Change & Meaning
Change & Meaning
by Paul Kwiecinski
Change
I was reading Bob Dylan’s book, Chronicles, and he starts in on “change”: “Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it—like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, Change is Gonna Come— but you don’t know it in a purposeful way. Little things foreshadow what’s coming, but you may not recognize them. But then something immediate happens and you’re in another world, you jump into the unknown.” I’ve had that experience; I’m going along, maybe getting some momentum going in my business, and then “Boom!” something happens and it’s all different. It seems sudden, but the small and large energies have been working toward it for a while. I could smell something coming, but couldn’t put my finger on it, or didn’t take the time to reflect and look deeper into it.
The dictionary definitions of change that apply are: To make different; alter. To become different. A clean or different set of clothes. The act or fact of changing. I’ve spoken about organizational models that are either mechanical or systemic/holographic. In our mechanical model, we want to build the ideal organization, like a cool car, that will navigate the business streets and highways for some time to come; hopefully with a minimum of maintenance. But in a holographic model, change is constant, and the organization is capable of making smaller adaptations that can stave off larger more catastrophic ones.
The world is moving faster and faster, and given this acceleration of change, the car is tending to be obsolete before it gets off the assembly line. The next merger happens before the last one was completed, the game has switched since you designed your business unit. Our mental models inform the story that we tell each other, and ourselves, and are reinforced by our internal dialogue that keeps describing what we perceive in terms of our model. Change happens when an increasing amount of data doesn’t fit the model, and we can no longer twist, shoehorn, or ignore it.
Any description of reality is, perforce, wrong, or incomplete; change is describing a new reality model, believing in it, and for groups, coming to an agreement and acting from it. We can question the interpretations of our perceptual data about our world, explore other possibilities, and act those out to create the next future.
Meaning
In complex mechanistic organizations with very specialized tasks, it can be difficult to connect to any deeper meaning around specific jobs. What difference does this really make? If we increased sales of Listerine strips by 20 percent, how does that improve the world? What does it mean to me personally? How does changing the cling factor of plastic wrap impact my spiritual life? Many workers are disconnected from meaning in their work. When there is no meaning, it becomes a job for a paycheck, a “necessary evil” disconnected from what makes a difference. I need this to pay the rent or mortgage, the bills, food, and clothing, etc. We’re pretty far down on the Maslow hierarchy here.
The ideal job is doing something that one is passionate about and would do anyway, even if they didn’t need the money – something totally aligned with their values. Many are working so that they can fund and go back to their “real life” or “other” life that has meaning for them—family, friends, religion and spirituality, hobbies, challenges. What’s interesting to me is the intention of creating workplaces, organizations, that are meaningful to the people that work there. The more meaningful they are, the more productive they will be. “Part of our change initiative is to facilitate more significance and personal value in our organization.” I haven’t heard that one yet in my organizational development experience, but maybe it’s been done. As a general trend though, that is not the thrust of most organizational initiatives. “Do more with less”, “best are getting better,” “10-10-20”—(ten billion dollars in sales, 10 new products, by the end of 2020), “We Gotta Grow Organically” (not by acquisition)—these are some of the initiatives I’ve run into.
One of the keys is that the process of the work itself is meaningful, that people learn, grow and discover new insights by doing the work. Work is satisfying when there are interesting and caring personal interactions and significant growth that comes out of them. For me personally, I enjoy and learn from participating in the process of several individuals coming together for a project or initiative and becoming a team that is able to do something collectively that we could not have accomplished on our own, without the combined wisdom of the team. In that process, each team member grows independently, and concurrently in concert and in response to the others on the team, holding a higher collective purpose.
Paul Kwiecinski
Managing Partner, Face The Music
