Connecting Dots 13 ◎⁃◎ Ending Change to Start Transition

Welcome to Connecting Dots where we explore the psychodynamics of digital innovation leadership to bridge academic research and real-world practice. Published by innovation leader, educator, investor and researcher @INSEAD Brett Macfarlane. Subscribe.

Acting to Avoid Reflecting

Staring at the sky it still doesn’t make sense. I’m in my North London backyard soaking up the privilege of outdoor space and sunshine. I’m eagerly trying not to start anything new. My typical response to a crisis is to start something. Just what is less important than the act doing something new, it helps me feel like I’m initiating the change rather than change happening to me. The action also helps me avoid reflecting on the deeper meaning and implications of the crisis itself.

Action and busyness are typical coping mechanisms when we don’t feel in control. It speaks to our deep ability to handle change. The core task of leadership, whether running a company or attempting innovation, is change. Yet change rarely goes beyond incremental improvements or keeping business as usual turning over. Change operates within the existing paradigm of a company, industry or society. The components of change are events, situations, results-orientated and relatively fast. The change paradigm ironically is why radical innovation typically fails, it’s too painful to go through the transition required. Currently, change is all around us, but something deeper is happening.

“Change is disturbing when it is done to us, exhilarating when it is done by us”

— Rosabeth M. Kanter

When Change Becomes Transition

What most of us are living through is transition and we are just starting to address it. Transition is radically different from change, beyond actions it’s an internal psychological reorientation as we adapt to external changes. Its components are experiential, psychological, procedural and relatively slow. To begin transition one counterintuitively starts with ending. One must let go of the old world before the new world is in sight. Moving into a neutral zone where you figure out just what is the new paradigm, product, organization, system, identity, etc.. The greatest challenge isn’t to progress forward, it’s to let go by putting your present in the past.

A courageous question for a leader to allow into the agenda is whether they are entering change or transition, both as an individual and as an organization. The mistake is to underthink and wait till we go back to normal. As is the delusion of overthinking that everything, literally everything, is different or unprecedented. Both extremes deny the reality at hand and the opportunity for a deeper reorientation. Transition is an emergent challenge and containing the anxiety of not knowing is an ongoing wrestling match. What can help to lead through the neutral zone of transition is to surface how deep is your organization’s tolerance for transition in the months ahead.

The Great Reawakening

We are in a sort of induced economic coma, functioning but impaired. When we reawaken, it will be an opportunity to revitalize innovation efforts to renew your staff around how you serve your customers. Beyond its tangible outputs, the transitional role of an innovation effort is to surface, recognize and metabolize the anxieties of grief, hope, disappointment or euphoria that sit under the surface of your colleagues. For some organizations with a high tolerance for evolution, this may be a radical moon shot. For those of lower tolerance, it’s simply addressing overdue but neglected iterative improvements. The mistake waiting to be made is denying the emotions and suppressing them by staying in the change paradigm of routine actions.

My hope is the great reawakening will lead to a more thoughtful approach to innovation. To inject oxygen into the 94% of executives who are dissatisfied with their innovation efforts. While also adding more holistic accountability to the innovations that do succeed to regain trust, integrity, sustainability and accessibility to the influential (mostly digital) product innovations of our time.

It can be a therapeutic and galvanizing experience to allow the unsaid to be said, to shed the less good parts of a business’ practices and elevate the better parts. Innovation initiatives can be a safe container to grieve for the old world that has left, so we can let go, while in parallel renewing optimism, enthusiasm and commitment through drafting the new reality for yourself and your organization.

Movements

I’m safely in London and well on my own path of transition. This topic is very personal at the moment. I have the privilege of choosing from many paths and have recently come through my neutral zone that lasted two years. I’ve begun a semi-sabbatical to focus my INSEAD research over the next six months. While taking on select innovation-related leadership and organization development initiatives. If I can help, as a program designer or facilitator, please do get in touch.

Thank you for your continued feedback and please share with me any innovation paradoxes or questions on your mind.

Stay safe,

- Brett

PS Please share this newsletter with one acquaintance or on LinkedIn to help grow the Connecting Dots community.

