This is essentially the message of Sam Conniff Allende in his book Be More Pirate. It tells how modern-day “pirates”, people like you and me, reject some rules and create new ones, and can really make a difference. He explains everything by drawing parallels with what the real pirates did during the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean between 1650 and 1730. I invite you to watch one of his very relevant speeches in the following video.

Why rebel?

To rebel is first and foremost to offer alternatives. By refusing a situation, one questions its relevance, its raison d’être. One wonders or realizes who benefits from the situation. And one finds ways to make the system serve us, people, better.

Now, probably very few of you have dropped everything by mere rebelliousness. However, I know of several people who have built their careers on a simple feeling of revolt against a problem or situation that they thought was unacceptable, and they made it their main battle. I’m one of them.

But in this article, I’d like to talk about small revolts. Those we can do every day. Those that allow us to move forward or free us a little more when the structures in places won’t allow it. Small rebellions that push causes one step at a time.

What does it have to do with the world of work?

Why talk about this here? Because the workplace is an ideal battlefield for small, more or less harmless, but important, and meaningful acts of rebellion.

A lecturer, whose name I do not remember, once said that 100% of absurd regulations exist because of 4% of people who abuse the system. Difficult to check this statistic. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to believe that a majority of unnecessary corporate rules exist because of a history of a few dissidents who once crossed the line, tried to cheat, tried to manipulate the system to their advantage.

The rather sad result of all this is that 100% of employees must comply with these rules that were created because of a few negative troublemakers, who sometimes have left organizations years ago.

What I suggest is to become positive troublemakers to rebalance everything and change things for the common good.

Stirring up good trouble

The idea is obviously to get things to go forward. To create a reflection, to generate a discussion, to help highlight what is intolerable, what hinders us, what infantilizes us, and to question its relevance. And even better, to offer alternatives and new options better adapted to our realities. But often, it must be done quickly, because organizations tend to stifle popular initiatives. As my partner would say, you need to act faster than the immune system of your organization.

Acts of rebellion with the sole purpose of creating problems are not constructive. It’s all about stirring up good trouble. Let’s be idealistic and constructive rebels, not for the sole purpose of derailing the status quo, but for the realistic and reasonable purpose of taking ownership our work environment for the good of the company (and, of course, ours).

To inspire you, I found many examples of small acts of rebellion. I was able to identify patterns in the different ways that people did it. Here are 4 rebellious strategies I could find in these multiple examples:

• Highlighting the ridiculousness of a situation
• Turning the arms against the system
• Creating a situation that inspires reflection
• Realigning with your own values

11 stories of positive rebellions

These stories are not necessarily related to life at work, but they are all examples where people have created small rebellions that have allowed instigators to inspire rapid change, create important reflection opportunities, or to realign with their values.

Strategy 1 – Highlighting the ridiculousness of a situation

I often say that few organizations make the effort to looking at themselves in a mirror. It is easy to ignore situations when you have developed the reflex of looking the other way. Some people, however, take pleasure in putting a huge mirror in front of the eyes of organizations, often accompanied by a big neon sign that says “HEY EVERYONE, LOOK HERE”.

In short, highlighting the ridiculous removes any possibility of ignoring the situation for very long. As all eyes are turned towards the organization that faces ridicule, it must act quickly to save face.

1. Flowers in potholes

A resident of Brussels was fed up with the number of potholes he found in his town, which grew faster than they were repaired. The 29-year-old Anton Schuurmans, equipped with flowers, soil and a bottle of water, started planting flowers in potholes.

This act did not go unnoticed, as he explains that at least 1 of the potholes was repaired 2 days after planting a flower.

Mr. Schuurmans was not the only one to have had this idea, or he may have inspired others. This is a trend that has been picked up around the world since.

Furious cyclist plants flower display in gaping potholehttp://t.co/oRUgFWios8 pic.twitter.com/tFEe9Qy3n5

— Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) March 30, 2015

2. Phallic potholes

A joker who calls himself Wanksy, in honor of the British street artist Banksy, has decided to push the ridicule even further. Rather than planting flowers in potholes, Wanksy, armed with a can of washable paint, draws phallic forms around the potholes of his city, to highlight the ridiculousness of the situation.

Although a representative of the city of Manchester stated that obscene drawings would not speed up the repair of potholes, the majority of those that received the phallic treatment were repaired in less than two days!

Anonymous activist “Wanksy” gets potholes fixed by drawing giant penises around them: http://t.co/BKTkoEv0eA #Smart pic.twitter.com/7WoxWYIiD2

— Lauren O’Neil (@laurenonizzle) April 28, 2015

3. Secret ninja exit

To my dismay, I do not remember where I had heard this anecdote. I once read the story of an office where a huge hole remained unrepaired on the ceiling somewhere in a hallway.

An employee who was tired of seeing that this damage was not enough to make the building management company react simply decided to print a poster saying “Secret ninjas exit” and install it next to the hole.

The following week, the hole was repaired. And while I searched for photos, I saw that he was not the only one to make this little joke!

Strategy 2 – Turning the arms against the system

It is sometimes effective, sometimes not, very often satisfying. Organizations that are so rigid in the respect of their rules can sometimes get beaten at their own game. These small rebellions make it possible to feel that we are doing our part to change things. Sometimes a person is not enough, but a mass movement can make a huge difference.

4. The high price of unsolicited advertising

We all receive advertising by regular mail. Often these unsolicited advertisements include a pre-stamped return envelope. It is no longer a secret that it is possible to use these envelopes to return the advertisement to the company. The pre-stamped envelopes are charged to the companies from the moment they are processed in the mail. Many websites provide ways to return the mail to the sender so that they pay for their own ads.

If a pre-stamped envelope costs $ 1 to a business, and 1 million people send all the ads back to the company, their marketing campaign may cost them more than what been budgeted! That’s the cost of polluting people’s mailboxes!

If 10% of the population began to do this in a systematic way, it is a safe bet that this practice would disappear rather quickly.

Meta-hacking of advertisement in a bus stop

Here I am not talking about computer hacking, but a more interesting form of hacking, which consists of claiming ownership of a system and giving it back to citizens / users.

A citizen of London has simply decided to appropriate a part of his city, more precisely an advertising space located in a bus stop.

In this little “meta” act of rebellion, the person replaced an advertisement with a poster explaining how to hack a bus shelter advertisement. See the result.

Tremendous.#adhackmanifesto https://t.co/BhuFksXjrv

— Owen Williams 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇪🇺 (@OwsWills) April 22, 2019

This act of piracy seems to be an organized and growing initiative. It is even possible to download the instructions in PDF.

