There is no growth without change. The “art of possible” is phenomenal.
Change is inevitable, leaders and professionals must be comfortable with “VUCA” reality, broaden their outlook, envision the future, analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Make sure they first understand what it needs to change for, keep the end in mind, build change competency, take step-wise actions to drive change smoothly.
Courage: Often, change is difficult, because most people have natural resistance for changes, preferring to get stuck in the “we always do things like that,” mentality. Being courageous implies open-minded thinking, bold perspectives, being courageous to listen to what you don’t want to hear, having the guts to make tough decisions, and taking step-wise actions. Change means you need to step out of the comfort zone, embrace uncertainties, understand diverse mindset, and different behavior patterns. Being courageous is not the absence of fear. It is acting in spite of it.
Courage is essential to enable people to operate beyond ego, become more inclusive, surround yourself with a diverse group that will provide you with things that you do not innately possess yourself. Courage is necessary for people to become more resilient by shifting from “risk-avoidance” to “risk intelligence” mentality, weighing on risk and reward. If failure is inevitable, fail fast, fail forward, learn and grow from failure consistently.
Commitment: Change is necessary, there are a variety of changes. It’s important to clarify what’s the best scenario to change, getting people to participate in defining the better change process, to ensure they have a voice in improving it, and to make a commitment for change. For strategic or transformative changes, it is difficult and requires courage and skills to really tackle what is wrong at the strategic level, make a commitment to enable and sustain changes.
If you only manipulate change at the behavior level, often change is not sustainable. Sometimes those resisting changes do not understand the real reasons themselves. When people feel like something is being “done” to them, it gets personalized and the resistance increases. Radical change starts from the mindset level, and clarifies the change scenario by asking: why to change, what to change? How to change? Who to change; When/where to change, Etc. Make a commitment to change by connecting the mind, improving engagement and harnessing collaboration.
Confluence: Change cannot be just another thing that needs to be accomplished, it has to be woven into communication, process, and action in a consistent way. For individuals, change confluence can be achieved by shaping learning agile mentality, developing humble attitude, and continuing learning & relearning fresh knowledge. The whole point of, is to keep iterating, learning, and working on a rhythm of sustained delivery.
In the collective setting, it’s important to break down siloes, create a digital savvy environment that encourages utilization and the flow of knowledge, handle information streams for different goals and different time frames, and streamline digital confluence. The goal is to make hierarchical systems adaptive so that the business can respond to the challenges of a more complex, interconnected, and interdependent world timely, people adapt to the business dynamic, and take initiative for changes proactively.
There is no growth without change. The “art of possible” is phenomenal. Fostering change is always a collective mindset and collaborative endeavor. Change can be an opportunity, but at the end of the day, it needs to be all about moving us upward. Either individually or collectively, it’s important to identify and develop a set of capabilities required to achieve your goals at a cognitive, attitudinal, behavioral, technical level, and build change competencies to get digital ready.
