Looking back, I see that I have been involved in drama of organisational change since the days I did corporate recovery work as a part of Price Waterhouse’s Corporate Recovery division. That must have been around 1990/91 – some 20+ years ago. What is it that I have ‘learned’ about this domain: the domain of leading-facilitating organisational change?
After 20+ years, I find myself totally clear on the following: almost every Top and Middle I have come across, in just about every type of organisation, in just about every type of industry, sucks at leading-enabling-facilitating organisational change. I found myself face to face with this truth, in a recent organisational context, where I find myself acting as an outside advisor on a Customer project.
If you find yourself in this ‘place’ and are content with this then stop reading and go do something useful with your life. On the other hand, if you find yourself in that ‘place’ and looking for an access to being effective in the exercise of change leadership then I invite you to listen – really listen and grapple with these words of wisdom:
Position is everything. Everything changes, even when the circumstances remain identical, when you shift your position. Try it sometime with someone who is your adversary. Shift your position. Be that person and the adversary disappears.
Shift positions with whatever barrier you are facing … in your life. Be the barrier, and it is no longer there. It is only there because we pull back, separate ourselves from it. The more we pull back, the bigger and more overwhelming it gets, and the angrier or the more frightened we become. If we really look at the anger that makes us crazy or the fear that stops us cold, we see that it develops step by step from our thought process. And starting point of that thought process is separation ……
When you really acknowledge that it is nothing but yourself, when you realise this fact, you cannot live your life in the old way. You’ve suddenly taken responsibility for it. Before, the problem was outside – your bad luck, what other did to you, the circumstances you could do nothing about… When you realise that the cause is you, you empower yourself. You suddenly become a ten thousand-foot-high buddha……. Nothing is outside of you.
– John Daido Loori, The Great Way, Best Buddhist Writing 2008
Just about every one of us (as a human being) sucks at relationship, at experience design, at calling forth engagement, at change, and at the exercise of leadership due to the neglect of this radical truth. Some of us are not aware of this. Many who us, who are aware of this truth, choose not to give life to this truth in our way of being (showing up and travelling) in life.
Is it then any surprise that just about every organisation sucks at cultivating relationships with customer, at designing-generating appropriate customer experiences, at calling forth the best of their people popularly labelled employee engagement, and the exercise of change leadership?
What hope is their for an organisation to make a shift to a customer-centric way of being-in-the-world and doing business with customers, when the Tops and Middles are not even effective in the exercise of change leadership in the context of designing-implementing a CRM system?
The Customer Blog 
I suppose your point is at the heart of most organisational mediocrity Maz. If it is all about me and never about you it will always be a little second rate.
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Hello James,
Yes, that which you say resonates with me. And it occurs to me that my point is more than this. It is that one cannot really effect change adroitly unless one moves away from one’s vantage point and looks at the situation with a rounded perspective. Call it the 360 degree view of the situation. Getting this kind of view involves looking at the situation through the eyes of those who participate in that situation – affect as well as intellect.
All the best,
maz
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