6. The restaurant with 1-star reviews

In 2014, a San Francisco-area restaurant owner named Davide Cerretini decided he was tired of being at the mercy of Yelp reviews. At the opening of his restaurant, he kept receiving calls from Yelp sales representatives, and when he refused to talk to them, he noticed that freshly received 5-star ratings were disappearing from his restaurant’s Yelp profile.

Being of Italian origin, Davide knew this is exactly how the mafia works and simply refused to be a victim of this kind of machination. It should be noted that Yelp categorically denies allegations of removal of good restaurant reviews and points out its algorithm.

Davide realized that Yelp was completely controlling his reputation. To thumb his nose at the situation, he started using Yelp’s data to turn the system against itself.

He created a newsletter in which he compiled the worst messages he received from the Yelp elite (which he called the Village Idiots). He also made a list of the silliest questions received on Yelp.

Eventually, Davide realized that he could very well live by not caring about his reputation on Yelp. “What if I removed their power from me by making the situation worse?”

One day, he put a sign in front of his store: “25% off for all those who give us a 1-star rating on Yelp“. (Later, this discount is raised to 50%).

He knew it was against Yelp’s rules, and that’s exactly what he wanted. And that was fine because at that time the Court of Appeals had just ruled that the manipulation of ratings and reviews by Yelp was a permissible practice and that it was a form of “hard bargaining”, not extortion.

The owners of small businesses being furious with this news, they found in Davide their hero. Davide has been visited by an avalanche of journalists, fellow owners, and supporters. The same day, he did as much business as in a regular month. He even had to ask for help and had to pizza dough in nearby businesses.

The brilliance of botto bistro, the worst-rated restaurant on Yelp @jillkrasny http://t.co/46abq8pSrk

— Inc. (@Inc) September 23, 2014

Strategy 3 – Creating a situation that inspires reflection

Sometimes, provoking reflection can be enough to become an act of rebellion. Many people, probably all of us, do a lot of things without asking the question, “Why are we doing this, again?” It becomes a reflex, and we quickly stop listening to our original suspicions.

7. The toy that’s neither pink nor blue

When it’s the birthday of my godson or my niece, I still have a lot of trouble being inspired to find a gift. In general, I show up a toy store, and I seek advice from an employee on site.

But as these children grow older, it’s hard to ignore the pattern according to which that girls’ toys are pink and boys’ toys are blue. I know people who are much more militant than me about this. For my part, I wonder: what does it mean, what is being passed on to children by reinforcing these gender patterns, what impact will that have, etc.?

So, to derail this pattern, when I ask for help to find a game, I only specify the age of the child, without saying whether it is a boy or a girl.

The first time it happened, and this surprised me, the employee really wasn’t sure how to approach this. He suddenly had to find a toy which first quality was to be educational. I had feedback, however, that my gifts were much more original and interesting since I was doing this. For this reason, every year, at birthdays and Christmas, I repeat the same thing, and I make an employee suffer a little in a toy store!

8. The right to bare arms

The British Columbia Legislature made headlines last March, since the Sergeant-at-Arms had repeatedly asked women to cover their arms in the corridors of the legislature on the pretext that it was illegal to be bare-armed. He simply affirmed that he was applying the regulation dating from 1980.

This intervention did not fail to create an outcry that found its way into social media, thanks to the hashtag #barearms. And it did not take more for women journalists and other employees to come to work with bare arms.

The initiative failed to get more than a reminder of the dress code, but the reflection went beyond the walls of the legislature and was appropriated by the public.

Do we look unprofessional to you? Women in the @BCLegislature are being told our bare arms are unprofessional, do not constitute proper business attire for the halls of the House #bcpoli pic.twitter.com/1lJSWngP34

— Shannon Waters (@sobittersosweet) March 28, 2019

9. Ginette’s dress code

This is the story of a non-rebellion that really, really needed to happen. My partner Maurice was the one to instigate it as he was involved with a client’s business, and it prompted a lot of reflections. He noticed that several people were wearing a funny outfit in the office: pajama bottoms and slippers, jogging pants and running shoes. When he asked around, he was told “Ah! That’s Ginette’s dress code. “

He dug to understand a little better. The dress code was dating back to the 1970s when very short skirts were fashionable. It turns out that an employee named Ginette really loved to wear the shortest skirts she could find and preferred to walk barefoot. It was highly inappropriate in this type of business, so the owner created a dress code ONLY because of Ginette:

• Obligation to wear shoes
• Obligation to have your legs covered

For 30 years, this regulation was in place for ONE SINGLE PERSON, who had not been in office for decades, and this regulation was abused at will, to the point where, instead of using their judgment, employees wore whatever piece of clothing that allowed them to check both of these criteria. Pajamas and slippers. Let’s be honest, they looked even more ridiculous than Ginette at the time.

It will have taken an external consultant to start wondering why they were following this obsolete regulation that wasn’t made for them, and to resume the habit of using their better judgment.

Strategy 4 – Realigning with your own values

Sometimes, our rebellious instinct shows up for no other reason than because our values are constantly trampled by the structures in place. Human beings have a need to feel aligned and in harmony with their values. When this need is constantly denied, it becomes more and more suffocating, like a plant that lacks sunlight.

10. The non-ethical corporation

In doing my research on small acts of rebellion, I found a rather interesting short story. An employee working for a company that once had very ethically questionable behaviors could not agree to pretend that nothing had happened.

Since the company’s lobby had computers with Internet access, this employee made it a habit go on every computer and load an article about the company’s offenses, and the way it tried to hide or smother the scandal.

Now, this employee is probably playing with fire but still continues to work for this company. But he is certainly a little more in tune with his values.

11. A simple denial of the status quo

Again, while doing my research on small rebellions, I found a very refreshing testimony of a person who acts simply according to his values, even though they seem to be contrary to what is socially acceptable or encouraged in his entourage.

His small acts of rebellion consist of trying to look after the interests of others. Whether it is to hold the door for someone or to ensure that their interests are represented in a conversation where they can not be present but that concerns them. He tries to be fair to those around him.

It may not be a rebellion strictly speaking, but in a world (or a country) where it is everyone for himself, this person likes to believe that by showing genuine compassion and empathy towards his peers, he rebels against a cultural movement that encourages self-centeredness, entitlement, and hatred.

What lessons can we learn from all this?

NOBODY IS COMING TO SAVE YOU!

If you want something, in life or at work, you will have to get it yourself. And it is not always effective or possible to do it by conventional means.

