There seems to be a debate, or at least a difference in opinion, about the difficulty or ease of change. Some view change as hard and difficult and taking a long time and others view it as easy, as something that can occur quickly. So what’s the reality? Does change take a long time and does it require lots of pain or is change easy and painless?
Well, of course, as with many things, it is both. It depends on the kind of change under consideration. For remedial or therapeutic change, change can be difficult and take a fairly long time. But for the coaching population where there are people wanting to change, change is not hard, or difficult, or painful.
Imagine you’re driving and suddenly you get a flat tyre. Not only that but you don’t have any tools in the car to take it off and putting the spare on. Can you imagine how hard it would be to try using only your fingers? It wouldn’t just be hard, it would simply be impossible.
But suppose you found a spanner… it would be hard, but do-able. Even better, suppose you found a tyre spanner hidden away under one of the seats? Now it starts to become easier, unless somebody at the garage thought it would be funny to see how tight he could put the nuts on! What if someone stopped and handed you a power wrench? You’d do it in second!
With each level of technology, the job gets more do-able, easier, and less problematic. The technology makes all the difference. The technology that’s designed to be applied to that particular event (e.g., changing a tyre) would completely transform the situation.
So it is with facilitating change in a person. How difficult is it? How painful? How do-able?
With human beings, there are levels of change. We can change a mind, a heart, a habit, an emotion, an action or behaviour, talk, lifestyle, perceptual filters, frames, personality, culture. With humans, there is also linear change as well as systemic change. In linear change, you work on changing each piece, one at a time, each one step by step. In systemic change, you find the leverage point whereby one small change can have effects that will reverberate throughout the system.
The challenge is to be able to recognise symptoms and to not get caught up in them. That’s what symptoms do; they call attention to themselves, they present themselves as “the problem.” But it’s a lie. Symptoms are not the problem. They are only a signal of an underlying problem, something that is wrong or out of alignment.
The harder stuff to change is the intangible things—culture, beliefs, communication style, working together, conflict resolution. At the first level, people are leaving the company, there’s poor staff retention, etc.
At the next level of the problem, we find something higher. The first intangible problem is but a symptom of something else. So we ask: “Why are they leaving?” “Why are they not staying?” “What’s going on that’s influencing these decisions?” “What is the problem with how people are being treated in the organisation that motivates them to make the decision to leave?”
If people are disengaged or bored, ultimately that is not the problem. There are higher problems. Perhaps it is the lack of meaningful challenges or lack of meaningfulness at work in general. If there is an effort to adapt to the current situation, then behaviours are adaptive attempts to find a solution.
So why is most change hard? Here’s some possible answers:
- People don’t understand the problem—the processes of change.
- People do not have effective tools for change.
- People do not have skills for applying the know-how to the situation.
- People do not have the right frames.
- People are not in the right states.
- People don’t have the right strategy for facilitating the change.
Obviously, change is a complex subject with many facets and dimensions. By working with a coach who knows how change works and has developed the skills to facilitate it, you can choose to make a change with the right tools in an efficient way.
Do you want to make change easy?
Co-Authored with Dr L. Michael Hall
