...the following is a letter to an editor...

Avoidance of chaos is the single most common cause of chaos. The root beneath this losing strategy is the notion that chaos is somehow bad, an undesirable state, and evidence of poor management, weak leadership, or sloppy planning. I see this attitude in your statement, "A good change manager minimizes the chaos involved in moving from the old to the new status quo." And also in your statement, "A good change manager reduces the pain involved in even those situations where the change is unwelcome and does not result in a better place for all concerned." Minimize chaos? Reduce pain? What IS a good change manager, some combination of order inducer and pharmacist? I don't think so!

Most of my clients wrestle with this issue. They equate good with predictive or, if not predictive, with results that do not shock or surprise. Good is continuous. Good is best represented by a smooth, not a sharply discontinuous, curve. Good is tidy. Good is happy. Good is the right side of the yin-yang symbol.

But experience is not simply right-handed. Experience is ambidextrous. Much of what is worth learning can only be grasped with our non-dominant hand. These operations are unpredictable, surprising, discontinuous, messy, sometimes sad or scary, and often sloppy. Chaotic. Moving to reduce the chaos inevitably reduces the potential for learning. Calling our messes bad disqualifies much otherwise useful experience.

I recently found a book that expresses this idea beautifully. It is called One Continuous Mistake by Gail Sher (ISBN:0 14 01.9587 4). Her premise is that the most encumbering barrier to every writer is their belief that good writing is the result of a smooth and satisfying writing experience. As all writers know,good writing is not produced by a tidy process whereby deathless prose flows from fingertips to paper. It is produced by a process best described as "One Continuous Mistake," where the sum total of the mistakes yields timeless beauty. Quite a contradiction.

And contradiction is what Chaos is really about. It is the time where our story for how the world works fails to explain our experience, where our logic fails us. There can be no logical exit point from this state because our logic doesn't include these conditions. Chaos is where we seek the logic shown missing. If this has to be a tidy process in order to be good, most will either conclude they are bad or, more commonly, simply go unconscious in the face of the experience.

And this comes to my definition of good change management. A good change manager maintains consciousness through the chaos, seeking neither to avoid it or vilify it, but to learn from it. I would not include in my definition thrill seeking managers who try to give everyone an 'E' ticket ride so they can learn more. This is just cruel. Nor would I include in this definition any sense that it is the change manager's job to keep anyone else awake through the experience. Others might become more attentive to what's going on with the influence of the attentive change manager, but each will cope with the experience as they cope with it. Getting better at coping with it is the real key.

I think the idea that change should be easy is a modern one, the product of our instant and easy access society. This is a society where having cake rarely involves making cake, someone else absorbs the mess while we enjoy the result. When we say we want change, we mean that we want cake, not that we want to make some cake. They are very different.

I start every project with what I call a dedication test for my prospective community. It is a test to determine their capacity for tolerating the continuous mess that real change quite inevitably induces. I don't like to work with those who have no stomach for making cake. They complain too much and treat every messy pan as evidence of failure. After all, they don't look like cake. I see many project teams struggling to hide what's really going on because it's messier than their managers can stomach. The teams know it will turn out looking like cake as long as they can keep the tidy-minded managers out of the kitchen until the frosting's spread.

I have some letters from my ancestors who were some of the first to cross the Oregon Trail in the early 1840s. Each letter ended with the phrase, "If I live...", such as "If I live, I will see you in the spring." This was stated without self pity or artificial sweetness. It was, and still is, a simple fact of life.

David
6/10/00
Portland, OR