While America is busy voting in a new president (and keeping the rest of the world on tenterhooks), I’ve been thinking about change (again). There’s just no escaping it, at home or at work, or out in the big wide world beyond my own domestic and professional day-to-day. The immediacy of it all is partly what’s caused a hiatus in my posts.
For some people, change seems to produce clarity of thought whilst for others it induces panic, “blind spots”, or even “head in the sand”. What I’ve realised is that when I observe change objectively from an external perspective, I experience insight and big steps forward in my understanding. However when I’m in the middle of change I can’t control, it feels like living in a fog where “the answers” keep mysteriously eluding me like will o’ the wisp.
I’ve recently been having an offline conversation with a publisher about how consultants (like me) can add value to small businesses, and it seems to me that the befogging consequences of change are part of this. In small businesses there is a constant need to be productive. Processes to facilitate productivity evolve rapidly early on and are then followed rigorously by individuals on staff who consistently shoulder workloads that would make their corporate counterparts gasp with horror. All works well until change rears its head. But in this highly efficient environment, responding to significant external change such as aggressive competition or disruptive innovation from new players is beyond the internal bandwidth of the organisation. In the fog that comes with being surrounded by change, staff respond by feeling pressure to be even more productive by doing more of the same. Whereas in fact the answer is often not doing more but doing different. Working out how to do that involves stepping back, looking and thinking – which is what good consultants do – and encourage others to do. Doing different comes from leveraging internal assets of product, intellectual property, knowledge and experience to engineer a changed process - and often changed products and services – that meet the new needs and opportunities that external change has created.
As I wrote back in July, change happens. To negotiate the consequences of change, rather than meeting it head on in a clash of old versus new, we have to use every option available to us to step aside, look at what it means for us and create nimble, innovative approaches that make the most of what we have. And yes. Sometimes working out how we can succeed by doing different can involve using consultants, even in the smallest of businesses!