Change Fatigue

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts Peter Madison and Dave Sharrick. Uh here for another interesting conversation. What are we talking about today, Dave?

Well, uh, I was just gonna say you're full of energy. And what I wanted to talk about was change and change fatigue. That uh it's it's interesting as we talk about change and transformations, just how often people push back on with a kind of concern about change and that discussion of change fatigue or do we really need to do a change or whatever it might be.

And it's funny, isn't it, really? Because we we were talking about this just before we started recording, and that the we're always doing changes. There's always going to be more changes coming, too. That's all that that's just the nature of the work that we do. And uh this this idea of change fatigue largely comes from it being inflicted on you. It's that uh we're we're the victims of change rather than the ones who are helping look at this and drive it and come up with new ways of doing things.

So yeah, I I um there's a great video by Gary Hamill, and I don't know if this is his quote or a quote of somebody else, but he says that change itself has changed. And his I I think this is something that we're all used to, that realization that the pace of change around us is astronomical. It is very, very fast. And if you look at the products that we're using, the the services that we use, the opportunities that are out there, everything about it is changing all the time. So there's definitely change happening out there. And yet we don't complain too much about some of those changes. I mean, there are some people who still have an old 10-year-old mobile phone, but most of us have quite freely adopted smartphones and uh they are now attached to our wrist and we depend on them for many, many things, right? Most of the time there's not too much in the way of change fatigue there. We can use them well enough, we're happy enough to take them on board and make use of them. So, where does change fatigue come from?

And I I think it's when uh it's when we say, as I was describing that, we're we're told that we have to go through change, that we have to do something else. It's not something that we're driving or that we've come up with on our own. And we we see this a lot in the in the space of like, we're gonna do an agile transformation or a DevOps transformation with capital letters, and it's uh and it's always a disaster. Well, I at least I haven't seen one at any kind of scale that's ever been uh entirely successful and produced the outcomes that it was intended to, uh, and hasn't resulted in the more and more change being brought in, which is this where this idea of change fatigue then comes in, because you've you've inflicted this amassive amount of change on me, and now you're asking me to do yet something different because you didn't like the last set of change that you were doing. So yeah, it's just go away, leave me alone. I don't want to do any more.

Yeah, I mean I think that one is, and I there's a couple of things that I hear you talking about there, Peter. One is is the scale of the change. It's you know, the real org that all of a sudden I've got different teammates or I'm now reporting to a different line of business or whatever it might be, and yet in somehow my job is still sort of the same, but things have kind of been moved around and it's that big change. That's uncomfortable. It's not something that we want to go through without understanding why. And I think that's that next bit is that top-down, it's not clear what the benefits are. And I think uh on the other hand, when change is when the when the objective, the purpose or goal of the change is there, I think that can be, and we buy into it and understand the need to do that. I don't see the same sort of concern about the change. It's more about going on a journey. We're ready for it, we're up for it, and hopefully that makes a difference, right?

Right. I a lot of the time when I when I bring this up with organizations and when I'm talking to leaders, I bring up um David Rock's scarf model as a way of helping uh people understand why change is impacting them, why they they're seeing this. You know this model, the yeah, like the status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness? If you s and I and I bring it up in the sense of uh, especially when I'm coaching or mentoring somebody and they come to me with a I can't believe that I acted that way. And it's the well, have you thought about how what you're saying is impacting them and how it was interpreted? And if you look at it from their perspective, how are you impacting their their status, like their their relevant part of how their feeling of uh belonging, their uh their certainty, their like uh their ability to understand what's about to happen? Are you changing so much on them so fast that they they're now suddenly uncertain and they're gonna start resisting this and wanting to uh say, no, I'm not doing that? And uh are you giving are you removing their control? Are you taking away their autonomy? Are you stopping them from being able to feel like they're making their own decisions because you're you're removing that? Are you stopping them being able to uh do they not feel safe? Do they not feel like they're part of the community anymore? Uh and or do they feel like they're not being treated fairly? And if if what you're saying is impacting like two or three of these, then that's probably why you got the reaction you got. Yeah, and uh I find that's a very useful way of of helping people start to look at it from other people's perspective to consider what you're doing as you're changing.

