aimed at the wrong target. Whatever the change that is headed our way, whoever the "attacker," what we truly have to struggle with is ourselves. James Collins and Jerry Porras of Stanford University, found this to be true in their study of 18 "visionary" companies that were experts in survival (such as Boeing, Disney, and Sony). Arie de Geus and the Shell Global Planning Group found it to be true in their studies of the world's longest-lived companies: The organizations that survive and thrive over a long period of time do not ask themselves, "How can I beat the competition?" They ask themselves, "How can I beat the completion? They ask

Each of these organizations, at crucial times in their histories, took on overwhelming tasks (Collins and Porras call them "BHAGs," or "big hairy audacious goals") - such as Sony deciding to move into tile American market, or Motorola pushing for "Six-Sigma" levels of quality. Often, as for Walt Disney creating Snow White or building, Disneyland, or Boeing when it built the 707, and again when it built the these goals were outrageous in size, true "bet the company" gambles. Each of these were in response to changes in their environments - the maturing of animation, for instance, or advances in jet engine and aircraft construction technologies. But they went far beyond mere reactions. And they had little to do with what the other guy was doing. In many cases, no one else was doing anything like it.

By taking on these BHAGs, they captured the imagination and energy of everyone in their organization, and were able to make extraordinary efforts. But there is irony here, as well: By focusing on their own capacities to create something new, rather than focusing on their competition, they surged ahead of the competition and gained positions as market leaders that lasted for decades.

Those who are driven by competition are always in reaction. They are never ahead of the pack. In martial arts, the defender succeeds by deciding in the ace of the battle, its direction, and who she will take on next. The defender paradoxically, has all the freedom, because she is responding to the situation, while the attackers can only react to her. In health care, an organization that can make swift changes in a turbulent environment sets the pace for others in their market, forcing them into changes that are reactive, often ill-conceived, and made without proper foundation.

Using the energy of change

Success in dealing with change is not about refusing to let it affect you, or simply accepting it, or defeating it. Success in dealing with change is about profiting from it, about using the energy that it brings into your life to challenge yourself, to become larger, deeper, more lush, more fruitful, more useful to those around you - as Disney used the Baby Boom, as Boeing used new technologies, as Columbia/HCA has used increased cost pressures, the disintegration of other for-profit chains, and the heavy debt load of not-for-profits - each of these acted in the midst of powerful, chaotic, shifting forces of change. But they did not merely react to change, they danced with it.

The key thing to remember when dancing with a gorilla is this: You don't stop when you get tired. You stop when the gorilla gets tired.

And the gorilla has more energy than you do. Try to run away, and the gorilla will catch you. Hold on tightly and artfully, and you can make the gorilla do all the work. On the martial arts mat, after a well-done randori, the attackers are exhausted, puffing, and sweating. The defender is calm and centered. She has used the manic energy of her attackers, and very little of her own.

So, faced with changes beyond our control (a shifting market for our services, unprecedented demands for cost reductions, expensive new technologies, a sudden change in governance - or a divorce, or the loss of a job) the goal is not merely to survive, but to thrive, using the very energy that the change brings to us.

As the martial arts saying has it, "The hit is a gift."

Two friends, Rick Foster and Greg Hicks, are deep in a research project on happiness. In interviewing scores of truly happy people, there was one factor that they had in common - not wealth, health, or diet, not youth or age, not being married or single, not being religious, or educated. It was the ability to transmute the changes in their environment, even the evil and difficult cult changes, into power, into positive, useful energy. The people they interviewed had no more luck than anyone else. Some had suffered the death of children, or disfiguring diseases. Some even faced an early death from terminal illness. All were able, over time, to find good for themselves in these evil events. Is this easy, fun, and educational? No, it is unbelievably difficult. And it is counter-intuitive to an extraordinary degree. It can seem like a crazy response to news of a contract falling through, or a diagnosis of heart disease, to say to yourself, "What can I gain from this? How can the loss make our organization stronger? How can I use the power of heart disease to change my life for the better?" Yet, at some point, after the disbelief, the anger, the fear, this becomes the only sane option, the only one that works. The nurses, strike leads you to rebuild relationships within the organization, the heart disease leads you to a better diet, toward rethinking your priorities, evaluating your life. If there were any easier way, we'd take it.

Joe Flower is the Principal of Be Change Project in Larkspur, California. He has written about change in health care for over a decade. Author of hundreds of articles, be is a contributing editor for the Healthcare Forum Journal and New Scientist, a system host of The Well Computer Conference, and a faculty, member of HealthOnline. The Change Projects Web site (www.well.com/~bbear) has been featured as a resource by PC Week and the Los Angeles Times.

The four quadrants of change

What's the best response to change? That depends on your relationship to the change - to a great extent, on the power balance. How much power does this change have to affect you or your organization or family? How much power do you have to control it or shift its direction? The answer to those two questions will give us one lens through which we can look at change.

We are not vulnerable to changes in the first two quadrants. They have little power to effect us. How we respond to them depends on how much power we have over them.

Quadrant I - Irrelevance: Here we find matters which don't have any true effect on us, and over which we have little power. I have plenty of opinions about the Bosnia situation, private militias, and the proper raising of twins, but unless I make one of these things my business (by joining an advocacy group or adopting twins), my opinions don't mean much. Yet, like many people, I can spend a surprising amount of energy on matters that belong in Quadrant I.

The goal for Quadrant I is simply to recognize the matters that properly belong here as the energy sinks that they are - and to scan for matters that could become newly relevant, such as a technological change that may hit the market next year, or pending health care reform legislation.

Quadrant II - Stewardship: We have more power over those changes than they have over us. Changes that deal with children, subordinates, and employees, for instance, often fall in this category. Too often, it feels like we can safely give changes in these unequal relationships only minimal attention. But here, unlike in Quadrant I, we do have a relationship, and everything with which we have a relationship has reciprocal power over us. The power of unequal relationships can be deceptive - and the more unequal they are, the more deceptive they can be. When they suddenly reveal that we have less power over them than we thought, as in a strike or an adolescent rebellion, it is easy to respond with moral outrage, as if the foundations of all that is good and right had been overturned.

The goal for Quadrant II is two-fold: to honor our responsibility, and to give away some power. A subordinate who has no options and can make no choices is dangerously disconnected from the relationship, and can only express themselves through subversion and rebellion.

Quadrant III - Engagement: Some changes have enormous power over us, and we can't do much to effect them - a hurricane, new tax laws, a shift in reimbursement rules, changes in the populations mix of your service area.

Here again we have twin goals. The first: Don't get hurt. Train's coming, get off the track. Make the organizational changes you need to minimize your exposure, and make them rapidly, before you feel the full effects, not after.

The second goal: Discover what's in it for you. When you're on the track, the train is a deadly danger. Step a little to one side, it's a passing freight, and may be you'd like a free ride across town.

If I want to take that free ride, through, I have to stay close to the train. Simply running from difficult changes is rarely effective.

Quadrant IV - Leverage: Finally, there are the changes which can affect us - and which we can affect equally. This quadrant represents the "key change area," where we are most vulnerable, yet we also stand to gain the most.

Again, the first goal is: Get out of the way. The second: Search for the point of maximum leverage, where you can shift the momentum of the change in a direction that you would like it to go.