Are there small rebellions that would be safer than an overthrow? What can you do to highlight the ridiculousness of a situation? Can you turn the arms against a system that slows you down or infantilizes you? What small gesture can help you generate a reflection or realign with your values?

What unnecessary or outdated regulations could you challenge? How do you and your peers claim ownership of your work environment?

It’s time to put your imagination to good use and to put in check your ability to tolerate what gets in your way.

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

I recently spoke in a private event. A company created an internal initiative called The Innovation Week, and they wanted to ensure that the mindset of innovation kept going for the rest of the year. They hired us to give a speech on the matter. Here is a summary of our conference.

Soft skills at the service of innovation

Innovation is not an goal. It’s difficult to measure. “Our level of innovation has increased by 39% this quarter”, that does not exist. While teams can be dedicated to innovation, such as teams of intrapreneurs, for instance, it is also not an expertise you can find on a resume. There is no certificate in innovation, as far as I know.

Innovation is a mindset. It’s a set of reflexes that can be leveraged, using our hard skills, which is common practice, and our soft skills, which is a little less common. What I mean is that we often have the technical expertise to innovate, but not always the mental reflexes to stimulate innovation. There are technological tools for tangible innovations, we use them every day. There are also other tools – both practical and conceptual – to foster an innovation mindset.

Knowing this, we can say that innovation is a culture, or at least requires a certain culture to happen. We have identified 4 key points that are necessary to foster of an innovation mindset that will last over time: agency, intention-based leadership, our power of influence, and the ability to change intangible ideas into tangible projects by experimenting.

A culture that favors agency

Agency is one’s ability to deliberately affect their environment. Basically, it’s our power to act, to voluntary influence our surroundings. When people decide to wash the dishes because there are too many dirty dishes in their sink, they are being agentive. They take a deliberate action to improve their environment. It’s an innate behavior in humans. However, the workplace is one of the only places where this natural parameter is programmed to be disabled by default. At work, we ask permission to take action.

Agency is not the same as empowerment. Empowerment has its limits, and shows several differences with agency.

• Empowerment is a permission given by another person of higher hierarchical rank. Agency is innate, it is a mindset everybody is capable of, and it is deliberate.
• Empowerment can be withdrawn by your superior, by senior management, and anyone in between. Agency being a mindset, is permanent and can not be removed.
• Empowerment perpetuates the status of followers. Agency allows the creation of new leaders.
• Empowerment works as long as we respect the structure in place. Agency works as long as there is a will.

For more information on the subject, I wrote an article entitled Empowerment Is Not Enough, Go For Agency Instead.

A culture of intention-based leadership and leader-leader relationships

People behave according to the way they are treated. Have you ever heard a manager yell “This is a real kindergarten here!”? I guarantee you that this guy treats his peers like preschool kids.

David Marquet, from the US Navy, has tried the opposite. He had just received his rank of captain for the submarine USS Sante Fe. He had to deal with the worst crew of the US Navy. He stopped giving orders, and began telling his crew what he intended to do, and then let them decide how best to get there. This is called intentional leadership. In doing so, not only did he stop treating his peers as soldiers or executants, but he began to consider their expertise, their collective intelligence and their better judgment. He stopped treating them like followers, and began treating them like leaders.

In the end, his crew has collected the highest score of all armies combined in history. On average, in a submarine with a crew of 30, about 1 or 2 sailors eventually become captain. In the crew of Captain Marquet, 9 people became captains. Other captains began visiting her submarine to learn how to achieve such an accomplishment. This guy has managed to create a factory of leaders in a nuclear submarine, nothing less. This is the story I prefer to tell the most, having tried it myself in business, with very impressive results. I also wrote an article on the subject, titled The Colossal Impact of Leader-Leader Relationships.

Note that leader-leader relationships do not only go top down but also buttom up and horizontally. We can treat our boss the way we would like him to behave, and the same goes for co-workers.

A culture that leads people to develop their influence

Not everyone knows how to ask for something in a proper manner. In 16 years, my son will probably ask me for permission to use my car this way “Hey pops, give me the keys to your car”, and it will be with great pleasure that I will refuse him as a matter of principle because that is not a way to ask for something.

So my colleagues and I have devised a process in 3 simple steps that we like to call “How to convince anyone of anything“. This is often scary to managers, and in the end, they end up thanking us because it will save them 1 to 2 days of busy work a week.

If one has to innovate, one must be able to explain why he would do it. A company will not fund all the ideas that come to people’s mind. In fact, most companies will not be interested in people’s ideas until they can attach a dollar sign to it. So let’s see how we can improve that. It’s good for both managers and employees. There are 3 steps

1. Make sure your idea fits into their agenda

Everyone has an agenda, especially high-ranking people in businesses. They have goals to achieve, aspirations, and KPIs. They also have a gun to their head (figuratively speaking) that is brandished by someone higher than them. If you want to convince them of something, you will need to empathize and try to understand what THEY need to succeed. If you offer them something diametrically opposed to where they are going, it is almost guaranteed that you will have a no. So, basically, you have to see how the idea you are trying to sell helps your manager succeed.

2. Do the work for them

I know I know. It means having to work to get what you want. What we mean here is: give them all the information they need to make the right decision. If they do not have the information, they can not make that decision. They have things to do, they are busy, and have a gun to their head. Finding information to support your request is at the bottom of their to-do list.

There is plenty of information you can provide: costs, return on investment (tangible, like money or time saved, or less tangible, like other benefits such as increased retention, engagement, etc.), comparisons with what the competition does, etc.

A quick and efficient way to get this information is to fill out a Business Model Canvas. Here is a simplified version that we have created to gather important data when it comes to selling ideas. It takes 30 minutes to complete, you can do it with your colleagues, and it allows you to ask yourself the right questions, especially those we often forget.

Problem: What problem are you trying to fix?
Why? : Why does this problem need to be fixed?
Customer segment: For whom do you solve the problem? Who will this solution affect? (Customers, other departments, other teams, users)
Distribution channels: By what means will you set up your solution, communicate its value?
Solution: A summary of the solution you propose
Cost Structure: What will be the costs? What will cost what?
Key indicators: What should be measured to determine if the idea is successful? (Ex: Number of visits, number of users, traffic, customer satisfaction)
Return on Investment: A projection of the benefits you expect your idea to generate. (Ex: Increased customer satisfaction, increased sales, increased revenue by 3% to 6%, reduced workload, save 1 hour per day for employees).

Basically, when trying to convince someone of your idea, make sure that the only thing they have to do is accept and sign. Do not give them the burden of having to do the work for you. And even if your manager needs approval from above, you’ll have given him all the arguments he needs to convince his own boss.