Yeah, it's uh um it's so true that the I mean ultimately nowadays I think the work that we do is is actually tied to our well-being and our self, you know, the identity that we carry into a workplace. And we're emotionally tied to that in a way that I I don't know for sure, but but if you're you know more sort of less knowledge work-based work, maybe you're not as connected in that way. But and and I think that remembering about emotions and around how people feel and what connection they have with what's going on, and how we can provide people that space and autonomy and security about what's being done. And and this kind of speaks to um a trend, if you like, of big changes being associated with uh uh insecurity and with with losing or something, whether it's losing your job or losing a career path that was a promising career path and has now changed, or losing autonomy and control over what we're doing, then naturally that's going to lead us uh many of the people involved in that change, in fact, most of the people involved in that change, into pushing back and uh digging their heels in a bit just because they really aren't being thought of as the beneficiaries of that change.

We were talking uh a little bit before this recording as well about a another aspect of it where people are just too busy for change. And uh perhaps the the previous changes have meant that they feel like they've now got even more work than they had before, and they're being asked now to change yet again, which they feel like's going to pile even more work on top of them, uh, in addition to all of the extra work they took on from the last set of changes, which drives again another form of change fatigue, and that uh I'm being asked to do more and more and more, and you're not giving me anything to to help me uh uh ensure that I can be successful.

I think there's there's another piece to that, which is um almost I'm thinking of this as the futility of change. And maybe I should rephrase that to say it's the futility of large changes. Uh when we're talking to organizations and we're trying to explain the sort of um the cyclicity of of change, the the kind of cadence that these big changes come through on. And I think we're most of us are in the in the industry, if you like, are familiar with the idea that these changes were several years, two, three, four years cycles. And then there would be a change in leadership, change in strategic direction, and more change coming down the pipeline. What I find really intriguing nowadays is those that cadence is so short now. You're it's not unusual. We certainly see that with many of the people that we work with, the organizations we work with, where that cadence of big organizational change initiatives, whatever they are called, are happening like one to two a year now. So that and and and at least my observation, if you like, of that is it's because those changes don't necessarily work. You do a big change in a very rapid, dynamic, uncertain environment, you create, it's a bit like throwing a huge rock into a pond. You create a lot of disruption, and when you're left, you've got muddy water, you're still in the same boat, if you like, and you've not been able to so you go and grab another rock and you throw that in. You grab another rock and you throw that in. Whereas actually, in those uncertain, rapidly moving environments, small steps are more likely to lead to a next obvious small step, which is more likely to lead to a next obvious small step.

And I think that brings us to that point exactly that uh small incremental changes. So in instead of in some ways, instead of having less change, it's it's have fewer massive, large, disruptive rocks getting thrown in, and instead just create smaller ripples, like drop in some gravel, if you will, in the in that analogy of uh we want lots of small changes. We want to, we've got to get used to change because we know we have a lot of things to change. So we want to be able to introduce it incrementally. We want to have uh lots of small changes, and as we change, we want to learn so that we can decide what is the next small change that we want to try so we can incrementally grow and continually improve.

Yeah, I I'm it's uh it's in lean, I think they differentiate between Kaizen, which is that continuous improvement model of small changes all the time, and Kaikaku, which is the much bigger sort of impactful step change, if you like. And I think there are needs for both. It's not that you use one, not the other, or anything like that, in as is true in many cases, they're not the extremes, you need to get the balance right. However, I think the um the reality is now that the bigger changes are happening more frequently because they're not working, because things around us are changing really quickly. Maybe the only toolkit I have is launch a big change initiative, and that doesn't really it it kind of you can imagine it sets it's the fight or flight response in many of the people going through it, especially if it's happening that frequently. And the results aren't being seen. You lose confidence in the viability of those changes.

Yes, yeah, and we see it again and again, especially in the larger organizations.

Now, what do you do instead of going into an organization and saying, let's go do a big transformation? What is it that you're going to encourage them to do to take advantage of, or at least to avoid some of the pitfalls we've been talking about?

