The Change Challenge

Adversity is something we are all exposed to. Every time something unexpected happens, our world turns to pieces and we face adversity. But there are ways to handle it and it will make you even more competitive if you master the game

Most people react negatively to change. At the same time – change is the most important strategic tool you got to stay competitive in the marketplace. The number of changes that we are exposed to are dramatically increasing. In other words; to enable change is the most important challenge for leaders to address.

You may improve the way people react to change. The worst thing to happen is to get caught by surprise. Diving into something that looks very much like a depression, it could take months before a person surfaces from such an experience. For a whole organization it could take years to recover. The receipt is to make people mentally prepared for change. This you can do by reviewing different future scenarios and letting people discuss possible outcomes.

However, change will in many situations be regarded as a threat. How people react to such adversity is also a subject to address. It’s possible to measure your Adversity Response Profile™ by taking a test. Just by becoming aware of how to investigate and control your reaction, you may improve yourself with a measure of 25%. Think of that when you calculate hidden cost related to change.

PhD Mats Lindgren has documented in his paper “Strategies and Performance in Raplex Environment” that if you are able to double your strategic responsiveness, you’re about to increase your profit / growth with up to 70%. To enable this improvement you need to make people mentally prepared for change and improve their Adversity Quotient (AQ)

You have definitely experienced it your self. A lot of effort has been made to make change happen, and then, just a few weeks later, the organization is back in old tracks. Something disturbed your change process and pushed your colleagues back into old habits. Why?

It seems that the only way to make change happen is to make sure that people see their tasks in a bigger picture. That they can relate their actions to “the whole”. Only then will people stay in the new tracks and continue the change; because they see why from the big picture. This is essential for every change process and one of the major reasons why we claim that strategic issues must be addressed from a top view and given a systemic approach.

Often we have great difficulty seeing what really happens around us. This is due to the fact that our brain is trained to observe what already is known to us. Jeff Hawkins – the author of the book On Intelligence -

On Intelligence

explains this in an excellent way. The book introduces a new way of thinking about the brain. It explains how the brain performs a sort of pattern recognition of the signals it gets from our senses. When it recognizes a well known pattern, it knows how to handle it, and we get this though “oh yes, that’s what it is!”. When something strange or unknown happens, the brain will need more focus and brain capacity to handle the information. If it doesn’t mach any previous patter, it may be “forgotten” if we are not consciously taking care of it.
In the book Presence, Peter Senge and his co-writers mention a specific case that exemplifies this perfectly well;

In the early 1980s, executives from U.S. auto companies started making regular trips to Japan to find out why the Japanese automakers were outperforming their U.S. counterparts. Speaking with one Detroit executive after such a visit, Peter (Senge) could see that the executive hadn’t been impressed by the competition. “They didn’t show us real plants,” the Detroit executive said. “Why do you say that?” Peter asked. “Because there were no inventories. I’ve seen plenty of assembly facilities in my life, and these were not real plants. They’d been staged for our tour.” Within a few years, it became painfully obvious how wrong this assessment was. These managers had been exposed to a radically different type of “just-in-time” production system, and they were not prepared to see what they were being exposed to.
Do you remember the days when the value of a company was based on its assets? Those days are fare gone.