change management

Do you suffer from mill-mindedness?

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The Mill astride the river was the town’s heart. Life blood pumped through it in surges of steam, blasts of the shift-change whistle, toings and froings of boxcars and hoppers on the rail spur, shift workers parading in and parading out. Tied up the traffic light? A mill shift was entering or leaving. A man asking credit at the grocery? The Mill cut back hours. New houses going up on the North side? Output and sales are up. Like peasant shacks against a castle wall, the whole town leaned on The Mill, and drew its sustenance from it. Imagine the town without The Mill? You cannot.

You must try to imagine the town without The Mill.

Small towns exist because of a mill or rail depot, a mine, a factory, a college, a hospital, something central that informs, shapes, sustains a community. But America’s ghost towns are often mill or mine towns that lost their mainstays. They didn’t think past The Mill.

Too many companies and sectors have something just like this: a mill, a production line, a critical machine, a cash cow, that is everything. It occupies the front and center of the minds of stakeholders: owners, investors, leaders, and workers. Wall Street sees the firm with mill eyes. Lenders see it with mill eyes. The community sees the firm and itself it with mill eyes.

All of them want The Mill to be The Mill, to churn along, to make money and jobs and community. And all of them define their truths in reference to it. This is mill-mindedness and it can constrain thought and change.

Using foresight to fight mill-mindedness

Foresight can make the difference. Images of different futures are powerful for fighting mill-mindedness.

What is the company (or the town), after The Mill?

Good futures thinking brings a focus beyond what exists now. It can break down rigid mental framing. Without images of something different, The Mill will define everything, past, present, and future.

How to work past mill-mindedness:

Ask these questions of yourself or better, discuss them with colleagues:

  1. What is our mill—that central thing or process that we allow to define us?
  2. Does that thing or process have a secure future?
  3. What would our organization become if we no longer had it?

Exploring the answers means confronting fundamental questions about how you frame and understand what your organization is all about. And answering them sets you up to consider “what’s next?”.

So build scenarios of your future without The Mill. Re-imagine the organization on a new basis. Those thought experiments allow you to see a future that doesn’t depend on this singular force or asset. It gets you past your mill-mindedness.

This blog has dozens of posts about “thinking differently” and on the power of foresight to work past stuck thinking. See: Thinking differently 

My practice as a futurist is centered on helping organizations break down barriers to thought and positive change. If your organization is so afflicted, maybe I can help. Let me know. Email me or call 202-271-0444.

Image: White Oak Cotton Mill, North Carolina, about 1914, with part of the mill village in the foreground. Public domain.

Inhibitors of foresight: Measurement and its pitfalls

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“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts.”   –William Bruce Cameron, sociologist (often attributed to Einstein)

We put a lot on measurement. We say, “what gets measured gets done.” What we can measure takes priority over the subjective and unmeasured.

We expect proof of progress that we can measure. Numbers that we can report or publish prove success. Statistical reports and year-on-year comparisons dominate leadership meetings.

But measurement weakens or fails when we’re dealing with the future. The future does not exist. There is no data. There is nothing we can touch or feel or measure.

Consider:

1. You can’t measure something that hasn’t happened
The results of a policy, program change, or new business model unfold over time. Any measurable outcome is in the future. We need to start the change process now, ahead of any chance at measured assessment. Yet often managers look for immediate quantitative evidence of success.

EXAMPLE: RotoRooter placed radio ads in my city in the 1970s. Then I didn’t hear any ads for 20+ years. But they had planted an idea (and a jingle) in my head that I used thirty years later when I had a blocked drain. RotoRooter could not have measured that payoff of the ads in the 1970s.

2. New or emerging things are hard to measure and our traditional measurement tools don’t fit
New things need new measures. But we don’t always know what those should be. Or, we may think the measurement tools we have fit when they don’t. Our measurement can give results that lead to wrong assessments and decisions.

EXAMPLE: When a consumer sees a promotional Instagram post, some kind of brand message has gotten across. But such social media marketing is new. What’s the value of that Instagram post to the brand owner? Is it the equal of a TV or print ad? We have numerical measurement tools for those: circulation, impressions, and reach. Do those work for social media messages? We don’t know enough to say. But instinct tells us to use the social media anyway. Our instinct is surely right.

3. We can’t measure some things that matter
Some of the most interesting changes in society and commerce are those that are hard or impossible to measure. Social phenomena, psychic outcomes, and culture and behavior change don’t fit our measurement tools.

EXAMPLE: In education, we don’t know all the payoffs from experiential learning, from collaboration, or from the application of new technology. Common standardized testing doesn’t directly assess those programs. The intellectual outcomes for a child won’t be clear or measured until years later. But mandated standardized testing has to correlate specific parts of curricula to measured assessments, today.

What to do about this

In strategic conversation, consider changes that you won’t be able to assess quantitatively. Allow strategic action that has weak or no measures. Get beyond the tyranny of measurement. To do otherwise is to hamstring organizations and limit positive change.

