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Change vitality: How to lead for continual transformation

DEBORAH ROWLAND

Twenty years ago, I launched what has now become a regular cycle of empirical research into what it takes to lead big complex change well. The initial research inquiry, Is Change Changing? carried two questions. On the cusp of the new millennium and dawn of a digital, globally interconnected age, was the nature of change itself — and how to lead it — changing? But more than that, by simply inserting a comma between the two words, ‘change’ and ‘changing,’ could we replace the notion of change as a singular event with its recognition as a continual state of being?

Perpetual transformation is no new concept. It was 2500 years ago that Greek philosopher Heraclitus notably proclaimed, “nothing endures but change.”¹⁰⁴ But fast-forward to two decades ago and what fueled my initial research were management thinkers such as Pascale¹⁰⁵ and Senge¹⁰⁶ placing the notion of change as a constant state in the forefront of a leader’s mind. And today, undoubtedly amplified by 18 months of ducking and diving the uncertain waves of COVID-19, perpetual transformation is a deeply lived reality. The question stands before us — have our leadership practices and approach to change caught up with this dawning reality?

In this article, I share a holistic framework, Change Vitality,¹⁰⁷ that I and my colleagues have created to guide leaders through the navigation of constant change. Grounded in now four rounds of research over two decades, Change Vitality stands on the shoulders of hundreds of leaders across all continents, industries and sectors who have generously given their time to participate in in-depth behavioral event interviews that we rigorously code for what leads to success in a continually changing world. I hope the framework guides you too.

Introducing Change Vitality

Perpetual transformation calls for a distinct new way to lead change. One that replaces notions of launching time-bound, system-wide, centrally controlled ‘change programs’ with the subtler realization that ongoing change is an inherent feature of all living systems¹⁰⁸ — and that if we could only understand how change naturally occurs, we could lead it with less busy effort and more easeful impact — a distinction I call the difference between ‘action’ and ‘movement.’¹⁰⁹

A key tenet, therefore, of Change Vitality is that you only do what is necessary (vital). Change is also not something you periodically bring to a system, separate to its task, but an ongoing phenomenon you inherently cultivate — continually pausing (stillness) in the flow of work to scan your team, organization and wider context for the ripe issues that most need attention, and in these spots targeting minimally invasive experiments that have enduring, energetic, whole system impact (movement).¹¹⁰

As such, I liken Change Vitality to ‘corporate acupuncture’ — as distinct from ‘corporate surgery.’ Witness how with one client I worked with, the simple and singular act of training meeting observers to continually spot and name in-the-moment decision-making routines sped up cultural change in a way their elaborate “new ways of working” programs and governance redesigns could never have achieved.

Change Vitality therefore requires you to go to the source of the system’s routines and regularly hold that up to attention (a bit like doing a daily body scan for your physical well-being).¹¹¹ In the above example the inner code was “we cannot make a collective decision until everyone is happy with the decision so we will spend as much time as we need trying to accommodate everyone to a compromise.” When the pleasing culture got named, change could occur.

So, how to cultivate this ongoing, system-shifting Change Vitality? While more effortless, it is not without effort!

The Still Moving Change Vitality Framework

Our research has revealed four essential, richly interdependent factors that, together, enable leaders to cultivate successful Change Vitality:

• Inner Capacities: the quality of your inner state as a leader, how people experience your being
• External Practices: the effectiveness of your outer behavior, what people will see you doing
• Change Approach: how you choose overall to design and implement change across the system you lead
• Ordering Forces: how you attend to the deeper systemic health of your organization that governs how your change will either flow or get stuck.

It’s a lot to pay attention to — hardly surprising that most change efforts fail.¹¹² But when you do take this ‘how’ of change seriously, you have a far higher chance of success. Given the high price of change and the toll it takes on people’s time, energy and lives, set alongside the prize it can bring to markets, societies, livelihoods — indeed our very planet’s survival — I feel this is an effort worth taking.

