The important thing is to execute against who you are; be authentic, start pumping out free content, and become part of the conversation.

Chris Brogan & Julien Smith

The way I approach resistance is influenced by the way I look at organizational change management. I see resistance as a crucial ingredient that is needed to make a change happen. Resistance fuels change. Without it, there is no change.

I get very suspicious whenever I see advertisements for consulting companies or training courses claiming they will help you to reduce or avoid resistance. They create the false expectation that organizational change is a mathematical exercise.

Emotions are the Only Way Out

They avoid to make sense of the emotional responses. Instead of seeing them for the fuel and energy they provide, they mistake them for a failure. Then, they move in the opposite direction, as if they were reading a road sign upside down.

Here is what that road sign says: resistance is emotion; and emotion is the ‘motion’ that is needed to move through the dip of change. Of course it is a bumpy road, but it is the only way through.

Lateral Thinking as an Example

One example to go forward is by looking at these reactions like Edward De Bono approaches creativity. De Bono discovered that logical, linear and critical thinking has limitations. It is primarily concerned with judging and seeking errors. He calls this black hat thinking. The problem is that it scares us so much that we want to move away from it. But the opposite it true.

De Bono’s approach is to appreciate the value of this negative thinking, instead of avoiding it. Next, he stimulates the other thinking hats to come to the surface. As a result of respecting the negative thinking and going through, one ends up with a rich palate fueling a solution for the situation at hand:

• Negative judgment (black hat) – logic applied to identifying flaws or barriers, seeking mismatch
• Neutrality (white hat) – considering purely what information is available, what are the facts?
• Feeling (red hat) – instinctive gut reaction or statements of emotional feeling (without justification)
• Positive Judgment (yellow hat) – logic applied to identifying benefits, seeking harmony
• Creative thinking (green hat) – provocation and investigation, seeing where a thought goes
• Process control (blue hat) – thinking about thinking

The bottom line is that we need to go through the roller-coaster of our own emotions in order to have the respect and authority to lead others through the organizational change.

The Math Versus The Path

The mathematical or linear approach assumes a straight line from the present state to the future state. This line is best described as ‘Analyze – Think – Change’.

Inevitably emotional side tips us and our beliefs into the cycle of change as described by Elisabeth Kübler Ross. Turns out that in times of change motivation is more important than math.

The nature of things is ‘See – Feel – Change’. The feel part, according to Kübler Ross is a rollercoaster taking us through the dip of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Trying to avoid those emotions is like cooking without heat: ingredients won’t fuse.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.

Maya Angelou

I have grown up with the firm belief that in order to achieve something in life you need to have a degree. Although I resent that statement with all of my heart I have come to a point that I no longer can deny it.

There are three ‘M’s involved in explaining why I capitulate to the non-sense of the way things are. They are: Matthew Effect, Membership and Mindset.

Matthew Effect

For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.
—Matthew 25:29

Those who have shall be given – and if you happen to be on the other side: bad luck. But it’s more subtle than one may think at first sight. In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell compares the misfortune of the genius Chris Langan to the successful achievements of another genius: Robert Oppenheimer.

Both men were equally gifted, so the Matthew effect is not applicable on first sight. However, Gladwell states that – while both men were comparable in terms of intelligence – it is their sense of entitlement that has shaped the opportunity (or lack thereof) to grow and have a successful career.

Being talented, good-looking, intelligent, etc. may be the entry criterion for the achievement contest we call life; eventually it is the access to opportunities that will determine the outcome.

Membership

When researching the main causes of hunger and poverty in Third World countries, 1998 Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen discovered that hunger is not caused by a lack of food, but by a lack of entitlement.

In the book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation he demonstrates that famine occurs not only from a lack of food, but from inequalities built into mechanisms for distributing food.

At the age of nine, Sen witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943. Later he concluded that the loss of 3 million lives was unnecessary. He presents data that there was an adequate food supply in Bengal at the time, but particular groups of people including rural landless laborers and urban service providers like haircutters did not have the monetary means to acquire food.

