Challenging Your Certainties to Make Transformative Change
Talking about transformative change is easy enough that in many organizations it can seem like a favorite pastime. But as we all know, while talking about change might be easy, accomplishing that change can be hard. Among the many obstacles to change, one of the major ones is ourselves. Specifically, that obstacle involves our behaviors that become so routine that we may not even realize we are doing them. With that blind spot comes the potential to miss how those very behaviors are causing us harm.
The inability to transform despite the stated desire to do so was something that attracted Barry Borgerson’s attention. He was tasked with taking over a failing business that needed to change. Everyone in the company knew that change was required if the company was going to stay afloat. The need for change and the desire for change seemed like the perfect recipe for change to happen. However, change wouldn’t come. Change doesn’t happen through thinking about it or wanting it; change happens through doing it. And you can't do change unless you focus on the behaviors that stop it from taking place.
What is it about changes taking place that can confound our best intents and efforts? Is there a better way to change behaviors? This quest led Barry to create a new framework for change based on the automatic and unthinking ways that we often engage the world.
Based on his understanding of self-repairing computer systems, Barry created a more systematic approach to creating cultural and behavioral change in organizations. Using his PhD in computer engineering, he saw how organizations in many ways were like operating systems, and legacy systems at that. Operating systems can be challenging to upgrade, especially when they have not been maintained and are stuck in a legacy framework that doesn’t fit current needs. Organizations are the same way.
It can be hard to blame a legacy system that is merely responding to the user requests in the only way it knows how. The longer something has been around and been used, the more challenging it can be to upgrade even though no one might be happy with it. Anyone who has been involved in a large-scale upgrade knows that pain is involved in that process. At the end, there is no guarantee that anyone will be happy with the outcome.
There is no way around the fact that change is going to be uncomfortable, and nothing to say that it shouldn’t be. Part of the discomfort is challenging our perceptions and beliefs around what we think is true, or what should be true, or what might be true. We have to be able to face the fact (or at least the possibility) that how we are seeing the world may not be as things are, or even how it should be viewed.
By connecting changed perceptions and changed actions into a system that is more capable of making changes, we can unlock the greater opportunities for success and growth in ourselves, as well as each other. Through challenging our certainties, we can see the perceptions and practices that are holding us back.
Listen to the episode on Experience by Design here: https://experiencebydesign.simplecast.com/episodes/barry-borgerson-and-challenging-your-certainties