Just Seven Things

Exploring why and how we do what we do, and how we can do it better

Archive for the category “Change”

22 Sep 2008

Relaxing into Change

I’m working through a lot of change at the moment. Interestingly it’s more about corporate change than personal change (i.e. myself), but as I’m planning for and leading the change at Madgex it’s actually nearly all about people change.

It’s a fairly straightforward observation that the change will happen through people. That without their buy-in, change remains locked in managers words and in documents and project plans.

I have considered change in a number of posts, and over the last few weeks have been digging around for as much management theory as I can. A few things have struck me:

  1. I could be looking in the wrong place, but the theory content seems to be quite thin when I had expected depth. Particularly when you consider my earlier point about the centrality of change happening through people. I obviously haven’t been looking in the right places for the psychological and motivational theory linkages which should be at the heart of all the planning
  2. A very good, positive focus on talking: both in terms of gathering feedback and aligning expectations. Indeed, the balance between the leadership role of inspiring and aligning people behind a motivating vision of the future and the management of the operational and functional ‘realities’ is fascinating
  3. A balance is starting to appear. A balance between trying to plan for change, and relaxing into change.
To explain my third point: it is starting to feel like change actually happens when an internal tipping point is achieved. You can try and impact as many of the elements that can contribute to change as you can consciously identify. However, it feels like there is a lot that has to fall into place. That has to shift internally to a good place that is aligned with the future desired changed state. A lot of the work that takes place consciously feels like it prepares the ground for the internal alignment/ realignment. But it can’t actually cause the change. A period of percolation and feeling for fit seems to be required
And it is during this stage that, unless the conversations are continuing throughout, degrees of misalignment can get fused in which will distort the future changed state

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Posted in Business, Change, Communication, Leadership and tagged , , | Leave a comment
15 Sep 2008

Time Management Progress in Action

I was prompted by a comment on one of my posts from June (J7T was just 19 days old) about how hard time management was. It made me stand back and evaluate how far I’ve come in just over three months (and particularly after a 7/10 level day in terms of stress and task bittiness as I travelled between appointments):

  1. I feel more relaxed control (and a clearly ring-fenced idea of where there is a diminishing pile of ‘stuff’ to clear through the GTD system
  2. I am significantly better at locking down my focus to a task in hand. To switch and give it my full thinking attention. Ironically, writing this blog (with the aim of posting at least 5/7 days a week) has improved this ability
  3. I have a more flexible approach to prioritisation based on trust of my systems and reaction to a gut response. This opposed to the constant prioritising and re-prioritising trap that it is sometimes easy to get into
  4. My sense of ‘someday/maybe’ or just ‘ruthless task deletion’ has improved. I feel like I know myself better and cull those things that will just sit for years on front-of-mind task lists and create noise.
  5. I (as posted on recently) am a lot better at just doing the action. Just getting on and starting without messing around.
And the main area for improvement? 
As WorkLoadMaster states in his comment to my post on the ‘Stress of Time Management’ above: it’s all about keeping on top of the system. I feel like my report card would say:
‘Si has shown much improvement over the term. With continuing effort and focus he should continue to improve……’

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Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Control, Deliberate Practice, Focus, Habits and Routines, Learning, Psychology, Time Management and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment
13 Sep 2008
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The Referred Pain of Procrastination

Medicine 2 by Sergio Roberto

Medicine 2 by Sergio Roberto

My watching of a favourite American TV show about a cantankerous Dr House, and a 121 chat with a colleague at Madgex started me thinking about why we sometimes find it hard to change something that it appears we could consciously address.

It often appears to me that one of the frustrations with change is that we think we know so clearly what we have to do to make the change happen. Our conscious intellect has applied weighting (prioritisation) and a set of justifications to the most likely drivers for change. We think that we can start to get up early in the morning and get loads of work done/ start that book/ do that reading if only we could respond to the alarm clock. We obviously think/ justify that we need more sleep to do this, so we go to bed earlier. But this doesn’t seem to work, so we re-tag ourselves as ‘being one of those people that…..’ and continue not to get up early. Read more…

Posted in Action Orientation, Change, Conscious and Unconscious, Game Playing, Psychology and tagged , , , ,

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