Still Moving Change Vitality Cone

© Still Moving Consultancy Ltd

We visualize the four Change Vitality factors as a flow of energy that rises upward through a spinning cone. Perpetual change can feel like this — a bit wobbly, risky, hard to stay in balance. And we all know that the essence of the cone’s ability to move at pace, yet remain stable, rests on how securely it pivots on the ground. The Inner Capacities are at the bottom of the cone for a reason. The startling, primary message from our research is this:¹¹³

Your entire ability to lead whole systems through perpetual change rests on how well you cultivate your inner state, your ability to tune into and regulate your mental and emotional response to experience.

Change Vitality starts in the quality of your being

I never forget the time when I was an executive leading big change and I decided to switch from trying to change the team and process that I was leading, and in its place work on my inner state. It would have been very expensive and time-consuming to change the team and the process, but by flipping my inner state from judgment, impatience and a need to be seen as perfect to curiosity, stillness and an expansive humility — the quality of people’s engagement and the speed of the change shifted perceptibly. My inner state altered the outer world.

We cannot always directly control the external world of perpetual motion, as hard as we might try. But we do have the power and freedom to change how we respond to it, and in so doing, get a different world. I danced for joy when my research proved Frankl’s¹¹⁴ wisdom applicable to leading change. The Inner Capacities mediated all other variables. What a pivot your inner world is.

Sounds easy, but our ego can get in the way. To override our neural patterning, our research revealed four Inner Capacities that require your continual attention. Scan this ‘to be list’ — how well do you intentionally cultivate your quality of being?

• Staying Present: the awareness and wisdom that arises from paying intentional nonjudgmental attention to what’s here, now, for you — your moods, thoughts, impulses — without mental distraction or wishing for things to be otherwise. There is so much rich data available to us in the present moment — what information does it hold? You cannot change what you don’t notice.
• Curious and Intentional Responding: the capacity to slow down the period between what you experience and how you respond, staying open and curious to what arises, aware of your choices and intention in how to respond. Switching from autopilot reactivity to creative response shifts the system around you — what fresh leadership mindset can I bring here? Pause permits perspective.
• Tuning into the System: when you are present to the moment and free of personal reactivity, you can now more clearly see the deeper dynamics of the system around you, free of your story and projection. This heightened perception capacity into the field that underlies what you see was paramount for successful change leaders. Can you put your finger on what underpins reality and might require transforming?
• Acknowledging the Whole: the capacity to give everything that happens a place and a purpose, and in particular, to welcome difficulty and disturbance as a helpful resource for renewal. It’s tempting to push away discomfort in change, but what gets excluded only gets bigger. Can you enlarge your leadership and help others integrate all that is encountered, seeing each and every experience as helpful?

Notice, choose, perceive and integrate — your four inner state resources for a world of perpetual motion, and the basis for all else that matters in leading change well.

Perpetual change requires an equal balance of structure and chaos

The Inner Capacities enable you to be calm, resourceful, and systemically alert — a fundamental being quality. They enable you to up your game in what you then need to do to lead change well. The four External Practices are highly correlated to leading successful change, and when combined enable you to keep a system in continual, creative motion. Drawing from the science of ‘complex adaptive systems,’¹¹⁵ that shows us how such continual innovation holds an equal balance of structure and chaos, the four practices span two axes of stability and disruption.

Stabilizing practices

• Attractor: the skill that creates a magnetic, guiding and aligning energy by building a sense of shared purpose and meaning for the change. Can tune into patterns and from these cocreate a compelling narrative that acts as a continual North Star, inspiring others to move into new directions. How are you fueling the change story?
• Container: can channel the inevitable anxiety of change into constructive energy by staying nonanxious, affirming, and clear about expectations and boundaries — what has to be done and how. Makes it psychologically safe for people to say/do risky things, builds ownership, and puts in place networks that support people through change. How are you creating secure spaces for movement?