3. Make it so that saying YES is easier than saying NO

Or, the alternative to this title: make it so that it becomes a bad idea, or completely stupid to say no. The goal is to put forward what it would cost NOT to say yes. Take every conceivable risk of not implementing your idea, make them visible, and known to everyone. You can even create a risk chart with your team or department. And when you make your request, with all your ROI information, give them all the risks it would represent not to go ahead with your idea. Risks that are known to all.

At this point, if the risks are higher than the costs, it is very likely that you will have a green light to move forward with your innovation or change. It is always possible for the answer to be no. But if one of the risks raised becomes reality, you can always tell your boss “We told you so”.

Encourage small controlled experiments

Most companies are allergic to chaos and uncertainty. They want to be CERTAIN, before making a decision, that it is the right decision. The problem is that no exhaustive analysis or study provides as much data as trying something out.

So, if you have almost convinced your boss to go with your idea, but that he’s is still hesitant, because it could be risky and we aren’t sure of anything (and also, gun to their head), offer him to do a small controlled experiment.

The two main advantages of these experiments are that they validate your hypotheses, and they test your riskiest assumptions.

SMALL: On a small scale. An experiment can be done on a small group of users, or by a small team. In technology, you can create a prototype on a local server with a partial database, for example.

CONTROLLED: An experiment is controlled when it has a time limit, success criteria, and a list of things you want to verify. You can even have a budget (in dollars or allotted time).

When the experiment is over and you have collected enough data, there are 3 possible paths:

1. Stop everything, we were wrong. It’s a good thing we did not continue, and we did not lose a ton of money on this idea.
2. Stop everything, and we move to the overall implementation because we were right and our assumptions were validated.
3. Another controlled experiment is required to collect additional data and or verify other or new assumptions.

Conclusion

A company that can gain and own these 4 mindsets has no excuse not to change, improve and innovate. A team mastering these 4 mindsets naturally has the necessary qualities to be a team of intrapreneurs. It could help you innovate where your competition does not. But hurry up. Your competition definitely is already innovating.

At GoPyrate!, we offer workshops to help teams acquire these reflexes and mindsets, and we offer practical tools to support them. Feel free to contact me if you want a conference on this topic in your organization!

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

Employee empowerment has the wind in its sails, but it also has certain limitations. Agency, however, goes much further in the development of your employees.

Empowerment

Definition of “Empowerment“
In the sphere of management and organizational theory, “empowerment” often refers loosely to processes for giving subordinates (or workers generally) greater discretion and resources: distributing control in order to better serve both customers and the interests of employing organizations.

Empowerment, according to Wikipedia

The concept of empowerment is not new, but I have mainly heard about it in the last 5 years. Companies, seeing that the command and control approach is equivalent to accompanying each employee towards the door one performance review at the time, changed their mind and began to think that giving more room for decisions and responsibilities to their employees could have a positive impact on their motivation and therefore their performance.

None of this is false. If we trust Daniel H. Pink’s works, intrinsic motivation is composed of three aspects: mastery, meaning, autonomy. It is this autonomy that is aimed at when a company or a manager take initiatives towards the empowerment of their employees.

The problem with empowerment

The great problem with empowerment is that this increase in discretion and decision-making power is granted to employees by a hierarchically superior force. A manager can choose to move forward with the empowerment of his employees, usually with the goal of increasing motivation, growth, and performance. Corporate empowerment is often an initiative of management, which is spread across various departments via a management and training structure.

That being said, what happens if a manager who is a big fan of empowerment leaves and is replaced by someone who is quite less benevolent? No more empowerment. The organization decides that it does not work? No more empowerment. The organization is bought by a multinational corporation that “does not believe in these things”? No more empowerment. And the fallout from these change of minds will be dangerous. One does not take back the freedom of motivated people without suffering the consequences.

In short, empowerment exists in a relationship of power. And the name says it. “I elect to give you more power.” I empower you. Captain David Marquet explains this problem very well in his book “Turn the Ship Around”, but through leader-follower relationships.

He argues that many leaders have the reflex of empowering their collaborators, but the consequence is that this further strengthens their own leader status, as well as the follower’s status. If the leader must be there, and must voluntarily and consciously confer more power to his followers, their empowerment is directly dependent on the will of the leader.

So, basically, empowerment consolidates, strengthens and maintains the status of followers of your peers, because they can not give themselves these powers. It will never turn them into natural leaders. Here lies the limit of the concept of empowerment in businesses.

Agency

Definition of “Agency”
In the social sciences and philosophy, agency is the faculty of action of a being; his ability to act on the world, things, beings, to transform or influence them. In sociology, agency is the capacity to act, as opposed to what the structure imposes.

Structure and Agency
In social sciences, there is an ongoing debate about the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behavior. Structures are sets of devices that influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. Agency is the ability of individuals to act independently of social structures and to freely make their own choice.

Agency and Structure and Agency, translated from French on Wikipedia

Agency is the ability of a person to make decisions and act on their free will, and to influence their immediate environment. It is more natural in some people, less in others, but it is something that one can work on and develop.

We can’t remove the agency of a person, unlike empowerment. You can certainly prevent someone from exercising agency, however, at our own peril, it would be like depriving a plant of air, water and sun. A person who takes a lot of initiatives and innovates shows agency. Limiting this person’s agency basically means turning him into a pawn, an executant.

Hierarchical and corporate structures are not always tolerant of people’s agency. As defined above, agency is the ability to act as opposed to a structure. But employees with a strong sense of agency will be those who stir good trouble. Those who question for the common good. Those who will go around or bend a few rules to create new ones, or bring value in a way no one would have ever imagined. Those who will take over part of the structure that does not work for them to improve or adapt it to their reality, resulting in the optimization of their team’s work and its efficiency. And all of this without asking permission.

Now, imagine an entire team that demonstrates an increased sense of agency, and that receives the research and development mandate in a company. The potential of such a team will be dangerous for the competition.

The advantages of agency according to GoPyrate

In our workshops, we like to tell the participants that we are there to help them develop their super powers. Because our goal is always to increase the agency of a team. The techniques taught are all meant to involve more the team in their own work as well as in business processes. 

This is also the reason why we push to use real cases that the team is (or has been) involved with. It helps ground the teachings their own realities. Every company is slightly different and, as trainers, we can’t cover every variant. But your own realities can. We don’t even adapt our teachings to your realities, but we help the team do it. That way they own what they learn a lot more, and their agency develops as their confidence with the material grows and as they can directly sees how all theses ideas relate to them in a very concrete fashion.