Mindset

Back to the importance of degrees and the perversity of entitlement. Although entitlement was described by Sen as a matter of having the opportunity to influence your own mortality, I recently came to think of it as an illusion. It seems to me that entitlement to the fruits of a degree is mostly felt by those on the lower side of the glass ceiling.

I also think that the ignorance of how little a degree is worth once you crossed that fence, makes people blind to the real gravitational forces of the Matthew effect. That is: it pulls people down, not up.

A degree is a hygiene factor in terms of Herzberg’s two-factor theory: it is necessary, but not sufficient to succeed. It doesn’t push you up, but lacking it can pull you down.

Tragedy

The tragedy of it all is that it is the degree-less people with the most outspoken talents who suffer the most from this downward spiral of I-am-not-worthy-ness. They carry the lack of entitlement as a burden every day.

They are the victims of a ‘false negative‘ or simply a stupid coincidence.  As a consequence, this world not only suffers an inflation of stock markets. Most of all, it suffers an inflation of degrees.

Hope

Ken Robinson, who recently published ‘The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything‘ became popular after his 2006 TED talk titled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” In this talk he makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Peter Drucker

“There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin

To see people who were once labeled as ’sheep’ taking initiatives and putting their ass on the line is the greatest gift of all. Finding out that I am the one now needing to stretch in order to keep up with my Oompa Loompas – instead of the other way around – is a great experience.

When I was appointed as the CIO of our organization I was completely new to this business. I have a background of engineering and until then I had been managing global projects in a multinational environment of product launches, markets and affiliates. All of a sudden I was propelled into the local niche of an HR service provider. Needless to say that my background no longer needed to be at the top of my mind. But then,… what else needed to be at the top of my mind instead?

Foreign Element

From the beginning I made it clear to my department that I had very little knowledge of the sector and that I would need all of their involvement to make the turnaround we much needed. In the beginning that seemed to be radical idea; and I was featuring as the foreign element.

In the beginning the response was quite poor and I remember the skepticism in our department. Soon enough I discovered what people had warned me for: “they are a bunch of sheep”; “dedicated followers with zero sense of initiative”. On top of that, most of the knowledge was trapped in people’s heads and within a growing organization this became more and more a continuity risk.

So there I was with my newly declared Charlie Bucket Approach. First I would learn about the current set-up. Next, I would get as much information as possible. And then – and only then – I would determine a strategy. The only certainty I had at that time: I was not going to pull it off without the Oompa Loompas.

Loompaland

In Roald Dahl’s story, Wonka’s workforce – the Oompa Loompas – come from Loompaland, a small and isolated island in the Pacific Ocean. They are funny-looking characters with strange habits. No use in explaining that my IT department was also being looked at as if they were Oompa Loompas.

Apart from being very busy at all times, nobody really knew what the IT-people where up to, what they were working on, which priorities they followed or whether it was what the business most needed.

Reengineering the Chocolate Factory

With the Charlie Bucket approach in mind, I choose to take on one challenge at a time. For us, the starting point was going to be IT governance and transparency. But it turned out that the Oompa Loompas were not so keen on it.

I remember the discussions we had on serving the internal customer. When I arrived, the Oompa Loompas were providing enhancements and fixes every day. The customer said ‘jump’ – and they said ‘how high’? No thinking, just jumping on whatever they were asked to do.

As an outsider I could easily see that we would definitely benefit from redefining ’service’. And this included saying ‘no’ from time to time and bringing structure to the work.

In the beginning the Oompa Loompas resisted this change, arguing that this would slow down the service to our customers. And eventually it would. Their argument was a valid one. But when we sat down with the customers, we discovered that they did not really need daily enhancements and fixes in their systems. Rather, they prefered transparency, focus and guidance.

This was a surprise to the Oompa Loompas and ever since that moment, they have taken the habit to ask ‘why’ more often and to challenge the things we have taken for granted.

