Have you ever started a new job and went to listen to someone’s pride product or sat in on a management meeting and thought .. oh no this is a nightmare, its cringeworthy, fallen behind and just terrible!

Yet everyone else is nodding like its the emperor’s new clothes, that everything is fine and alright because the boss has deemed it so, or its always worked this way?

So how do you change the status quo? Let me share my 5 tips to being the change agent no matter what level you work at in any organisation.

Support Diary of a Business Designer

Key takeaways

1.      Listen, learn – don’t shoot off at the mouth

• Do product discovery
• Do operations discovery

2.      Find the coalition of the willing, the decision makes and the obstaclesEmperor’s new clothes …. a story by Hans Christian Andersen where only fools could not see the emperor’s new clothes – the emperor indeed walked around naked, and everyone (including himself) agreed they could see them. This was a situation in which people are afraid to criticize something because everyone else seems to think it is good or important.

Through discovery, you find a coalition of the willing. Hence you realise that others were silently agreeing with your same observations and did not know how to break the status quo.

3.      Fact base conversations

• is not emotional statements, outbursts of proclamations nor negative commentary
• asking permission to review further, to participate in suggestions
• collect facts, metrics, measures, examples
• bring others on the journey
• transparency, and open offer to participate
• open interviews with willing, unwilling and obstacles
• avoid assumptions

You do get a backlog of what a better solution might be, the magnitude of change, and an idea of how willing participation is.

4.      Change by incremental areas of control (bottom up)

“Sphere of influence, sphere of control.”

Popularised by Stephen Covey, this concept explores three spheres: … Human beings can choose where they focus their energy and attention. The Zone of control (or span of control) includes all those things in a system that we can change on our own. The Sphere of influence includes activities that we can impact to some degree but can’t exercise full control over.

• Weigh up the odds, from your backlog of what can be changed
• What are the risks or where will you fail?

5.      Pick your battles

People would be well-advised to select a specific issue of importance to focus on, rather than trying to deal with too many things at once

Carefully determine who was in and out. Leave those battles for another day

Recommended Books:

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen R, Covey)
• Strategic Storytelling: How to Create Persuasive Business Presentations (McKinsey, Dave)
• Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations That Accelerate Change (Ertel, Chris; Solomon, Lisa Kay)

Timestamps:

• (01:02) – Step 1 – Listen, learn – don’t shoot off at the mouth
• (02:14) – Business examples
• (04:41) – Step 2 – Find the coalition of the willing
• (06:38) – Step 3 – Fact base conversations
• (09:01) – Step 4 – Change by incremental areas of control
• (10:57) – Step 5 – Pick your battles
• (11:41) – Diagram – Area of influence and area of control
• (12:18) – Recommended books