It’s all about growing their agency.

By capitalizing on agency development, teams become more autonomous, more engaged and more innovation-driven. They also learn to communicate more with management and become more involved with business goals instead of just executing orders.

You pay your experts quite a lot, better make sure that they can contribute to the best of their abilities.

Our training is very freeform. The first thing we’ll do will be a small retrospective: We look at what they tried so far and how did it go, what are the things that they’d like to improve at work, what are the greatest challenges. From that short session, we’ll have all the priorities of your team, and all the material we need to improve on what they learned as well as what new ideas to introduce.

That’s the key with our workshops : It’s all about you, your team, your company, your needs. 

It works well with engineers, but also with managers, salespeople, HR people, etc… Most of our clients are teams of managers.

Training a team takes time. In fact, it takes quite a lot of time outside the time we’re there. We’re just the tip of the iceberg. We aim to teach principles rather than hard techniques. We want people to understand how this work and what is the value for them, and then we let them experiment over weeks. That’s good for any company.

You need people that are curious, stimulated, and bent on improving. When the employees stop being alive, the company itself is moribund. Good training is stimulating and give them a jolt. 

If you’d like to know more about GoPyrate services, visit www.gopyrate.com

Olivier Fortier

Owner of Primos Populi, partner and coach at Moabi. As a former manager, I prefer to use a “people first, the rest will follow” kind of approach. My favorite topics are organizational culture, safe work environments, and lowering the center of gravity of the decision making process. I cultivate people’s awesomeness.

www.primospopuli.com

As Society 5.0 is on the horizon, a fresh batch of upheavals will strike most organizations as emerging technologies, market dynamics and people’s relationship with work will change. 

This means that, yet again, organizations will have to face Change. It means a lot of power plays will happen, a lot of money will be spent (and often wasted), a lot of people will be stressed and a lot of company will fail their changes in a way that will cost them far more than just money. 

Just talk about Change in your organization and you’ll see the fear in the look of the people around you. “Not AGAIN.” 

We see Change as something big, put in motion as events. Each requires solid change management skills to build a strong strategy, communicate it appropriately, deliver the plan, manage expectations and manage for resistance to change. All of these things are difficult and the bigger the changes, the more difficult they are. 

Big changes will always be stressful. It will be difficult for humans who have evolved stress to improve their survivability during unexpected and uncertain events. It will be difficult for organizations built like machines: precise, ordered and predictable. The more you add stress, the more the resistance and the higher the chances something breaks. 

So how to approach those big Change events to execute them successfully? 

Don’t. 

Lean experts have been advocating for creating a culture of continuous improvement, of constant small changes. This is great, as it creates a culture of constant dynamism. For people, those changes are not violent, events or big enough to put them in danger. For organizations, it requires a reorganization into a living, dynamic structure, much closer to a natural ecosystem. 

But that the theory. “In the real world, it doesn’t work like that Maurice.” Big changes often end up not working or paying off as intended. Companies either aren’t Lean or have adopted parts of a Lean model. Old habits die hard, and they still manage their changes from a central authority. I have met my fair share of Lean change experts who will spend months analyzing change impacts, devising change management plans and creating communication plans for the rollout of those changes. Or of companies that ask for continuous improvements and innovation, and yet stifle any attempts of locally modifying behaviors and dynamics that haven’t been decided/designed/approved by a central authority. Where’s the Lean in that? 

Just asking for companies to allow their divisions, like teams, to innovate without interference, or even better with their full support, is wishful thinking. Why? Because until those companies changes, anyone initiating those changes will be at risk and will face resistance. In Jack: Straight from the Gut, Jack Welch describes his attempts at bringing change to General Electric, as a CEO, akin to starting a war and throwing grenades. If it’s that difficult when you are in charge, imagine when you are just a cog in the machine. 

Sure, teams can achieve a limited form of continuous improvement. As long as it doesn’t rattle the rest of the organization, it can work well. But it is limited. It can be so much more than that. And if we want to evolve a company to adapt to the emerging world of Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0, it’s a situation we need to address. 

To understand the underlying problem bringing changes in companies, one that becomes clear when we use a bit of system theory and learn how complex systems work. 

Explaining the problem

We’re going to do a bit of theory now, so please bear with me. 

One standard model of complex systems is the hierarchical model, where specialized systems of varying complexities nested within one another. Like companies. 

One of the most frequent problems with hierarchical systems is that the healthy dynamics between the hierarchical levels becomes skewed. 

Hierarchies evolve from bottom to top, from the lowest level to the highest, from the cell to the whole organism. The lower you go in a hierarchy, the faster the evolution rate. Those lower levels are the front line of the complex hierarchical system and as such have to respond a lot more precise and specialized stimuli.

The highest-level system, like the brain or the board of directors, still has a critical role to play: it must give a general direction, a purpose, to this evolution. Without it, lower systems will evolve fast in often unpredictable, and undesirable, directions. Like cancer. The higher-level system parses vast quantities of information coming from all the sub-systems, but that information is more straightforward, higher-level, already digested into something less complicated. 

Both high-level and low-level systems have their precise roles. The common mistake is to give too much power to one or the other. 

In a company, the most common issue is too much power taken by upper management. They know where they want to company to go and request departments and teams to execute their plans to get there. But that kind of centralized power comes at the loss of most of the information that should be gathered and processed by the teams. The team’s focus becomes execution rather than intelligence and adaptation. Information only trickles up within the system rather than flow and is usually ignored until it can’t be anymore. Innovation is stifled, hurting the capacity of the entire organization to adapt to change. 

On the other hand, not enough guidance form the upper management and the various teams will only react to their own, immediate situation. This will cause a significant loss of cohesion and productivity across the entire company. We don’t see this situation as often as too much control from management, as it requires a decentralized, self-organizing model, like Holacracy, which is still rare. 

The principle remains similar for governments. Too much control at the top and you create a totalitarian regime, replacing natural adaptability, innovation, and evolution by whatever is deemed the priority of the moment by the government. Too little regulations and you get tax avoidance (which prevent the delivery of shared services), monopolies concentrating common resources (such as money) in few hands, crime and other similar system-related problems. More often than not, governments strive for a balance but end up with too much and too little at once: constraints who end up benefitting large conglomerate while killing small businesses, help for specific slices of the population that ends up trapping them in a situation where they need that help, over or under-reacting to a challenge because they focus on the wrong reasons (such as an upcoming election), etc. This situation is a result of addressing symptoms without understanding the underlying system. 

