Trigger Question #162:
I’m a shower person, but I’ve had the odd bath or two. My problem with using a bath is that it relaxes me to where I don’t feel like getting out. And then I become that frog in boiling water, but in reverse. I adapt to the cooling water until I’m too cold to stand up. That, obviously, cannot happen in a shower.
Imagine you are soaking in a big tub of hot water. The water cools off, but you are not ready to get out. You want to soak some more. What do you do? Are you passive, like me, and slowly cool down? Or do you change the water temperature back to your liking?
If that’s you, what do you do to raise the water temperature to your liking? Do you add hot water? Or do you first get rid of some of the cold water before you add hot water?
This is not a trivial question. It explains how we often attempt to make change happen.
Here’s another example. A new building is being constructed in your city’s central building district. How did they find the space to build a brand new building? I bet they didn’t have a space problem when the city was but a village. Today they must first demolish something old to build something new. Which is why city builders often opt for the simpler solution, giving an existing building a make-over.
You get it now, don’t you? To make change happen, we either add, delete or redesign. You want your bath to be warm again? Well, you either open the hot water tap (add), let cold water out before adding hot water (delete), or start a fresh bath (redesign).
At work, we don’t always have the luxury of re-doing something from scratch. Even a brand new project takes resources away from something already up and running. Reallocating resources always smacks of deleting something somewhere.
Humans don’t like losing things. We would rather hang on to the certainty of what we’ve got than risk losing it to gain something new. We feel less stress when change happens through building on what is already there.
Stress easily turns into fear when change can only happen by getting rid of something, especially if that something once mattered and had meaning for us. Which is why we mostly tackle change through adding, not deleting. Even though that is often less effective.
If you are a leader and manager in charge of making change happen, what should you do? Figure out how to sell subtracting as addition, as the best way to create space for something more meaningful.
It’s called vision.
Welcome to my side of the nonsense divide.
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