Winds of change

Created on 2018-07-24 14:25

Published on 2018-07-25 14:52

In 1964 Thomas Gladwin compared the way that Trukese people and Europeans sail on sea. The Europeans tried to follow a plan and stay "on course" while the Trukese navigators were going hop-to-hop towards the objective and decide ad-hoc what will be the next segment and how to tackle it. While plans are clear ways of presenting one's goals and share information, in a deterministic, stepwise approach, the plans require that every possible outcome is already thought of and scripted in it. Plans are great when you know the space in which you sail, the distance to the next shore exact position of islands and ability to track progress (astronomically). Plans are great when you have maps.

What if you go into the unknown, in places where you just have a vision but no paths, no charted seas? Change is always exploratory and vision driven. In an enterprise, when change processes starts, there is no chart of the process. Probably there are some war stories that people know about about successful changes or failures but a given organization is in uncharted waters itself. Not all the stories are true, sometimes sailors exaggerate and not all the dragons are known. Basically plans are just retelling of the stories, motivational parables that give courage and determination to those who are handling the changes.

What I am trying to state is not that plans are bad, they are good in known areas. I rather want to stress out that change should not follow a strict plan but a set of actions that are geared towards a goal, in some situations not the original one. Columbus plan was to reach India going westwards and staying on course. Polynesian people discovered countless islands and probably some continents by sailing in smaller increments in a given direction. Columbus' plan failed (albeit it's failure was a greater win) but this shows that exploration and change cannot be safely done by following a script because of the unknowns. Plans are the perfect methods for improvement, when quantitative data is available as flows can be maximized by following the script. Exploration is about qualitative aspects dangerous/safe, easy/hard decisions. Polynesian people were sending ships to check the seas, some ships came back with new information so that the others learnt of it. This is the equivalent of prototyping, of "throwing nuts". Change should be first isolated to some parts of the organization so that failure should not generalize while success of the smaller changes can be generalized and retold as magnificent epics that would spark the imagination of the followers.

The agile principle of "respond to change" seems to me a more suitable way of handling exploratory issues. The vision shall be followed but steps, "situated actions" should be taken every time something new comes in the change process. The context is always different from step to step and shortcuts may be possible. In the animation above, if we consider the green as situated actions and the red as a plan we can see that the plan is easy to be derived when enough of the unknown is charted out. Although it looks that it is a waste of resources to explore things exhaustively, in real life there are lots of heuristics that can be used to limit the effort and keep focus on vision. (A* pathfinding animation taken from: http://www.andrewsouthpaw.com/2014/05/28/trailblazing-and-graph-searches/).

I'd rather sail the in organizational winds of change from hop to hop, following a goal and trying to find best paths from my current position than following a long plan, probably based on heard stories, on uncharted waters. Management should help by keeping the vision consistent and reminding it often, and offering rewards for those who follow the winds.