Fixing the imbalance

If we fix that power imbalance, not with a single patchwork but with a change of internal dynamics to align how the company works with how a complex hierarchical system works, then we can hope of creating an organization that is a dynamic system under constant evolution and improvement. 

My favorite model to remedy to this power balance is based on an approach described by Dave Gray in his book The Connected Company. He calls it podularity. It is a model, not a framework or a complete, complex solution. To make it work for you, you need to fiddle with it a bit, you need to keep communications going, and you need to keep it alive and evolving. For organizations that adopt a Lean mindset, this is right up their alley. 

In this model, management establishes goals, constraints, and resources into sandboxes. Teams are wholly self-organizing but attached to a sandbox. Teams get their resources from the sandbox but must contribute information and effort toward the goal as well as respecting the constraints. The system is very alive as the sandboxes will evolve, with their resources and constraints adjusted based on the information contributed by all the teams attached, while still aiming for the goal determined by management. Teams who don’t follow the rules of their sandbox can’t draw resources from it and will need to attach to a more appropriate sandbox or starve and be eliminated by the system. The beauty of this model is that it is self-correcting and the power distribution between higher and lower systems stays in balance through the sandbox. It makes for a very organic model and can be scaled to apply to a government level.

One of the strengths of the model is that it is possible the to progressively introduce it within an organization. Start with the groups that are ready and willing. Make sure their sandbox includes everything both they and you need to give them their independence. Then let them deliver results and improve the system. Make sure their successes and challenges are well communicated across the organization, so other groups can open their minds to it and start thinking how it can work for them. 

I often talk about decentralized organizations. Well, this is it. 

Just like adequately working complex hierarchical systems, the higher systems set high-level goals and constraints. Lower-level systems must work within these guidelines but can evolve fast to adapt to their changing environment. They can also influence the guidelines to make sure they are kept relevant. The entire complex system will slowly adjust and evolve as a result of all the small local changes, slowly modifying the dynamic of the whole organization. The entire dynamic feel more natural, reducing stress across the whole system as the scale of actions, decisions, and consequences is vastly reduced. Autonomy and reduced scale allow for experimentations, leading to innovation and adaptability. 

It does require a will for the central authority to let go of its power and redefine its role. This kind of transformation starts with the top, not as a big change management plan, but rather as a will to let go. The hardest changes in the culture of an organization rarely come from the team, but instead, it comes from the organization’s leaders. A desire for change and a willingness to do what it takes are two very different things. 

If you want to know more

While using this model isn’t overly complicated or difficult, it helps to know what you are doing. 

I recommend reading Dave Gray’s The connected Company. Not only is the decentralized model outline there, but the whole book is a fascinating read, showing us clearly why companies need to evolve their habits, as the old ways won’t work anymore. 

I’m involved with two companies that can advise and support you if you are interested in evolving your organization toward such a model. 

Octant organizes seminars and retreats, both privates and open to the public. Decentralized model is a subject we often cover. 

If you want to adopt this model and require training or coaching for your organization, get in touch and I’ll hook you up.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

You’ve read a whole lot of books on the subject. You devoured a bunch of blog post too.

You know it is now time for an organizational change in your organization. You’re ready and willing. You’re pumped!

So… how do you proceed?

Change is a difficult subject to tackle, especially since people are a bit (okay, a LOT) weary about change. With good reasons too.

It’s hard for a company to reinvent its architecture. It’s even harder to implement a new one. The endeavor will face the full brunt of the organization’s immune system, competing personal agendas, danger from unexpected context changes, and the mighty power of truly apathetic people. Fun times.

Here are three strategies for change management. Each has their specific uses and knowing which one will save you lots of pain.

Big Top-Down Change

This strategy is a popular one. Not because it’s the best, not because it’s the safest and not because it’s the least traumatizing one. No, it’s the most popular because:

• It can be managed just like a project, with big planning committees, lots of predictive planning, and good excuses to scrap the whole thing when it goes awry.
• Many consulting firms prefer to work this way: big endeavor means you’ll need more help, and thus more revenues for the firm.
• It’s a great way to focus attention. It can be on yourself. It can be away from something else. If your company is large enough, it can even be newsworthy! Perfect to hide something.
• It keeps you in control.

This doesn’t mean that it can’t be the most appropriate form of change in many situations. It’s just that the bigger you go, the riskier it gets. If you want to go that route, then make sure you do it for the right reasons.

Use this strategy when:

When an organization needs to implement something across the board and do so in a specific manner, a Big Top-down change might be the way to go. Ex: A new governmental constraint for example or a new company initiative.

When the organization needs to do a major pivot quickly, this strategy may be appropriate. Pivots will cover changes in vision, or organization and maybe even the very nature of the work being done. In theses cases, there might now be a better way to implement the change. Mind the risks, however.

Avoid this strategy when:

Avoid this strategy if you can use another. Big top-down change seems safer because a lot of Very Intelligent People talked and planned and produced solid documents. They still often fail because the employees (and even people in upper management) don’t buy-in on the change and will resist it actively or passively.

Know the risks:

It is easy to plan such strategy and still fail miserably to communicate to the organization why it is important and why it has to be done this way. Communication is key here because any Big Top-down change is assured to elicit the most aggressive organizational immune response.

This risk can be mitigated by exchanging with the affected people well in advance, not just to inform them of what’s to come, but to allow them to express themselves and maybe even contribute in making the change less traumatizing for them. Getting any measure of buy-in from them will go a long way toward the success of the change endeavor.

Never underestimate the power of a large group of people dragging their feet.

Bottom-up

When you want real change, but are very conscious of limiting the possible damage if something goes wrong, the bottom-up strategy allows you to drive small change increments and observing results before committing at a larger scale.

Use this strategy when:

If your organization already follow a kanban approach, then this will be the way to go, as kanban prefer small but constant improvement over large wide-scale efforts. That’s one way of looking at bottom-up changes; there are two others.

The second one is the small, controlled experiment approach. That’s the one favored by Modern Agile. Find a group willing to participate, ask them to adopt a small change for a set amount of time, then debrief with them and choose to permanently adopt it, drop it or tweak it and retry the experiment. This participatory way of conducting change doesn’t require a huge plan and will give you a lot of data moving forward. When you are done with one change, move on to the next.

The last type of bottom-up change is the grassroots effort. That’s when the people affected by the change request it and drives it. You can’t get better ownership than that, and you get it right from the start. Grassroots efforts can be fragile, however, especially when they cannot get the buy-in from higher-ups.

Avoid this strategy when:

When the buy-in from higher-ups is necessary and won’t be possible, don’t waste your time with the bottom-up approach.