Disrupting practices

• Edge and Tension: can shift a system toward a new potential by speaking straight and candidly about reality, ruthlessly focusing only on what matters, spotting and challenging unhelpful assumptions and behaviors, and staying constant, not withdrawing from difficulty, when the going gets tough. Can you get comfortable with amplifying disturbance?
• Transforming Space: makes change happen in the here-and-now by creating and making interventions that live (not just talk about) the desired change. This could be changing the nature of a conversation to more fully enact what is being espoused, designing meetings that disrupt routines and enable transforming encounters, or putting together novel mixes of people. Are you being the change you want to see?

The top five percentile of change leaders in our research were able to master all four practices, combining them into powerful, ‘multi-hit’ interventions. Do you notice your leadership in them? How well do you put them together, do you lean toward some more than others? Are you more of a stabilizer or a disrupter? Putting all four practices together becomes easier once you have mastered the Inner Capacities. Can you start to see the connections between the quality of your ‘being’ and the skill of your ‘doing’? For example, it is very hard to make a Transforming Space intervention if you are not Staying Present.

These first two Change Vitality factors are about your personal leadership skill and are paramount. Indeed, our research showed that 52% of the variance between success and failure in high magnitude change is attributed to the quality of a leader’s inner state and outer action. But there are two additional Change Vitality factors that require your attention, which relate to how well you create the wider, systemic capacity for change. The next factor up the Change Vitality cone is your choice of Change Approach.

Now is the time for an emergence

A Change Approach is the overall way in which you design and implement change. Too often we focus solely on the what of a change — for example, do we need to restructure, is a cultural change required? And we fail to pay attention to the how of the change, that is, the process through which the restructuring will occur, or the cultural change implemented. Yet, our research has shown that your choice of change approach is fateful — it will fundamentally determine where you end up.

One approach in particular — emergent change — was highly correlated with success in ongoing, rapidly changing dynamic contexts. In today’s world, heavily engineered top-down approaches to change that assume a fixed destination simply do not work. Here is how we have taken the principles of emergence from complex adaptive systems and applied them to how you approach organizational change:¹¹⁶

• Have a loose direction and set of hard rules. In perpetual change, you need to give up predetermined visions and control over end points and instead articulate the biggest question that needs answering, or simply set an overall change intention. Then craft some statements of the micro-level behaviors that will govern the pattern of the overall entity — and take it from there. One client we worked with on becoming more ‘agile’ gave up rolling out agility training programs and instead issued several simple, expected behavioral statements such as “stop when it is good enough,” “plan in weeks, not months,” “focus on high impact within your control.” The understanding and enactment of these few hard rules alone fundamentally shifted the entity’s culture and performance and had a catalytic impact on its wider context.
• Start with the ripe issues. Don’t try to roll out change everywhere, but (by tuning into the system) focus on the hot spots most requiring attention and target where you go. Given that the hot spots can change unpredictably, continually ask: where does the focus need to be now?
• Work now and next. When you design for emergent change, you do not plan or predict for the long term but instead test and iterate partially formed solutions step by step — prototyping your way to the future. In rapidly changing contexts, that is the only sensible thing to do, focusing on what is needed and critical now, and from there see what is needed next.
• Use volunteers and informal networks. Rapid and creative change happens when you bring together lateral networks of communities passionate about getting involved with the change. Innovation most often happens at the periphery, not center of a system, where diverse contexts are encountered. Memorably, when I was working in the healthcare sector, it was the hospital porters trolleying patients around the buildings that were most able to contribute to improved patient outcomes.
• Build skills in sensemaking and high-quality dialogue. When you work in the unfolding flow of emergence, you hold off premature judgment and cultivate moment-to-moment awareness, the approaching of experience with a watchful curiosity, and intervening to alter the flow of action when the time is right. Such penetrating noticing awareness is a high skill indeed. Make sure you focus on how to change how conversations happen.
• At all times, cultivate the emergent conditions of connectivity, rapid feedback loops and diversity. While emergent change cannot be controlled, it will flourish naturally if you build into your change high quality interaction spaces among key players and teams, an absolute insistence on open, transparent and rapid information sharing, and the gathering together of a rich cross-section of the whole system.

