Different kinds of change benefit from different approaches and leadership styles. Organizations and situations vary, and to create change that sticks (not to mention being more fun along the way), you’ll have an easier time if you design for the people and situation you have.
I’ve found the best way to decide on a style of leadership is to take stock of what we know (certainty) and how expansive and interdependent our environment is (complexity).
When you start with more certainty, change can feel like more work.
This is such a paradox to me! And yet it’s happened again and again – having to do more change work when our inner circle of leaders feels sure of our answers. The challenge when some of us know but most of us don’t is helping everyone catch up to the same place (and, sometimes, realizing what we felt sure of was wrong).
If you already have a clear answer in your own head, a large part of leadership is about articulating that vision, telling a story and persuading others to follow. People encounter thousands of persuasive messages a day, so the challenge of “selling people” on anything new has exponentially increased over time. With enough trust between people, this style of change leadership can be very efficient, as long as you’re confident that your world won’t shift while you’re trying to change it.
Directed change
If certainty is high and complexity is low – we know our solution or a clear path to find it, and we have a controllable environment (like within a team or function). In this case, we can often take a directed approach to change – persuading and supporting our colleagues to move in a direction. In this case, the people at the center share an idea, and convince others to follow.
The change leader acts as conductor, with well-defined parts for everyone to play.
When the most widely known change literature was being written 20-30 years ago, organizations were often well-defined and straightforward to navigate, and external shifts happened much less continuously. A lot of our ideas about how change works within a group imagine that orchestrating change is mostly about cueing the right parts at the right time.
This type of change requires a lot of clarity about what the end state should look like, and a lot of “what’s in it for me” conversation with the people receiving change.
Tools I use for conducting directed change: Kotter’s framework for change. Prosci’s ADKAR model, stakeholder analysis, elements of IDEO’s Design for Change
Planned change
If certainty and complexity are both high – we have a clear vision for the future, but can’t know all the details for every involved group. This is a really common situation in modern, complex organizations; often we start with a strong central idea or direction and need to take many different people on a journey together.
We may not end up at the exact destination we had in mind, but we all need to go in the right direction together. In this case, we’ll want to work together to create a map and then build on that planned change.
Sustaining this kind of work requires clarity about the intended destination, a well-defined map, identifying the people and teams involved, surprises we might encounter, problems we need to solve, and a complex, interconnected web of benefits for different groups. Tapping into the organization’s collective knowledge with a degree of collaboration and design thinking is essential.
Tools I use for mapping planned change: Program management practices, Kotter’s more recent work Accelerate (2015) and Change (2021), fluency models, partnering with experience designers and researchers (often using IDEO’s Design for Change)
The problem of assuming certainty
Many change management techniques focus on how to help create change in with these well-defined maps, when we already know a lot and are sure of our environment. I think that’s partly a function of leaders thinking about the human aspects of change well after they have an idea to solve a problem or create a new opportunity. I also think many of us are still a tiny bit in denial about how much the world is shifting around us (it’s a lot to wrap our heads around, really).
Reality is – things change! Markets, customers and communities shift, and that can make plans irrelevant quickly.
So what happens when we don’t know? Many of us can’t count on certainty in our environments! How do we shift in the direction we want when we don’t know what the destination looks like?
You can adapt faster if you plan for uncertainty.
I’ll be honest – my favorite changes are the ones where we know what outcome we want when we start, but have only a vague idea how we’ll get there, let alone exactly what the new world looks like. Setting an intention and figuring out collectively how to shift that way gives everyone space to make local, day-to-day decisions that will get us closer to the outcome we seek, and gives us freedom to adapt our actions to the short term results we see.
It’s also much more likely to work! People taking small, incremental steps with good principles in mind may get to the result faster or better, and at the very least, they’ll see wins and losses much earlier.
Grassroots change
If certainty and complexity are both low – Maybe we have an area that we want to improve but don’t know how. Maybe there are many people who see similar possibilities and want to try things out.
In this case, we can iterate and explore from the ground up – with the people most directly impacted generating and trying new things. These grassroots changes may stay put and grow where they started, or they can uncover ideas that other people might want to try, too.
