Do you want to be different or do you want to change?
being different or change – what’s the difference (pun intended)?
Something that comes up more often than you’d think when I discuss how I support clients on change – the question of whether they’d need to change things in order to be different. Well. Ok.
It is kind of a tricky question per se and it applies regardless of whether were talking companies or people, and it can get very deeply personal rather quickly once we’re talking people. That’s why I think it’s worthwhile looking at it from a simple perspective first: a row of (nearly) identical houses, built similarly or the same, at the same time, with the same material. Something like this row of houses.
Now, lets take a step back from the pic. I haven’t seen those houses initially (they’re in Edinburgh Old Town, btw). Looking around, I’d assume they’re more or less built from the same stone, in a similar style and have aged similarly.
That’s one (past) starting point: a row of similarly grey houses. The photo depicts the status quo today. A row of buildings that LOOK different: bright colours – blue, pink, cream, red, and so forth. Maybe some will be yellow, or green in the future? Just for the sake of being different, perhaps?
Now, bear with me, just one more step: how do we get from identical grey to boldly different colour? We CHANGE them!
I’d imagine that someone somewhere sat down and said: I want a bright pink building. There, that’s your vision and your goal!
Then you sit down some more, assess where you’re at aka the state of your buildings, the dirt, the soot etc., assess what needs to be done (cleaning, base layer, paint), your resouces (money and/ or manpower), and map out a project plan. And THEN you start the actual work.
And all of that, both the roadmap and the actual doing - that’s CHANGE.
The outcome is BEING DIFFERENT.
The amount of change that needs to be done, well, that’s determined by three things:
your starting point
your desired outcome
the (amount of) resources you have
Summing it up
does it require change do be different? – YES
can you determine how much? Also YES
If it seems to be too daunting – adjust the outcome and/or look for resources. (NB: it is kind of difficult – aka virtually impossible) to adjust your starting point. It is of course totally feasible to define intermediary outcomes and steps though.
Where do I support? All of it – depending on your wishes and my capabilities (and availability). Lez’s put it this way: Painting houses isn’t really my core competency ;-)
Here’s more on change…
Something that comes up more often than you’d think when I discuss how I support clients on change – the question of whether they’d need to change things in order to be different. Well. Ok. Let’s dive right in!