What sacred rule will you break?
The Change Question: What sacred rule will you break?
What if the principles by which you’re leading change fell into three buckets?
First, loose tactics
Useful things to do and rules of thumb that can be tweaked, adjusted, and discarded as required. They exist at a tactical level. Sometimes they’re appropriate, sometimes they’re not. “Use Slack, not email, to [this population] for [this type of message]”, as a bland example.
Second, proven guidelines
These might be the basics which you’ve learned, through study and experience, about how you lead change.
You might be drawing on Kotter, or Prosci, or something from McKinsey. This is your standard playbook, and you know how to run the playbook. This might be something like, “Always cascade communications through the formal hierarchy.”
Finally, sacred rules
Ah, those slippery, sacred rules.
Sacred rules are tricky and paradoxical. Because not only do we hold them to be inviolate … at the same time, we often don’t realize we hold them at all.
They exist at what the (late, great) Ed Schein would, in the context of understanding an organizational culture, call the “underlying assumptions” level. It’s the way you breathe, it’s the way you see the world, it’s water. I’ll give you some examples of sacred rules that are true for me.
“You can't sprint toward a finish line no one else can see.” Keep banging on about the vision.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has occurred.” (Thank you, George Bernard Shaw.) So, always communicate more.
“Nobody likes change, except a baby with a wet diaper/nappy.” There’s bound to be resistance.
“The middle managers will make or break your change effort.” Pour all your effort into that so-called “frozen middle”.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Not said by Charles Ducker, and I totally don’t agree with this. I think they’re the twin DNA strands of a successful organization. But it’s too popular a truism not to include.
I’m a vegetarian
So when people say “scared cows make for great steaks,” I don’t totally buy into the metaphor. But I do agree with the premise. But it’s not until you see your sacred rules, until you bring them into the light, that you can decide whether they still serve you, or whether they’re unduly influencing some of your plans.
So, let me ask you:
What feels so obvious, so true, so undeniable, so essential to the way you think about change, that it’s not even worth talking about?
