A New Mystery
“It poured with rain the day I left. But I was filled with excitement, a strange exuberant sense of taking wing. I didn't know where I was going, but I knew what I needed. I needed a new land, a new race, a new language; and although I couldn't have put it into words then, I needed a new mystery.”
~John Fowles, The Magus
Everyone loves a good mystery. Even when the mystery means change.
And that’s exactly where I find myself: in the middle of a mysterious change.
A few months ago, I was living in a comfortable place. I had a job that I liked. We were as financially sound as we’ve been … ever. I was even realizing that I may have been too comfortable, so I started making plans for what was next.
And then it happened: I was suddenly and unexpectedly out of work. Much has changed. The feelings of comfort with career were thrown out the window in a matter of minutes. The financial comfort hasn’t faded as quickly, but every reserve has its limits. We can see ours from here.
Much has changed, indeed. And I’m curious, not just about the mystery of what’s next, but about the nature of change. Much of agile ways of working directly addresses change: how to cope with it, how to plan for it, how to mitigate it, and how to initiate and steward it among many other topics.
I googled “types of change” and most of the top results were lists of some kind of change: 7 types of this, 3 types of that, and 5 types of the other. I read several of them, and quickly found a pattern. No matter how many bullets were in each of those lists, the authors were really only talking about two types of change: sudden and incremental.
In the lean agile world, there are names for those changes:
Kaikaku, sudden change
Kaizen, incremental change
Either can be actively planned and managed or either can be passively left to their own devices. The former approach is often held too tightly by command and control organizations. The latter is often a recipe for failure for organizations that see themselves as change resistant.
One of my favorite coaching topics is kaizen and how my clients can make gradual but continuous positive change. I like it so much, I put it in the name of my company. Kaizentum = Kaizen + Momentum. The concept is simple: a little bit of change over a long period results in a lot of improvements. This means that I often overlook kaikaku as a potential path.
Different than kaizen, kaikaku means a sudden and abrupt change. Theses changes can be planned like when a company completely redesigns its products or makes radical changes within their supply chain. They can also be unplanned like a sudden loss of market share because of unforeseen competition or when someone loses their job, like me, and maybe you.
All of which takes me back to the mystery of change. When change occurs we never know what the end results will be. Will our plans work out? Will be successful in dealing with change? Will we create new, more resilient systems that will enable us to weather future change more easily?
We do know, however, that we can either persevere and make small, continuous course corrections or we can radically break from the status quo and reinvent who we are and what we do. The choice, of course, isn’t that stark. Every good plan for initiating and dealing with change will be some mixture of both kaizen and kaikaku style changes.
Kaizentum has been such a mixture. It’s the culmination of many minor but meaningful changes over the last decade plus. It’s also a product of being kaikakued (I think I just made up a word) by suddenly and unexpectedly becoming unemployed without an immediate back up available.
So welcome to the mystery. Keep reading the K-Blog to see what happens next.
