Not smart enough to accept, not smart enough to adapt
By: Paul Duffy
Tags: Acceptance, Change Management, Change, Brexit

Photo by Leon Contreras on Unsplash

“You’re one of those annoying bastards who can’t let go!”

“Errr… well… yes!”

This was the highlight of a lunch conversation I enjoyed with business colleagues many years ago when one member of our team, a fiercely bright Kiwi, shared her forthright opinion on the dating habits of one of our party, a very sheltered (at least in the ways of romance) Englishman. I felt my face flush when her barbed insight pierced not just my colleague’s thin veil but also my own. I dove into my sandwich to mask my embarrassment. My memories dragged me back to those times in which I had also clung too tightly to something, or someone, unable to move on.

I have just deliberated for an inordinate amount of time over whether it was better to say, ‘unable to move on,’ or whether it would have been more correct to say, ‘unwilling to move on.’ Inability feels more accurate if only because I work on the basis that everyone goes through life trying to do the right thing, and anyone who doesn’t just can’t help being an a***hole. This confident assessment of how everyone is wired has got me through some tough interactions over the years. But I’m digressing; I was talking about letting go.

When the world moves on without us, or when people do, it is in our own interests to adapt quickly, yet speed of adaptation is not something that comes naturally to many of us, myself included. It doesn’t come easily to organizations either despite there being a whole discipline around helping them adapt quickly.

The discipline of change management helps people in organizations adopt new ways of working, and there are three components to adoption: how many people have embraced the change, how well they have embraced the change, and how quickly they have embraced the change. That final point, in relation to speed, often gets overlooked.

If a company wants to move you from point A to point B they might start up a project to build a car. By the time everyone has argued over design, color, and technical specification and a compromise solution has been delivered, everyone is exhausted and there is no more money. But having a car was never the goal; the car was just the company’s way of achieving the goal. Now the ‘victim’ who actually needs to make the journey — because it can truly feel like you’re being abandoned in this way — is left to figure out the rest for the themselves.

A project with change management would make sure you knew how to drive the car and that you knew which direction to drive. It would monitor and feed back to you any driving behaviors likely to delay your arrival or compromise safety, and it would regularly check that you were taking the fastest route. Really good projects would make sure you knew a lot of this even before the car was finished. The best projects would make sure you knew and accepted why it was so important to get from A to B in the first place, because that fosters will and desire. Desire is crucial, both for companies and for us personally.

It’s hard to accept and move on when a change comes that you didn’t want, and even harder when it’s also a change you didn’t expect. It’s important to take time to process the grief. Change can feel like grief.

As a British Europhile I recall how I felt when the U.K. voted to leave the European Union — it was like a punch to the stomach. To preserve my sanity my brain took me straight to DEFCON 1, which lies somewhere in the land of denial between obsessively digesting every tiny morsel of news to make sense of what has just happened, and burying my head in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, leaving my backside in the air in the process. But there comes a point where wallowing in the delusion that the world isn’t changing serves no one, least of all yourself.

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”~ not Stephen Hawking. (I’m still researching who said this, but it also wasn’t Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, or Nelson Mandela, who seem to be collectively responsible for about 90% of the misattributed quotes on the interwebs.)

As I formulate my thoughts on the topic of adoption, grief, acceptance and change I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that this is not about intelligence at all. (I’m going to add the word ‘not’ to each line in the title of this post.) Reflecting on my own experiences two things have evolved, which work in tandem. The first is is an increasing ability to let go, whether it be of anger, or the past. It’s not an easy thing to cultivate, but like a muscle it gets stronger with practice. The second is a corresponding increase in hope for the future. I still grieve, but hope sustains, and like a precious flame it can be nurtured into a sturdy fire.

The questions we ask ourselves have been a useful trick in accelerating my evolution. Instead of saying to myself, “what if the future is not going to be as good as the past?” I say to myself, “what if the future is going to be better than the past?” The great thing about this question is I don’t even need to persuade myself that it’s true, I just have to commit to always asking myself the latter over the former. With a little time and enough repetition you slowly begin to believe it’s true. With even more time you look for ways to prove to yourself that it’s true. Now I’m filled with hope that I speak the truth when I say I’m no longer one of those annoying bastards who can’t let go.