If we want to see these changes happen, one of the most important things we can do is create an environment that encourages innovation and connection. In our organizations, that means allowing slack and freedom for people to create change. In our communities, that means getting out and getting connected. Good grassroots change comes when people feel safe innovating (and sometimes failing) at a small scale, and are able to grow their successes through their connection with others.
Open source communities, social justice movements and creative, regenerative practitioners across all kinds of industries and activities often follow this model. If you’re in that position, finding like-minded people and figuring out how to share with them is incredibly valuable. You may cross-pollinate ideas, partner, or just create a safe and supportive place to see each other.
Tools I use for nurturing grassroots change: Community organizing principles, any kind of participatory decision-making that the change creators like, with an emphasis on making the work as open and easy to follow/connect with as possible, Theory of Change, Lean Change Management
Evolving change
If certainty is low and complexity is high – we’ll need to discover our vision as we go. This means giving ourselves space to try, fail and succeed in many small ways.
When we know change is needed, we don’t know what the future looks like (the world is changing around us pretty fast!) and we have a lot of moving parts and people, we’ll need to build an ecosystem for emerging and evolving change.
We’ll need a mix of ideas from every part of our ecosystem in order to make progress.
I like to think of evolving change as a series of continuous feedback and learning loops, all of which help create incremental improvements to our ideas of the future as we get closer and closer to it. The center of your evolving change ecosystem can’t make all the decisions alone – they need information and results from the edges – but they can be the hub for communicating what we’re learning and what’s happening across all the moving parts. Likewise, in a complex, interconnected system, grassroots change only goes so far – one piece impacts another which impacts another; they usually benefit from some orchestration.
That orchestration must leave room for learning. You’re not conducting a well-defined series of parts. This is jazz; it’s improvisational. While quick wins always power complex changes, quick losses are also key when the vision itself is evolving along the way.
A very common concept in change as a practice is the idea of change resistance. What looks like resistance or intransigence is often a result of a competing condition: maybe someone agrees with the strategic view of what should be different, but they’re still rewarded with praise for doing things the “old way”, for instance. I find it helpful to think of inertia not as a result of active resistance but as encountering obstacles. Lean Change Management calls this “response to change” and views it as useful feedback – so should you, especially when you’re guiding a complex, emergent change. What you learn isn’t just a “response”, either – it IS the change.
Tools I use to design healthy systems for evolving change: Design practices (especially IDEO and XPLANE’s change resources), Product Innovation practices, Lean Change Management
These different types of change coexist!
Most of us have started a piece of work that changes our environment only to realize the work needs to take on a different shape as something else changes. Complex, adaptive systems – which we see all over the world, including most of our workplaces and communities – are typically changing in many ways at the same time.
It’s very common for smaller efforts to grow – for instance, what seems like a well-understood directed change within one department at a company can turn out to have impacts on others… and now it’s a more complex challenge that requires a more flexible map. A grassroots change originating from one community service can spark a bigger movement that eventually needs more coordination as it evolves. Likewise, large, responsive urban planning efforts often spawn many smaller projects where change is owned and led within communities – grassroots changes within a larger evolving system.
If you’re leading change, you’ll be more successful & the work will be easier to sustain if you use the right approach for the work you’re trying to do. It’s also helpful to understand what else is going around you. In practice, that means that, the broader your scope of influence and responsibility, the more likely you’ll need to be ready for your environment to evolve. I tend to assume all change will, eventually, become evolving and emergent, and to help the people around me think about the bigger picture.
Want to think about this some more?
This blog summarizes things I’ve been learning and teaching over many years, and owes a huge debt to every creator of the tools mentioned. I was first exposed to the complexity/certainty axes in a workshop that referenced the work of Anthony Buono and Kenneth Kerber, which the team at Education Reimagined summarized beautifully.
Resources mentioned:
- Kotter Institute
- Xplane’s Strategy Activation & DNA of Change (includes some good stakeholder analysis tools)
- Lean Change Management
- IDEO’s Designing for Change (course) and Change by Design (book)
- Prosci’s ADKAR model
- Theory of Change
- I left program management, participatory decision-making, design thinking, community organizing and all other broad-brush resources off this list, because each of those topics is an entire course (certainly more than a blog post) in and of itself – but send me a note or book a chat if you want advice about how to learn more on any of those topics.