change part 3: the plan falls apart

-possibility_open

The best laid plan of mice and men always fall apart.

Well.

I don’t know about mice’s plans but people’s sure do.

Always.

The military probably knows this better than anyone else in the world.

Now.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a plan. And even a plan for when the plan falls apart. And maybe even another thought on another plan. All those things involve change.

And then of course there is the plan you hadn’t thought of that actually becomes the plan you actually do.

 

That would really be change at it’s best.

So.

Some of the best managers don’t waste time stopping or slowing down to try and glue the plan back together again. They keep moving and make the best of what pieces are still within grasp. Maybe create some new pieces of the plan to replace some that broke off. Keep an eye on the vision or the goal. And let some pieces catch up to you later if they can.

 

In other words ‘don’t fear the broken plan.’ You just cannot live in fear of the unknown. You make your plans, take the necessary precautions, train people, assign responsibilities, prepare your mind for the action, prepare for the fact you may not know the actual form all the action will take and then go.

 

Like I said.

The military is awesome at this.

They don’t stop to fret over broken plans they simply seek out new possibilities (in fact often finding innovative fresh thinking on the move) and leave behind anything not key to achieving the goal (and that can be people and materials).

 

Look.

I love plans.

I love a well thought out plan.

And I absolutely expect the best well thought out plan to not reach the finish line looking exactly the same way it did when we started.

 

Yes.

Something will go really right that you want to take advantage of that breaks off something else that was a lower priority.

 

And, yes, something goes astronomically wrong and you have to replan while moving.

Let’s call this the breakdown and repackaging section.

The plan is all in pieces. Knowledge is untied from the foundation. The selection, flow, and discussion of knowledge have all moved from controlled spaces (at the point of creation or filtering) out of your control space and into the control space of the organization. So you end up taking the small pieces you can grasp (and are valuable to you and your vision), mix them up and create fresh personal understandings within the organization.
Some organizational behavior studies call this “shared understandings.” When people absorb similar patterns or when people create shared patterns.

Please note. In almost everything I have described above the leader had “lost” some control and passed it along to the organization. This is more than “trusting the organization or your people.” This is a personal understanding of “self.” It takes some inner strength to watch “your plan” devolve and morph into something different (sometimes better but almost always better understood by the organization).

Great leaders understand how to manage, or oversee, the breakdown and repackaging so that in the end it shifts from being “management’s plan” and it become the “organization’s plan.” Tricky. But doable.

So. The reality is the best plans are not exactly linear but evolving. Which can kind of suck for a leader/manager as well as the people involved with the change but in the end create a better conclusion.

Accept the fact a plan is always happening though progress and does not often follow a neatly developed plan. The plan will break. People will break. The leader needs to work with the energy and shape it.

I found an awesome chart from a guy named Peter Senge who has a model called “The Dance of Change Tree” (he is an engineer forced to manage organizational change so I thought he provided a really neat perspective).

change-tree from engineering perspective

Reinforcing loops are represented by the visible parts of the tree and include new business processes, networking, business results and personal results. These drive the change process forward. The roots of the tree are the factors that can hold your change process back. These limiting factors show up at the beginning of the change process (no resources, inconsistent leadership behaviors), in the middle (fear and anxiety, resentment, lack of measurement) and ultimately when trying to establish sustainability (lack of linkage to business plans, unclear management roles). But it shows the plan will break because of human nature.

So … this ends change part 3 when the plan falls apart.

I would imagine the point of this one is … the managers/leaders that don’t recognize that the best plans evolve and that the vision is the most important (not all the little pieces of the plan) … well … are probably going to suck at managing change.

 

That’s it.

Assume broken plans are possibilities.

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Written by Bruce