Their Factory

I was lucky to draw Charlie’s golden ticket because I have spent half of my career in Loompaland. I can decode their language and respond in a way they understand. The one thing I learned in Loompaland is never to underestimate what these weird creatures are capable of.  And by now I can say with confidence that I would never have been able to reach this level of change in our department without their involvement.

But challenging their status quo is one thing; gaining their trust is another. Because to the same extent as I was rocking the boat, I needed to provide the psychological safety for people to grow. That’s when I found out that there is a direct relationship between the trust you gain and how vulnerable you allow yourself to be.

In our particular case I decided not to pre-fill the 15 new positions in our department ourselves. Filling the positions myself by appointing people directly would have been the safe-game. Instead we carefully crafted an internal labor market where everybody could apply. My biggest fears at that time: to have a zero response or the complete opposite – a tsunami-response.

Luckily none of that happened. What’s more, people really opened up, as if they had turned a switch in their head. The most touching proof is the one Oompa Loompa in his fifties, who made a complete career-shift. This is a guy who could easily settle for inertia and dozing-off-until-retirement. But he didn’t. To my surprise, he abandoned his burned-out past and is now a dynamic learner and a responsible initiative taker.

Managing Oompa Loompas

I am sure that other organization also have their Oompa Loompas. And I am convinced that – there too – these people are undervalued. So consider the following two points whenever you are in charge of the Oompa Loompas of your organization.

1. How to recognize them
Oompa Loompas are always busy, dedicated and hard working. However, nobody really knows what they are doing and most of the times they look a little distant and weird. This is not good for their reputation and that’s a shame because they are valuable to your organization. Don’t mistake their distant looks for disloyalty towards the organization, and don’t assume that you can put them all in one and the same category. They are a colorful subculture.

2. How to coach them
You have to know that Oompa Loompas have the capacity to engage into the most complex problems of your organization and solve them. However, sometimes they too can get lost in this complexity.

Albert Einstein once said ‘You cannot solve a problem from the same  consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew.’ Therefore there are three rules I always apply in Oompa Loompaland:
- I keep it simple and I tell them “If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, forget it”;
- I tell them to make sure to tell their customer what they are working on and what the customer can expect next;
- I use metaphors to explain where we are heading and what we are trying to achieve; this gets us all on the same wavelenght.

As for this metaphor of Charlie and the Chocolate factory, it is probably the one that makes most sense for myself. Because thanks to this metaphor I realized that I was just the Charlie who made the change possible. They were the Oompa Loompas who actually fueled it, completed it and sustained to the present day.

Behind every successful Charlie there is a dedicated team of Oompa Loompas.

Maturity is the ability to do something even though your parents have recommended it.

Paul Watzlawick

“If things start happening, don’t worry, don’t stew, just go right along and you’ll start happening too.”
— Dr. Seuss

As the Organizational Change Practitioner’s group on LinkedIn is about to reach 10.000 members, it’s time for me to look back and wonder how on earth the group got this big so fast? Sure enough, it is tempting to think that it’s all about me. But ego-centered games usually don’t last so long and don’t get so big.

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

I am sure you have come across these terms already. They are used to describe the division between generations who are connecting digitally and those who don’t. Unfortunately, most us think this is a generational gap. It isn’t. Today I saw a presentation indicating that the gap can even be split according to year of birth: 1980 seems to be the year of birth that indicates the great divide.

But age is irrelevant. Rather than talking about a generation gap, there is another difference: those who create, contribute and communicate digitally and those who don’t. In short: we are all digital natives once we decide to contribute digitally.

Trust Agents

“The stupidest possible creative act is a still a creative act.” says Clay Shirky, the most cited thinker on new media and digital economy. The thresholds for participating digitally have never been so low and not participating is no longer a matter of being too old or not being computer literate. Shirky underscores that the greatest difference between digital natives and digital immigrants is the difference between doing anything and doing nothing at all.

