Are we inhibiting the change we are trying to bring about?

I’ve doing more reading in the area of influencing the future (see post on understanding, mapping, and influencing). Recently finished Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey’s How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work. I’ve been a fan of Kegan’s work and the title attracted me in that one area of “personal development” I’ve been working on is paying more attention to not only what I’m saying, but how I’m saying it.

In brief, I got so much more than that out of this book! I won’t go through all the ideas/themes that I picked up. It’s a very personal approach, and they recommend that you be prepared to work through the exercises (which I did).

Perhaps the biggest idea for me, which should be clear to me as a futurist and student of systems, is that systems seek equilibrium – “resistance to change” is simply a system seeking to maintain its equilibrium. Put differently, forces working for change inevitable encounter forces working again it (okay, still pretty obvious), and the kicker, is right on page one: “we must pay closer attention to our own powerful inclinations not to change.” Aha. Not me, right? Surely I have no such inclinations. Well, that’s where some of the personal work comes in, in terms of identifying some “hidden” dis-inclinations to change within us. I did find some!

To build the argument a bit further. They talk about how leadership “is a much more widely distributed and frequented activity than we are often given to believe.” (p.2). That’s been resonating with my work with clients on how they have the power to create change – more than they tend to believe they have.

After identifying typical struggles with leading and change, they bring it to the personal level (p. 3):

• It is very hard to sustain significant changes in behavior without significant changes in individual’s underlying meanings that may give rise to their behaviors
• It is very hard to lead on behalf of other people’s changes in their underlying ways of making meaning without considering the possibility that we ourselves must also change

There it is. A nice reminder for we change agents to look at ourselves in relation to the systems we are trying to change. Here is a real beauty (p.63): “…for every commitment we genuinely hold to bring about some important change, there is another commitment we hold that has the effect of preventing the change.” Like I said, got to do some personal digging here to get to this, but if you do, you may well find something (again, I did).

There’s much, much more, but I wanted to call out this focus on our own potential role in inhibiting the change we are trying to effect. Andy Hines