So for me, uh the first things I do is I start helping them see what is it that they're doing today? What how are things currently being done so they can see where are the opportunities to start to make some small changes and some experiments that can start to free up some of the time that's needed to start to accelerate that process. So it's the the small incremental changes, introducing them, identifying where they are. If we've got if we I if we start to map out processes, start to look at things and see that well, there's opportunities here to make uh a small change. Let's let's experiment with um a different way of creating environments. Let's look and see if we can find a place we can eliminate some of those handoffs, which will free up some time within areas to maybe focus and create some more value in other places. So that because that is to address the earlier concern that around where people say, Well, we're too busy, but we can't stop doing any of the things we're currently doing. So that we've we need to find ways of um creating space, uh, and because that's kind of that always seems to be one of the first things that we need is we need we need the space to think. And very often, uh, if if people aren't willing to say, okay, we're gonna stop something that we're doing, uh which can be a difficult conversation. Um, sometimes people don't feel like they can, they're either not empowered or they don't uh necessarily feel that it's it's safe for them to do so. And so they want uh and they need some form of permission to be able to take that step back, finding ways to help them create that space so that they can begin to run experiments, begin to learn, begin to look at different ways of doing things, look at how do we improve the system itself and focus there, then that's uh that's typically the kind of where I would focus.

I everything that you've said, I'm uh as you can imagine, of course, a huge fan of. We do incremental change nearly everywhere we go and we look for those um opportunities. I think if I kind of went back to the beginning of that, a conversation that I like to have early on is the idea of creating a culture with a habit of change rather than creating a culture with an expectation of big announced change projects. And the the the reason that I'm looking at that is just to go back to that quote, change itself has changed. So in order for us to navigate the waters that we're in, we have to always be changing and trying things. And if we let ourselves understand, believe that change fatigue is a thing, we get trapped in the position where we can't change because there are people saying, Hold on, hold on, we've got too much change going on. And my actual thought there is that we don't actually fear change or get fatigued by it when we're instigating it. You said that at the beginning. When it's some change that we choose, if we change the usual restaurant that we go to for whatever reason, um, there's nobody gets change fatigued by trying going out and trying different forms of entertainment. We might stop going to one restaurant and start going to another one, but you know, there is an element of us getting out there and trying new things. We're comfortable in certain areas, obviously. And uh I think that we try we want to really try and create a culture which which recognizes change is continuous, recognizes that in order for that to be something that we look forward to, we have to recognize it, we have to reward people for it, we have to acknowledge it and not therefore to that scarf model that you we started in our conversation. We've got to avoid the the um downsides of what that change is, which means actually taking it off us at the top of an organization, saying this is what the change will be, and actually creating an organization that's continually optimizing and looking for the changes from within their own areas um within an organization, so that it's more homegrown, more organic than it is top-down, and it becomes habitual, not not uh, you know, um uh multiple instances one after the other, but something large instances one after the other, but something that's tightly focused. It's a it's part of how we do business, if that makes sense.

But I think this is a great conversation around uh change and change theme. So, how would you sum this up? Uh, what three points do you think our audience would like to take away?

First, and I think this should be top of the list, is what you covered around scarf and that the human element of change and recognizing that we've got to look at the impact it has on the people around us so that it's there's their beneficiaries in the change rather than having change done to them. And I think that's a super important piece. Um the second bit is that Kaikaku versus Kaizen, the continuous change versus big changes. And I think there it's more of a shift of the balance away from the many big changes one after the other, but shifting it more into a habitual change, something that happens all the time. We look for opportunities and it becomes a part of that Kaizen type of culture in an organization. Um and I think that one would be the bit that culturally is creating a habit of change, and that one's a lot more challenging in that we can have continuous improvement on a team, but having something continuous improvement, continuously looking to change things, just to shake things up a little bit, but in a way that is is sustainable and not draining but energizing.

I I think the uh the third one I would add to that is that everybody goes through change in a differ different time frame. So different people will react to any given change in a different way, and it'll take some people longer and some people less time. So even when you're doing smaller incremental changes, you you have to remember that not everybody's going to uh take the same amount of time to be able to uh adapt and adopt and understand that and uh ensuring that you're taking that into account and considering that uh uh the the people element as you uh start to implement change. Um great conversation. I I I love this topic. I could talk about it for a very long time, but uh we're we're out of that time for today. So uh would you like to wrap us up here, Dave?

Yeah, and until next time, Peter, as always, it's a pleasure. And uh as always, uh feedback, send us the feedback. I'm gonna ask you to remember uh remind us of the email address.

It's uh feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. So so so thanks very much, and we'll see you next time. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.