Chris Brogan, another icon of the digital age published a book in 2009, co-authored by Julien Smith, titled Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
The authors hand out practical advice for social media etiquette. And they make it all very tangible through the analogy of a cocktail party. They conclude that the internet and all of its tribes and communities is ultimately human because it rewards social behavior and punishes anti-social behavior.

The Bank Account

So the good old metaphor of the emotional bank account that is often used by Stephen Covey in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People still stands. It’s like a financial bank account into which you can make deposits and take withdrawals.

The most important of all deposits into the emotional bank account of trust is empathy – and that is no different in the world of bits than it is in the world of atoms.

Covey defines empathy as: “listening to another person within his or her frame of reference. Empathy tells you what the important deposits are to that person.” And that is even more true on the internet.

The Platform

Of course, there are some principles you need to change in order to make things work in the digital age. That’s where Jeff Jarvis’ advice comes in. In his book What Would Google Do?
Jarvis explains some principles that would even make sense if we would also apply them in the non-digital world.

The first is to be a platform for other people to express their uniqueness instead of a big-hit-final-destination. Second, the insight that you don’t create a community but provide  elegant organization and then the community will let you help them (if you are lucky). You don’t own the community, so getting out of the way is a strength.

The Long Tail

Jarvis’ advice becomes clearer once you have a look at the dynamics and the mechanics underpinning the digital economy. In his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson does a very good job at explaining these dynamics in depth.

In short, there are three forces shaping the digital economy and they are bullwhipping the most fundamental laws of economics:
1. The means of production are available to anyone in the digital economy;
2. Transaction costs and shelf-space costs are close to 0 in this digital economy;
3. “Wisdom of crowds“: your brand is no longer a logo or a slogan: it is the story your customers tell about your product.

This means we need to review our basic understanding of transaction costs, distribution, shelf space and (above all) scarcity.

Is the Internet Making us Stupid?

The next question is the dumb-and-dumber question: is the internet sucking every bit of intelligence, education and sociability out of us? Again, looking at the generation Y’s and how they are most of the time behind a computer screen or any other device, it is tempting to say they are dumb and anti-social.

Think again, because what they are tapping into is way more intelligent, social and human than you can imagine. Here are three reasons why I think the internet is making us MORE INTELLIGENT:

1. Multiple Intelligence

First, in 2000 (!) John Seely Brown noted that the internet is the first medium to honor multiple intelligences. He invites us to have another look at literacy. In our narrow view of the world literacy involves only text, but there is also image and screen literacy. The ability to “read” multimedia texts and to feel comfortable with new, multiple-media genres is important.

According to Seely Brown, the new literacy, beyond text and image, is one of information navigation. My ability to watch TV does not exclude my reading abilities, just as my ability to tweet does not exclude my ability to have a decent conversation at the dinner table. They are all new layers of literacy that add up in out multiple intelligence. No need to be afraid of unlearning any skill.

As Seely Brown concludes: “Navigation” may well be the main form of literacy for the 21st century. In my humble opinion, this ‘navigation literacy‘ is being topped by  a new literacy: Collaboration Literacy.

2. The Medium Shapes the Message

Socrates worried about how writing affected the way ideas would be conveyed as opposed to speaking and conversation. Nietsche worried about how a typewriter would affect how his ideas would be conveyed as opposed to handwriting. A 2008 article of The Atlantic explains that the same is true for the internet:

“Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us.”

The internet as a medium shapes the message differently than offline. That much is true. But it does not make the connection poorer, nor does it make the participants dumber. The medium merely opened another can of possibilities.

3. Cognitive Surplus

In the below TED talk Clay Shirky takes the example of the platform Ushahidi to explain what he calls Cognitive surplus. In short: “Cognitive surplus = human generosity + digital tools”

Since the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008 the Ushahidi Platform has grown into a large open-source project impacting a number of communities around the world. It was deployed in the DR Congo to monitor unrest; Al Jazeera used it to track violence in Gaza; It was used to help monitor the 2009 Indian Elections; And to help gather reports globally about the recent Swine Flu outbreak.

