HYDE PARK — We’ve had a few calls recently from companies where the CEO has said: I want my people to know how to manage change… and they don’t now.
The candour appeals to me.
I’d only separate the “change” from “manage” to make a point.
Few of us are really good at managing change. (With Able and How being an obvious exception — what do you think I’m writing this for?) Because managing change has to do with multiple variables, schedules that cannot be confirmed and audiences who cannot be counted on to act a certain, uniform way.
And that’s why people like us get called in to teach change management skills, or indeed to manage change in organisation.
But when it comes to actually changing — we humans are in fact pretty good at it.
Here are my 3 best examples. I am sure you can think of more:
RECESSION: As I suspected, and have written about in the past, we are only starting to hear the real recession stories now. I have travelled through Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia in the last 18 months and the effects of the global recession were almost imperceptible. And yet, we know they profound. More than even 10 or 20 years ago, people have become more adept at changing their ways to adapt to changes like this. It’s not pretty, but we’re not living in a car under a bridge either.
TYPING: From the macro to the micro. But how much more basic and everyday can you get? I was never taught to type. It wasn’t even an elective at any of my 9 schools. But I can type, because my dad hauled around brilliant great typewriters that I used to bang out prose like other kids assembles Lego. Today my children – and every punter on the bus and Tube – seems to be typing furiously on some machine. There are people I have know for decades whose handwriting I have never seen.
MEDIA SAVVY – It’s interesting in a world where my beloved newspapers are going out of business like chain-smoking pandas. Kids and grown ups alike take bias into account in everything they see and read. We recognise cynicism, we anticipate hyperbole (without knowing what the word means) and we secretly adore a good piece of schadenfreude (ditto), even if it has to be made up for us.
We weren’t born with these skills. We didn’t learn them in school or from public broadcasting. We just adapted. We changed.
And maybe that’s a long-winded way of saying why I don’t like the line: “the only constant in life is change”?
It’s rubbish. It’s a solecism (ditto). Let’s not use it any more.
/df





