us where we are? What keeps it all in place? It’s not the rules, or the roles, or the values, or the initiatives. It’s some hard-to-define amalgam of it all – the system. And this mystery must be maintained each time a decision gets made to do something that will affect more than a small handful of people: individuals going through change must maintain their internal criteria – beliefs, values, norms, politics, dreaThe old adage goes: no one likes change. But I believe that people enjoy change; they just don’t know how to change without disrupting their status quo.

That doesn’t need to be the case. Change can be easy, with little drama or trauma. We just need to know how.

REASONS WHY CHANGE IS DIFFICULT

Why does change appear to be so difficult? Because our status quo seems set in concrete and we don’t know how to go about making changes unless we have some assurance that a new comfort will result.

The culture, rules, and environment that we currently live or work within is the result of many decisions that have been made, over a protracted time period, that continually create and maintain the status quo.

As a group or company, we start with some sort of vision, or belief, of who we are and what we want to achieve. Although some of this is verbally expressed, much of it is non-verbal. For example, I’m sure none of the founders of IBM verbalized a desire to represent “mainstream business” and to symbolize conventional professionals (remember the gray suits, white shirts, no facial hair, etc.?).

We then populate our environment to represent a look or a feel that we want to embody. We put policies in place to enable everyone who joins to adopt the same ethos and become part of our story. Obviously, any change that our companies make must also support our story. But outside of some rules and values laid down in our HR booklets, do we all consciously know the values and beliefs, rules and politics, relationships and vendor initiatives that consistently represent our status quo?

What, exactly, did we have to know or believe to get us where we are? What keeps it all in place? It’s not the rules, or the roles, or the values, or the initiatives. It’s some hard-to-define amalgam of it all – the system. And this mystery must be maintained each time a decision gets made to do something that will affect more than a small handful of people: individuals going through change must maintain their internal criteria – beliefs, values, norms, politics, dream

w to go about making changes unless we have some assurance that a new comfort will result.

The culture, rules, and environment that we currently live or work within is the result of many decisions that have been made, over a protracted time period, that continually create and maintain the status quo.

As a group or company, we start with some sort of vision, or belief, of who we are and what we want to achieve. Although some of this is verbally expressed, much of it is non-verbal. For example, I’m sure none of the founders of IBM verbalized a desire to represent “mainstream business” and to symbolize conventional professionals (remember the gray suits, white shirts, no facial hair, etc.?).

We then populate our environment to represent a look or a feel that we want to embody. We put policies in place to enable everyone who joins to adopt the same ethos and become part of our story. Obviously, any change that our companies make must also support our story. But outside of some rules and values laid down in our HR booklets, do we all consciously know the values and beliefs, rules and politics, relationships and vendor initiatives that consistently represent our status quo?

What, exactly, did we have to know or believe to get us where we are? What keeps it all in place? It’s not the rules, or the roles, or the values, or the initiatives. It’s some hard-to-define amalgam of it all – the system. And this mystery must be maintained each time a decision gets made to do something that will affect more than a small handful of people: individuals going through change must maintain their internal criteria – beliefs, values, norms, politics, drea

eve. Although some of this is verbally expressed, much of it is non-verbal. For example, I’m sure none of the founders of IBM verbalized a desire to represent “mainstream business” and to symbolize conventional professionals (remember the gray suits, white shirts, no facial hair, etc.?).

We then populate our environment to represent a look or a feel that we want to embody. We put policies in place to enable everyone who joins to adopt the same ethos and become part of our story. Obviously, any change that our companies make must also support our story. But outside of some rules and values laid down in our HR booklets, do we all consciously know the values and beliefs, rules and politics, relationships and vendor initiatives that consistently represent our status quo?

What, exactly, did we have to know or believe to get us where we are? What keeps it all in place? It’s not the rules, or the roles, or the values, or the initiatives. It’s some hard-to-define amalgam of it all – the system. And this mystery must be maintained each time a decision gets made to do something that will affect more than a small handful of people: individuals going through change must maintain their internal criteria – beliefs, values, norms, politics, drea

yone who joins to adopt the same ethos and become part of our story. Obviously, any change that our companies make must also support our story. But outside of some rules and values laid down in our HR booklets, do we all consciously know the values and beliefs, rules and politics, relationships and vendor initiatives that consistently represent our status quo?

What, exactly, did we have to know or believe to get us where we are? What keeps it all in place? It’s not the rules, or the roles, or the values, or the initiatives. It’s some hard-to-define amalgam of it all – the system. And this mystery must be maintained each time a decision gets made to do something that will affect more than a small handful of people: individuals going through change must maintain their internal criteria – beliefs, values, norms, politics, drea

us where we are? What keeps it all in place? It’s not the rules, or the roles, or the values, or the initiatives. It’s some hard-to-define amalgam of it all – the system. And this mystery must be maintained each time a decision gets made to do something that will affect more than a small handful of people: individuals going through change must maintain their internal criteria – beliefs, values, norms, politics, dreams, history – while making a change, even if it’s the change that is sought after.

ACKNOWLEDGING A PROBLEM THAT MUST BE FIXED

For some reason, when we, as sellers or coaches or managers or professionals, see an unresolved issue – either a problem, or an incomplete element that we believe needs resolution – we forget that the identified problem we want to fix is part of a complete system that has functioned ‘well’ for some period of time. When we see a problem our solution can resolve, we assume that we are needed, and that if we present or identify what we consider a solution, that the Other will know what to do.

But that’s not true. People and policies and relationships don’t change because something new is introduced into the system: indeed at the point something new is introduced, the elements we’ve defined as problematic go into homeostasis and protect the status quo. Remember that we’re working with a system here – one that has been static and has continually re-upped it's own internal processes to create consistency and comfort.

Whatever the change may be, no matter how small, before we’re ready to shift our status quo, we need to know that the change must match the criteria of what it’s replacing, or the new element will be rejected by the system.

That said, it is extremely difficult for an insider to take an unbiased look at the full range of systems that make up their status quo. Since little is explicit, it’s even difficult for insiders to understand the complexity of their current situation. Often the behaviors and decisions that were made through time and carried out daily through policies and people exist on the s