Anybody can contribute information. Whether itʼs a simple text message from a SMS-capable phone, a photo or video from a smartphone, or a report submitted online, Ushahidi can gather information from any device with a digital data connection.

To me this platform proves that the internet can really make us more intelligent, because intelligence is the ability to interact and make new understanding. A platform that can do the powerful math of “1+1=3″ is a social platform.

The Places You’ll Go

“Online” is a different literacy and even puts an extra layer on off-line communications. I became aware of this when I discovered some new things about friends and family by interacting with them via Facebook (which I restrict to family and friends). Some of them I know for more than 20 years and still I discover things I would otherwise not have known about them.

Is that a sign of bad communication during my pre-internet years? No. Now we just have more than one channel to resonate and each channel shapes a different aspect of my friends and family.

And there is so much more to discover… Oh, the Places You’ll Go!
…

“You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.”
— Dr. Seuss

The brick walls are there for a reason. They’re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.

Randy Pausch

It was only after I scrolled down in his reply to my own original email that I realized the damage I had done. I am a jerk. And now it’s almost midnight, so calling is not an option.

Bear with me, because ‘Mr. Communication’ is about to reveal a true story and it isn’t a schoolbook example.

Earlier last week I made it clear to Peter (not his real name) that I was not comfortable with the teasers he was sending me regarding our next teambuilding activity. It seemed to me that he was transforming our original plan of visiting a religious sanctuary into a murderer game by asking me to bring mysterious attributes and solving weird questions.

The Panic

Last time I was asked to do weird things like that was during a two year intensive course on transactional analysis involving the deeper levels of group therapy. I was not up for that and this went way beyond our original plan. What was this guy up to? All of my sensors went in red alert.

So I decided to ask him. Or rather: tell him. Because after a night of sleep – during which I could reiterate the panic and wind up some more – I decided to put it all in an email. Yep. An email.

The Solution – Or So I Thought

And it felt better. The panic was out of my system. I could breathe better and the fact that I twisted in some Monday-morning-blues and rush-of-the-workweek didn’t bother me. A bit of slam-poetry can only make things clearer.

I ended the email with the words: “Not with me and not now! And now up to you!“, convinced that he would be as tolerant and feel as light-hearted about it as I did AFTER hitting the Send button.

The Wakeup Mail

Days went by and I even forgot about the email. Until I checked the mailbox one night after coming home late, to find a crushed soul at the other end of the digital line. His response ended with: “Not sure I know what this is all about. But if you want to step out that is OK with me”.

Huh? I didn’t mean to do that! And to justify and rationalize my original intent I scrolled down to read my original email and convince myself. O MY GOD. Did I write that? Like that? I am such a jerk. And now it’s almost midnight, so calling is not an option.

The Best Part

Or: ‘Why this is so embarrassing‘

In my own trainings (see slideshow) I teach professionals that email is silver and phone calls are golden.

Truly a golden rule. One you should never forget. Thank you Mr. Communication… Now walk your talk!

Eventually I did call Peter and we straightened things out. I had the chance to acknowledge the damage done; to apologize and to get back to my original intent: simply to ask him what this was leading to.

Fortunately Peter is a few generations more mature than me and he was kind enough to course-correct and accept my apologies. He called me ‘over-assertive’; a very polite way of stating the facts.

My Own Private Refresher Course

I remember one other mail in my Inbox with the title ‘Have an Average Day’ – by Michael Neill, a remarkable coach I have been following for quite some years. I also remember thrashing that email with the same rush-of-the-workweek adrenalin that I was going to put into my email to Peter.

Now I know that I should have taken that advice and to take the day off from striving and struggling for success – and have a wonderfully average day instead…

Here is how I could have translated that advice instantly: Exceptional emails are silver, but average phone calls are golden.
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Related article: Some Mails are Better Never Sent – November 29th, 2007