Know the risks:

A lack of buy-in from decision-makers within the organization will doom any bottom-up change efforts. Same goes for lack of buy-in from those asked to participate.

“Weak” buy-in from decision-makers, that is a verbal support that isn’t backed by actions will only drive the organization’s immune system to target the change effort and squash it. Over the years, I saw many department directors asking for change but unwilling to ask HR, finances, PMOs and other such groups to allow for the exemptions to the standard rules needed for the change to be successful. I saw people courageously agreeing to step into a new demanding role just to be told later than that all duties from their old role were still expected of them.

Organic cohorts

Writers such as Frederick Laloux and Dave Gray and others argue in favor of a much more organic approach to change in an organization, even if the two have significantly different takes on it.

In his book The Connected Company, Dave Gray describe a model where self-organized groups (called “pods”) plug into a platform that defines the boundaries of what they can do independently and what is expected of them in return, creating a networked company. Called Podularity, the model essentially calls for the creation of franchise-like entities within your company.

This strategy calls for testing the change strategy in a receptive target group (your first pod), see how it goes, broadcast the benefits to reassure the organization. You then readjust your strategy based on what you have learned, and start with a second receptive target group.

You will notice that the platform will constantly grow and change based on the result of practice, observation and back and forth between the pods and management. If your organization is a bit larger, maybe you will end up with more than a single platform. That is totally fine.

This approach will create a living dynamic between upper management and the pods. The platform will stabilize after a while but will always keep this ability to grow and change to better adapt to your current reality in a far more natural way than initiation big changes.

Use this strategy when:

When you want to evolve your company toward a more self-organized, decentralized and adaptative model, this strategy truly shines. It turns upper management into stewards of a sort, rather than taskmasters. It creates more autonomous and engaged employees, who will be better at responding to any situation that is local to them.

Avoid this strategy when:

Organic cohorts change people. Avoid this strategy when you require only a temporary change and plan to go back to normal after a while. It would create a traumatic effect even more important as a Big Top-down change as your employees will feel betrayed to have been granted autonomy only to see it recanted without cause.

Know the risks:

Going toward self-organization and autonomy changes people and the dynamics of the social contract between employer and employees. While this isn’t a problem in itself, it can be a risk to an organization who doesn’t realize the depth of the change in expectation about the dynamics within the organization. Understand what these kinds of changes mean and start on this path only if you feel that you can live with them.

It’s important that your pods get their constraints from the platform and not from the usual sources from the rest of the organization. The reason for that if you ask a group to change but still forces them to conform to all the same rules and requirements as before, you are not only sending a mixed message but in many cases you are preventing the change from succeeding.

We see this situation with Agile transformation all the time: the company request that a group becomes Agile but instead of gathering to their specific needs they still force the group to conform to traditional financing models, conventional project management models, and so on. The Agile transition fails to deliver on its promises simply there was never a real change, just a chaotic mess of contradicting rules.

Getting Help

Change management isn’t easy, and it’s certainly not second nature to most people. Getting professional help is advisable. To that end, many organization hires external consultants (like me).

Getting the right help can be tricky. Many consultants are familiar with only a specific approach to change management and might not be equipped to advise you properly. Look for a versatile one with experience, rather than one branded to a specific approach.

Don’t hire a consultant to drive the change for you. Your organization should take ownership of the change, and the actual work should be done by internal people. This is the only way that the consultant’s expertise will pass on to your organization and allows you to reinforce and maintain the change over time without depending on the consultant.

Don’t keep the consultant for too long. The value of an external consultant over an internal change manager is as much the different perspective brought in than the expertise. Perspective needs to be constantly nourished by different experiences and will weaken when deprived of that diversity. I wrote a blog post on that very subject.

Getting rid of change management

Change management will always be traumatic to an organization, even when that trauma is lessened by using the right strategy. The only way to getting rid of it to move away from change management.

Continuous improvement is a different type of strategy to approach change. Kanban and agile teams are already using this concept, but nothing limits it to them.

In continuous improvement, every group, no matter its size, strives to improve itself, its members and the benefits it brings to the company. It’s an entirely decentralized approach to change and adaptation that allows an organization to adapt and evolve as needed to better respond to its context while still following a vision.

I’ll discuss more organizational continuous improvement soon, so stay tuned!

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

If you have ever lead a change endeavor, you had the pleasure to face some challenges. The fear and confusion brought by poor communication. The awakening of the organization’s immune system and the blanket resistance that comes with it. Or the planning is ridden with as many potholes as a Montreal’s street (believe me, that’s quite a lot).

One of the largest challenges is the sheer volume of situations you need to pay attention too, regardless of what they might be. It forces you to dilute your energy and often makes you lose sight of the goal or purpose of the change. There’s just too much noise.

The problem, however, isn’t that there’s too much to cope with. It’s just that we lose sight of what matters in all the noise. You can’t do everything, win every argument, convince everyone or even fight every possible battle.

The solution isn’t complicated, although it’s not easy. You have to learn to let go.

My younger self-learned that through a Zen practicing teacher of mine who would answer nearly all of my rants with the most frustrating questions ever: “Why?” and “Does it matter?” If you can’t answer those questions in a satisfactory way, then you have to let go.

Let go of what’s not worth fighting for

Learn to choose your battles. Some of them are decidedly worth your energy and should be fought to the bitter end. But such battles are few and far between.

Think about what you are about to fight for. Think of your reasons to fight. What you expect to get out of it. You would be surprised at how many of those important battles are in fact utterly hollow.

We get into most of our fights because of pride and stubbornness. Just like fighting things you can’t change, fights that aren’t worth the cost will just deplete your precious resources. Again, the trick is to be able to figure out the ROI of a potential fight quickly.

Compromising or switching to a different solution that accomplishes the same purpose but without the opposition is the best option for a potentially costly fight.

Let go of what you can’t do anything about

You can’t fight the wind.

Amongst the battles which are not worth the cost, fighting against constraints that will not change are the most wasteful. Compromising will not work on those unless you are the one making all the compromises.

Those immovable constraints need to be identified quickly and then dealt with with a bit of strategy. Some you can circumvent, some you leave alone, some you undermine undermined and, like the wind, some can be harnessed and made to work for you.

Keep in mind also that it is not because you cannot do anything about a constraint or situation now mean that you won’t be able to do something about it later. Context change and essential constraints can become irrelevant or beneficial.

Let go of that good idea you had

Yes, that idea was not just good, it was impressive.