Image: G. Combe, Elements of Phrenology, 1824, via Wikimedia Commons.

5 stages of grief for people facing their future

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In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross identified five stages of grief and loss. To anyone trying to get people to face and accept change or the need to change, the stages ring familiar.

Experts in change management recognize this. They have used the stages in identify what happens when people face change. The stages make sense in foresight too. They are a lens for looking at how people cope with the future.

Don’t be a victim of change

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When you face change, your responses fall on a spectrum. Foresight makes sure you are in the right place.

Reactive — Watching and likely being blindsided by change, and only making a move when forced to do so. Often your action is expensive and not effective. You miss opportunities and risk failure and economic loss.

Responsive — Preparing for and responding to emerging, visible change. You gain agility for responding, and may get ahead of crises and seize opportunities.

Proactive — Anticipating and shaping change. You are ready for crises and sharp change. You can seize opportunities ahead of others.

Never be a victim of change. Anticipate and shape it. Foresight is decisive in making you ready.

7 Deadly sins of foresight

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1. Ignoring the future (You let today's concerns give you an excuse to not focus on the future) [See: Keep an eye on the future while righting the ship].

2. Shortsightedness (You only think a few years into the future) [See: The foresight gap: what too many organizations get wrong]

3. Mistaking the present for the future (You mistake fixing things and catching up with today for being future-focused) [See: If you're only keeping up you're probably going backwards]

4. Narrowness (You fail to realize your future will be shaped by a much larger one which you need to understand) [See: Foresight illustrated: choosing how broad a view to take while exploring the future]

5. All else held equal (You let your attention focus on just one change, and assume everything else stays the same) [A solution is to use scenarios– fleshed out views of the future — to make sure you explore how multiple changes will unfold. See: Why we need scenarios to be ready for the future] 

6. Lack of vision (You have not thought through nor communicated the future you want or expect) [See: You can't be what you can't see]

7. Deafness (You don't listen to others, or pay attention to signals of change) [See: Talk to the frog]

For more on pitfalls and "deadly sins" for foresight see: 13 mistakes you make when exploring the future

For good habits in foresight that can fight these sins, see:  27 habits of highly effective futurists

Image: detail from Hieronymus Bosch, The seven deadly sins and the four last things, circa 1500. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Public domain.

Futurist as Missionary, Salesperson, Politician, Counselor

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2429091134_b829eb0d2c_mUltimately, your efforts around foresight–for their relevance, for their impact, for the willingness of your stakeholders to engage and get behind them, come down to agency*. How much room for action, maneuver, and strategy do you have or can you have?

Your degree of agency will shape expectations that you or the team you work with will take on a smaller or larger scope of change. To build agency, you probably have to take up new roles.

Consider the Low Hanging Fruit model I wrote about earlier. Most players have a little bit of maneuver, and some have a  lot. The low-hanging fruit, those actions that don’t imply big spending, revolutionary change in the organization’s operations and systems, and, to put it simply, don’t require much permission, those are easy, doable–middle level executives, or even an individual, may have the authority (agency) to take positive action.

But the levels considered more serious–big-systems change–require a lot more stakeholders to be on board: the boss, customers, regulators, the CFO, board members, etc. Your or a small team you assemble to explore change cannot act alone. Your agency is insufficient.

And in foresight, nearly always, you will discover a wider arena for action, or bigger strategic moves that make sense. In my work, it’s routine for executives to find, as we work on the future together, that they need more permission, more buy-in, more access, maybe more money than they expected. Scratching the surface of change reveals far more that needs reconsideration. The small question becomes a big question.

You may lack the agency to take the issues and changes you discover on, and you will need to build further capacity to orchestrate change. That means playing new roles you may not be used to.

New roles you’ll play: Missionary, Salesperson, Politician, Counselor 

Making the case for change with rationales, data, explanations, convincing arguments. If the future state you anticipate is to be understood and believed in, you will need to make it so. This means you are a missionary.

Getting buy-in from the executive-level. They may need to have “been there” to truly see the need for the strategy, so you will need to bring them into the conversation, give them rationales. This demands you be a salesperson.

Getting buy-in from the rank and file. This next wave of change will benefit from far more people being on board, if not in the decisionmaking, then in the rationales for the changes. Your “big system” changes will affect far more people. And change is scary, mysterious until explained. This may mean you are a politician.

An ability to surprise people without being rejected. You can’t usually go into a fresh look at your future without encountering surprises. In fact, if you don’t you are probably not being effective. Your surprises will probably be even more unexpected for your constituents. For this you will need to soothe fears, you’ll be a counselor.

So look for how you need to build agency, and consider what roles you are stepping into. It will make a difference to your success, and break down some of your frustrations as you confront the need for change.

Image: Mariano Kamp, via Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution License

*I define agency here as: the capacity for exerting power or control in order to change something.

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