I'm Grant Symons. I convene Transition Edge to help us understand how to transition to a low carbon sustainable world using leading thinking and practices.

FIRST A DISRUPTIVE CHANGE - Thursday not Friday and a request! (Just to mix things up this week)

We love publishing these articles and have a lot more valuable content in the pipeline. To keep us inspired and help get our message out to a wider audience and help others understand the Real Transition, please make a point of encouraging at least one of your colleagues or friends to join our readership this week. Many thanks.

We have all heard the sayings “it was like watching the grass grow" or "waiting for the paint to dry." 

Many things change at slow rates, often so slow that we are bored by them and don't notice them. One day you look out at the lawn and realise you have a heck of a mowing job in front of you on the weekend. Nothing seemed to happen for a long time and then all of a sudden, you notice a big difference!. Or perhaps it was the bank fees or monthly subscription that constantly ate your bank balance and finally triggered you to make a change when you totalled up the annual cost.

Slower still, very long-term change is always at play. It took millions of years for the earth and life to become what it is now. Consider the mighty Kauri tree that is 2000 years old, adding a bit of height and some extra girth every year. 

Constant change, also known as linear change or static change shows up in predictable ways such as:

• Population growth
• Aging through life
• Product quality improvements
• Forest growth
• Soil degradation or regeneration
• Rusting, oxidation, degradation of physical assets

The opposite of linear change is non-linear change.

Non-linear change is where we experience a very rapid, abrupt, and possibly disruptive change. Here are a few examples that have a variety of consequences:

• Earthquakes
• Lotto win
• Share market crash
• A new competitor with disruptive technology
• First born child!
• Pandemic
• Power cut

Sleep walking

While this is all fairly obvious, on the whole, as individuals and organisations, we tend to have some weaknesses when it comes to an understanding of the implications and combined effects of linear and non-linear change. Typically, we can lose touch or lose perspective, for various reasons such as:

• Misinterpreting what we are seeing or sensing
• Underestimating interdependencies and chain reactions
• Silo boundaries prevent seeing the whole picture
• Biases 
• Blind-spots or myopia
• Overconfidence, even arrogance
• Lack of a structured approach and baseline
• Structural or process gaps that prevent a systematic approach
• Culture of ignorance or outright laziness

Like the proverbial frog in the pot, we might ignore the temperature of the water as it rises.

Fake action and inaction

Although most organisations sense changes are happening, they are often distracted by short-term targets, the share-market price, patch or reputation protection, power games, internal politics, or politics more generally.

The feel-good fix is often the 'Strategy and Planning' away-day ritual. Leaders spend a day and night away at a fancy lodge (especially set up for these events), write on some post-it notes, do some whiteboarding and team exercises, that temporarily get people to behave out of character (often referred to as tree-hugging), and agree to ridiculous ideas and suggestions.

Often a favourite tame consultant or facilitator, equipped with a rather flamboyant jacket or other signature prop, is added in as entertainment to dust off last year's SWOT analysis (for those of you not familiar with that term, it stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats).

They will update the Risk register, tick all the boxes, and then congratulate everyone…and if you're lucky, a life coach will be on hand just in case you suddenly realise the whole thing is bullshit! 

Most of these events are simply an arse covering exercise, staged in the hope that imagination will come to the rescue, where everyone ‘goes along with it’ without the slightest intention of changing.

With decades of experience to draw on, we estimate that 5% or less of the agreed 'action list' at these events ever materialises into any type of value. Some away-day decisions actually set folks off in the wrong direction, creating negative outcomes - as they say, "never surviving the first contact with reality"

The other 95% of the wish-list goes nowhere, as it runs into middle-management resistance, sometimes referred to as 'Permafrost', and eventually fizzles out, perhaps to be revisited some day in the next "restructure."

The consequences

There are many good reasons why change cannot happen. The point here is that it doesn't and in the past this hasn't been an existential threat.

The big problem with slow or no organisational adaptiveness is that non-linear change is on the rise, not just because of Climate and pandemic drivers, but because of the impending cascade of responses from Governments, corporations, competitors, and society itself. 

Repeating that for effect…NON-LINEAR CHANGE IS ON THE RISE

And there are moments when everything can change, 50-year-old forests are reduced to embers in days, that ancient and beautiful 2000-year-old kauri felled in hours, share market values evaporated overnight, and aquifers stop producing over weeks. One case of Covid can become 15 thousand in a week or two and 50% of your fuel stations can run out in days.(this week in the UK) 

How to respond

It is one thing to be able to spot change; what you do next is as important. And as we have pointed out in previous articles, everyone has an opinion about what could be done in a given context; probably less than one percent of the population can decide what to do next, are prepared to take action, and do so in a timely manner.

So here are some warning signs to look out for...

• Talk fests with no intent of action, just kicking the can down the road
• Folks with their heads in the sand
• Frozen middle management that "love no change" or envy change makers.
• Everyone just gets along fine – because recruitment has driven compatible, but not complementary and diverse thinking and capabilities
• Arrogant leaders or those intoxicated on power and control
• Ineffective people only talking about mitigation and excessive use of the term 'staying safe'..(sitting on the MAT)...hello, the game has changed folks, its a Climate crisis!.

A positive orientation is to find and observe pockets of resilience building and real transition emerging or happening in your organisation or community (watch them closely and learn). Build on these or incentivise more of the positive in what they are doing.

At a strategy level, if you would rather reduce your chances of becoming a boiled frog or caught in front of a locomotive, we invite you to join us on a Real Transition Leaders program, where we help you develop a deep understanding of the Transition and the role you can play in it.