- Any change requires effort
- Too much change often leads to change fatigue
- To drive meaningful and lasting change, efforts around learning and acting both have to occur
- Ensure that both ‘efforts’ are included to avoid wasted (and failed) change efforts
Personal or corporate change is always seen as ‘hard’. It doesn’t have to be difficult, but it always will require effort to break out of the current status quo, experiment with new behaviours, and then practice them consistently to make them the new norm.
When we go through rapid change, these efforts can be taxing. Change fatigue often happens when the pace of change is too great and people don’t have the bandwidth or resources to invest the efforts into change processes.
Deciding which changes that you face are important and necessary can be a great way to bring your focus and effort on the changes that you want to commit to attempting. Too often we chase the ‘bright shiny’ new thing and before we complete more valuable change efforts, we are racing off trying to keep up with the pack. The change you have to make has to be important and necessary for you or your business – what others do is up to them.
Once you have decided to change, it is important to understand where are you changing to and where are you changing from? Are you seeking to change to escape your current way of doing things (like a bad habit) or are you seeking to become something specific? Understanding the type of change you are attempting is critical in your approach to it.
Next, consider that any long-term change is going to take learning and action. That is, you earn of a new way to do something, and you take action to practice that as the new norm. Or conversely you take a different action to normal and get a different result – you then take the time to learn from it to decide if the new way has value to you. Whichever way you approach it, the two efforts – learning and action – need to be present.
Simply doing one or the other won’t create change – acting without learning will allow the old habitual way to simply re-emerge because it is the low effort option. Only learning makes you more informed of your issue but offers no experience of what acting differently will give you.
To be effective and efficient in change, then using both change efforts in an iterative fashion allows you to maximise your return on effort – learn from what you do and chose more valued actions based on what you learn.
- How are you considering both the action and learning efforts in your change approach?
- Are you seeking to escape a status quo that no longer serves you, or are you seeking a specific new way of doing things?
You can master the change curve by paying attention to the change direction and efforts. Find out more in my new book – “Mastering the Change Curve” (available here or on Amazon). This book provides a profoundly different way to understand change and therefore allow you to be more effective and efficient in making whatever change you want to make.