Impressive enough to redo all your change plans to accommodate it? Can you sell that to everyone involved? No? It either wasn’t that good of an idea, or it wasn’t the right time for it.

Ideas are a very personal thing. We get attached quickly to the promising ones. But the better the idea, the more dangerous it is for that exact reason: it is too good to cast aside.

When such an irresistible idea comes, get into the habit of monitoring the cost of keeping it alive. The very second that cost surpass the benefits, it’s time to let it go.

Let go of that thing you really liked

Everyone have things we love and loathe to leave behind. In every change effort, you’ll find at least one such thing.

But it’s a thing. You can let go of a thing. You have a difficulty of letting some things go because of how it makes you feel, the time it saves you, or any other such underlying reason. By identifying that underlying reason you don’t want to let go of the thing, you can start looking for a replacement that fit with where you want to go.

Your thing can be many, well… things: It can be a tool, a location, a habit, a relationship. A lot of baggage makes moving forward more challenging. Find the essence and turn baggage into a springboard that will allow you to jump forward.

Focus on what’s essential

That very zen approach to change help getting rid of the noise so you can focus on what’s important. That’s the key to a successful change endeavor.

Learning to let go of the non-essential is simple to understand, but in practice, it’s hard to master. Dismissing the most trivial will come quickly enough, but even after years of practice I sometimes still struggle with letting go of whatever is close to my hard.

The practice of letting go is like a muscle. Just keep working at it, and it will become easier over time.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca

It can move us, persuade us, makes us relate to another’s plight. Good narratives follow a structure that has been passed down from one generation to the next, making the most frightening things clear and somehow reassuring. Even surprise turns of events are expected and accepted.

Change management, on the other hand, is the polar opposite. Information is lacking, communication breaks down, and structure is often lacking or is indiscernible.

Intuitively people perceive the events around them as stories, and change management initiatives are too often partial stories, filled with cracks and uncertainty. The mind being a powerful storytelling tool, it will naturally fill those cracks and, being geared for survival, it will fill them with dreadful things.

Using storytelling as a means to communicate change, make people empathize with it, and fill the blanks with something a bit more positive than dread.

How can you do that?

Create context

Every story needs a frame, a context, and yours is no different. Change projects aren’t born of thin air, and people need that context to be able to ground the reasons for the change in their minds.

We often neglect to add context to avoid admitting failure or a lack of control on an external situation. We might believe it will protect us, or the employees, but people aren’t fools. Their mind fill cracks in stories with dreadful things, remember? They will expect reality to be far worse than it actually is.

Transparency can go a long way to properly frame your narrative and make people understand the purpose and the stakes. People can smell a phony, so being genuine is the best strategy here. Understanding is how you get them on board. It makes them realize that the planned change is necessary.

Think protagonists and antagonists

Stories usually follow a simple framework: a protagonist lives in a status quo, then comes an antagonist (human, thing, event) as the bringer of change, which disrupts that status quo prompting the protagonist to take action in a way that will make him change and grow.

Your story also needs protagonists and antagonists. In organizational changes, the protagonists are easy to identify: it’s your organization and the employees. The main antagonists are what forces the changes: could be a market change, could be a competitor. Protagonists and antagonist are not inherently good guys or bad guys.

In the movie The Karate Kid (I’m showing my age, I know), Daniel-san is clearly the protagonist. Johnny, the bad kid who beat Daniel early on, is the original antagonist who prompts Daniel to learn to fight. However, it’s Mr. Miyagi, a good guy, who the main antagonist of the story. The changes he brings in Daniel-san are much deeper: he teach him to fight, but he also teaches him to live. Teachers can be great positive antagonists.

As a change management consultant, I often end up in the role of an antagonist. A market shift can be your main villain, but as an agent of change, I’m also an antagonist, albeit one who works for their best interests.

Understand the role you need to play. Use context to ease the role of the antagonists.

Mind the rhythm

The three acts structure so ubiquitous in novels, plays, and movies is one of the most recognizable narrative tools. It helps structure the story and crate a parallel in how people masters new situations or new skills.

Act 1 is all about setting the table. The purpose and stakes for the change must be apparent in this act. It is also the moment to get quick wins, and both increase people’s confidence and support the initiative.

Act 2 is when things become difficult. The quick wins have passed. The real opposition begins. In change management, it is usually the moment the organization’s immune system kicks in. Those who have bought into the need for change will have to face the resistance of others. Progress is made inch by inch if there’s any noticeable progress at all. Fatigue sets in.

The Pit of Despair is the trickiest part of any change initiative. Tired people lose confidence, and it may seem that it would be better to stop now rather than sink further.

Again, the power of storytelling can come to your rescue. Everyone who have read a book or seen a movie understand that there’s that middle part where everything seems lost. The protagonists need to rally, find back their center and push through. People all have that understanding deep inside their minds, what we have to do is to wake that understanding.

Get rid of the noise, make the focus clear. Show them all that they have accomplished. Make them understand that the larger the challenge, the greater the growth. Natural leaders tend to emerge in the darkest hours. We need to help them do so.

Act 3 starts when the result of previous efforts start paying off. As people realize the benefits of what they went through, confidence comes back. It doesn’t mean it’s smooth sailing from there, but all the major hurdles should have passed.

Your story is interactive

Stories printed on dead trees or committed to film are static. Since yours is dynamic, it is bound to change and evolve as your project moves forward. This is a good thing.

A living story can be reframed as needed. Its context might evolve. The characters have a mind of their own. Use that.

Keep your planning dynamic, able to change as needed. A relatively stable frame is important, but let the details emerge. Enlist those who have bought into the purpose and stakes and made them their own’s to help you shape the next step in the developing story. Make sure the natural leaders who will emerge to guide your team out of the Pit of Despair become part of the storytellers.

Celebrate the happy ending

A story is a journey. You know where it starts, you will get surprises along the way, and at some point, it needs to end. Stories that never ends lose their meaning over time.

When that ending comes, be sure to take some time to celebrate successes with those who participated, and mourn those lost along the way. Celebrates those who stood up in the darkest hour and became leaders.

Protagonists are meant to grow from a story for it to be significant. Be sure to reflect on what happened, as a group, and learn from it. Acknowledge the leaders who emerged to help others climb out of the Pit of Despair.

This story might have ended, but the next one is just further down the road.

Maurice Lefebvre

I am a futurist, system thinker and organizational transformation expert, dedicated to easing our transition into Society 5.0. I am available as a speaker through the think tank Hivernité (www.hivernite.ca) as well as a trainer and organizational coach through Moabi Formations (www.moabiformation.com).

www.hivernite.ca