Fish Food: Episode 610
Fish Food: Episode 610
Technical and adaptive change, secrets of great copywriting, the next wave of AI, synthetic research, and observations on friendship
If you do one thing this week…
Balancing comfort and urgency in change
Over time I’ve become more interested in the myriad of nuances around managing change. It seems more important than ever. One really useful way of thinking about different types of change comes from Dr Ronald Heifetz (of the Center For Public Leadership at Harvard University) and his delineation between what he frames as 'technical change' and 'adaptive change'. In his book The Practice of Adaptive Leadership and elsewhere he describes how technical change is typically that which relates to more tangible or visible things including products, processes, or procedures, whilst adaptive change encompasses more human and more intangible aspects including beliefs, values, behaviours and thinking.
The two types of change have differing time scales. Whilst the level of short term disturbance may be high with technical change, the organisation can typically deal with it rapidly because it is able to draw on existing stocks of knowledge or assumptions and experience to find a solution. Adaptive challenges however, are more likely to require potentially broad-based behavioural change in the organisation. And since they can't be solved using existing expertise they may well require a more emergent approach and greater experimentation.
The response required to these different types of change is very different and yet, says Heifetz, we are often pretty bad at distinguishing between them. Technical change typically involves simpler challenges and fixes that don't require a change to underlying system in which they exist. Adaptive change however, may well involve more fundamental revisions to the environment in which the company operates, and may well require more fundamental revisions to the system.
This is very similar to my writing around optimisation vs transformation, and first order and second order change. Technical change is all about responding in a way that maintains the status quo, and consequently may well be an easier for people within the organisation to grasp and enact. Adaptive change is more fundamental, potentially more disruptive, and requires new or different thinking. It's harder to acheive because the system itself often resists making changes to the system.
Any change or transformation process will likely involve elements of both technical and adaptive change, but it's the latter which will likely be more challenging. For this reason there's a huge risk that the business focuses more on the technical change (adaptations to products and services perhaps) rather than the more fundamental adaptive change which is required (shifts in behaviour, outlook, approaches, mindsets). Staff will need to evolve behaviours, ways of working, and maybe even become more comfortable with uncertainty or ambiguity.
Successful adaptations, says Heifetz, are both 'conservative and progressive' in that they require careful thinking to distinguish between what from the past is worth keeping, building upon or optimising, and what needs to be discarded. 'Adaptive leaders' as he calls them, need to be both patient and persistent to ensure that the system doesn't slip back into it's old ways.
Acheiving real change therefore requires not only a vision for the kind of organisation/business that you want to become but a healthy sense of urgency to overcome the inevitable initial inertia. It needs impetus to get the flywheel going, but the wrong kind of pressure creates unhappiness and chaos.
This brings us to Heifetz's idea of a ‘productive zone of disequilibrium’. The idea here is that positive urgency and pressure needs to be high enough to generate forward momentum and engagement in the change, but not so high that it leads to chaos or unhappiness.
In my first book I used this idea to talk about how managing an effective adaptive change process means working within these boundaries. There needs to be enough urgency and sense of change to break inertia, move beyond complaency, and generate forwards momentum in a new direction. But too much of the wrong kind of disturbance may move people beyond the limits of tolerance which may generate unnecessary stress, unhappiness, and result in poor outcomes and even chaos.
The 'productive transformation zone' as I've called it above is where change happens. So what are the signals that you may not have gone far enough to challenge the business and generate a foundation for change? I think we can categorise them into five broad areas:
Behaviour — there are no demonstrable changes to behaviour, and no enthusiasm or ownership for change
Inertia — the change is happening too slowly, there are no visible signs that old priorities, ways of working, and relationship capital has been modified
Drift — the business starts to drift immediately back to the old ways of doing things
Innovation — is focused on marginal improvements to existing propositions rather than breakthrough innovation aligned to a new direction, there is no change to the rate of innovation or experimentation
Complacency — people are still within their comfort zone, and not demonstrating any urgency in implementing new strategies or priorities
There may also be signals that the type, scale or pace of change is causing you to exceed the limit of tolerance. Again, we can categories these into some specific areas:
Morale — is on a downward spiral, staff are dispirited, there is a lack of belief in the leadership
Performance — outputs suffer, the performance declines rapidly, there is a lack of attention to key business priorities
Behaviour — becomes overly pressurised or unpredictable, or characterised by unwanted shortcuts or politics
Talent — the most talented people start to leave, and there are challenges in retaining the best staff
Focus and governance — focus is disjointed, there is a breakdown in governance processes and structures, innovation initiatives start to become unfocused or poorly thought through
One final thing from Heifetz. I loved the way that he describes how the workings of an organisation can be like dancing on a dancefloor where you only really notice what is immediately around you. The adaptive leader needs to periodically 'move from the dance floor to the balcony' in order to appreciate the wider picture of what's going on. This helps them to gain a true perspective, and avoid applying technical solutions to adaptive challenges.