Source Material:

• McKinsey Innovation satisfaction - https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/how-we-help-clients/growth-and-innovation

• Bridges, W. (1986). Organizational Dynamics, 15(1), 24–33.

• Bridges, W. (1991). Managing Transitions

• Hirschhorn L., The Primary Risk. Human Relations, Vol 52(1), 1999

• 3rd ed., rev.; DSM–III–R; American Psychiatric Association, 1987 (logic distortions)

Connecting Dots 12 ◎⁃◎ Holding On to Reality

Welcome to Connecting Dots where interdisciplinary learning helps leaders innovate for the digital era. I’m Brett Macfarlane and this newsletter is a testbed for my INSEAD research into the behavioural and psychodynamic factors behind today’s innovation crisis and the coming revival.

Holding On to Reality - Leading Through Uncertainty

Leading in a crisis shares many similarities with leading innovation. In particular, acting with a large number of unknowns and unknowables in the face of emerging events and realities. It is why I study innovation leadership because it is the F1 of all leadership. Where envelopes are pushed and stakes are high. Leading innovation is a crucible for the highest tests of leadership.

Whether leading an organization, team, family or yourself everyone at the moment is outside their comfort zone. The typical playbooks have been deployed. We’re in uncharted territory. This is why for leaders amidst uncertainty information elaboration and group reflexivity aren’t just essential but in fact vital. The daily reassessment cycle of new knowns and new unknowns is exceptionally challenging when trying to maintain a firm grasp on reality.

Beyond Change - This is Transition

We can reasonably expect, based on the evidence from past quarantine situations, that day 10 will be especially hard for you and your team. It will be when one realizes this situation isn’t just change and is in fact a transition. The effects associated with trauma will be the strongest emotion. Leaders may start to sympathize with BP’s CEO Tony Hayward when he said “I’d like my life back” in the middle of the Deep Water crisis as the oil platform burned with no end in sight.

The point of information elaboration (adding to the group new knowledge) and group reflexivity (considering how this knowledge changes goals and tasks) is to maintain contact with reality. To minimize the inevitable creep of logic distortion such as denial, intellectualization and distancing. To decide what to do , when and to contain restless anxiety to “just do something.” This is a test of EQ over IQ.

EQ Superheros

It can be helpful in a crisis to look at the EQ (Emotional Quotient) factors associated with professionals in vital life and death functions. The evidence tells us the most important and significant EQ factors of Physicians/Surgeons, as well as other health care professionals, are Independence, Stress Tolerance, Empathy, Impulse Control and Flexibility.

It often won’t feel good and there is no shame to acknowledge it doesn’t. That containment of reality helps to metabolize the strong and conflicting emotions that the situational stress may trigger in your teams. While acknowledging and listening to the feelings as they might provide important signals to inform your decisions or regulate your decision quality over time. Trust your training, listen to your intuition and you can minimize being blinded by emotion.

Movements

In the coming months, I’ll continue to publish Connecting Dots. However, we can expect the tone and content to evolve with the context of how the crisis emerges. While there are already signals of changes in the innovation landscape it’s important we stay in the here and now.

I will also increase referencing of source material so you are reassured I am sharing perspective born from documented and researched evidence. If you have questions or doubts please don’t hesitate to write. Likewise, any leadership or innovation challenges you’re facing. I’m available to help.

Thank you for your feedback and please share with two leaders you think would appreciate this newsletter.

Stay safe,

- Brett

Source Material:

• The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence Samantha K Brooks, Rebecca K Webster, Louise E Smith, Lisa Woodland, Simon Wessely, Neil Greenberg, Gideon James Rubin

• Team reflexivity, development of shared task representations, and the use of distributed information in group decision making. van Ginkel, W., Tindale, R. S., & van Knippenberg, D. (2009). Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 13(4), 265–280

• The EQ Edge, Emotional Intelligence and Your Success Steven J. Stien, PH.D and Howard E. Book, M.D.

• 3rd ed., rev.; DSM–III–R; American Psychiatric Association, 1987 (logic distortions)