Harnessing the systemic undercurrents that govern perpetual flow

And so, we arrive at the fourth and final Change Vitality factor: the Ordering Forces. Unlike the first three, the Ordering Forces hold an invariant quality, they are constantly present in any human system.¹¹⁷ They are not skills to be cultivated or approaches to be brought, but deep hidden forces that govern all collective life. And a bit like the wind, they can be keenly felt while never ‘seen.’ Smart change leaders act as more than windsocks though. They not only pick up but harness these Ordering Forces, which, if left unattended, will always exert some kind of ‘drag’ on the change, making things seem like a lot more effort than they need to be.

The four systemic forces are:

• Time: all life is governed by time — the residual impact of unalterable past events, a system’s creation myth, the positive anticipation of or fear for future events and scenarios. All exert a powerful gravitational pull on the present. Good change leaders recognize we cannot move freely into new futures until all important past elements have been seen — even if that creates felt guilt and shame. In addition to exploring a system’s history, good change leaders tune into how the anticipated future is showing up in the present. Helping their system face into the emerging future by using techniques such as scenario planning is one powerful way to help a system move within ever-changing times.
• Belonging: we all have a basic need to belong in a place where we can matter and feel secure, united within tacitly recognized webs of meaning — for example a team, department, nation, belief system, profession. In times of change, rituals and loyalties get disrupted and belonging can feel threatened. Effective leaders tune into these dynamics and pay attention to whether and how transition supports or threatens belonging.
• Place: any human system is an interconnected set of role relationships and competing hierarchies (is age or level more important here?) that are often disturbed in change — especially in restructurings. In ongoing change, lines of authority and accountability are fluid and might constantly shift and therefore require a leader’s close attention. When place is unattended, people can be left feeling insecure and uncertain about their agency.
• Exchange: the universe is a vast system of exchange, every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity. Good leaders tune into the ‘give and the get’ in any change where there will always be both beneficiaries and those who have to bear the price. By simply acknowledging any exchange imbalance (we once invited a team to stand in a line according to who had most to gain and most to lose) leaders can enable change to flow with greater ease.

Cultivating your inner state, paying attention to your outer action, taking care of how you design the change, and harnessing what governs a system’s flow. Four potent and interconnected skill sets for leading in perpetual transformation. I wish you great Change Vitality in your future path.

About the author

Deborah Rowland is a pioneer thinker, practitioner, author and speaker in leading change. She has personally led change in major global organizations including Shell, Gucci Group, BBC Worldwide and PepsiCo, holding both Group HR and VP of Organizational and Management Development roles. Deborah is also the founder of consulting firm Still Moving which has pioneered research in the change field, and acts as change coach to the executive boards of major corporations. Her latest book, The Still Moving Field Guide: Change Vitality at Your Fingertips (Wiley, 2020) is based on her groundbreaking research into the realities of leading change.

Footnotes

104   https://iperceptive.com/authors/heraclitus_quotes.html

105   Surfing the Edge of Chaos, Pascale, R. (Currency, 2001)

106   The Dance of Change, Senge, P. et al (Nicholas Brealey, 1999)

107   The Still Moving Field Guide: Change Vitality at Your Fingertips, Rowland, D. (Wiley 2020)

108   Leadership and the New Science, Wheatley, M. (Read How You Want, 2012)

109   https://iperceptive.com/authors/heraclitus_quotes.html is this the right link?

110   Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change, Rowland, D. (Wiley 2018)

111   https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2019/02/07/lead-like-an-anthropologist-and-lead- change-well/

112   https://www.forbes.com/sites/sallypercy/2019/03/13/why-do-change-programs- fail/?sh=63755a342e48

113   https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2017/01/11/change-starts-with-a-leaders-ability- to-look-inward/

114   Man’s Search For Meaning, Frankl, V (Rider, 2004)

115   https://wiki.santafe.edu/images/5/53/Lansing2003.pdf

116   https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/emergence-a-unifying-theme-for-21st- century-science-4324ac0f951e

117   https://www.leadershipcentre.org.uk/artofchangemaking/theory/four-orders-and- constellations/