Leading change is delicate balancing act that requires perception, judgment and empathy. Understanding relevant signals and patterns is a critical part of this.
If you do one other thing this week…
Wow. This week we published the 50th episode of Google Firestarters (I can hardly believe it) and it’s a great episode to mark the milestone. Copywriter extraordinaire Vikki Ross dispenses a whole bunch of wisdom around brand tone of voice and what makes for brilliant copy. I particularly liked what she says about moving on from bland brand descriptors (like ‘human’, ‘friendly’ or ‘honest’), how marketers can work well to get the most out of copywriters, and how the secret of good copywriting is often subtraction. Give it a watch/listen over on YouTube, Spotify and Apple.
Links of the week
‘Imagine if every human on the planet has their own progammer that actually does what they want’. Eric Schmidt talks about the next wave of LLM AI and the convergence of large context windows (the AI can process vast amounts of information simultaneously), intelligent agents that can learn and evolve, and text-to-action which can turn natural language commands into complex digital actions. Crikey.
This is an interesting ecommerce concept - ASOS using AI to allow customers to haggle to get extra discounts (Nibble is an AI negotiation tool)
Plenty of hype around synthetic research (using Generative AI as a proxy for human survey responses) right now. This week Ethan Mollick shared a paper that seems to show that GPT-4 can simulate people well enough to replicate social science experiments. It’s an interesting idea - as this Kantar work shows, it’s likely that we’ll be seeing blended models (human supplemented by synthetic sample) for a while yet, but definitely one to watch
‘The most common view of this event and its implications…was that it was all preventable. So long as one secures a more robust solution, or makes the old solution more robust, all will be well. However, this represents a fundamental misapprehension about the kind of highly interconnected systems at play’. JP Castlin had a good post on (non-technical) lessons from the Crowdstrike debacle. Pair that with Doug Garnett’s thoughts on the stability and instability of actions in which he talks about how small issues can cascade into massive problems
This week I wrote about why some innovations take years to come to market using a brilliant example that I recently read about - the invention of the wheeled suitcase
For quite a few years I lost contact with the person who had been my closest friend through my early 20s (lots of reasons, life happens) but I’ve recently started speaking regularly to him again and its such a joy to be back in the groove. Apropos of that I really liked Ian Leslie’s 20 observations on friendship.
And finally…
The world is full of productivity tips and lists but this week I came across this particularly good example of the genre from no less than Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI (full post here). Lots of sensible things here but I particularly liked the focus on deprioritisation, compound growth in your career, and accepting that there will be times when you are less motivated (as an aside, this was a interesting long read in The Guardian on ‘anhedonia’, relating to the times when you feel flat and less able to appreciate the joy in things).
Weeknotes
Last week I was in Muscat (which is charming) working with leaders at Omantel, and also taking a few days holiday around that. Fun fact about Oman - it’s one of the oldest human-inhabited places on Earth (stone tools have been discovered that have been dated back over 100,000 years). So this week has really been about catching up with stuff I need to get done before heading off on my Summer hols proper next week. Plus I recorded an edition of Firestarters on organisational culture change with a guest that I’m really excited to have on the show (watch this space), and did a proposal for a new travel client. Because of said holiday, there will be no episodes next week or the one after, but normal service will resume on the 13th. In the meantime, play nicely everyone and have a wonderful couple of weeks.
Thanks for subscribing to and reading Only Dead Fish. It means a lot. If you’d like more from me my blog is over here and my personal site is here. If you liked this episode do share and pass it on, and do get in touch if you’d like me to give a talk to your team or talk about working together.
My favourite quote captures what I try to do every day, and it’s from renowned Creative Director Paul Arden: ‘Do not covet your ideas. Give away all you know, and more will come back to you’.