Final Thoughts
Managing Change Through Improvisation
The whole world is changing under our feet. As we walk toward the future, we don’t know what’s going to happen next or what direction our path will take. Change can create equal parts fear, anticipation, and stomach pain.
We resist change because of our ingrained patterns and the constant pressure of life; we want to do things the way we know because we’re pressured for time. We want to save face because we don’t want to look stupid in front of colleagues. We want to protect our source of income, and we fear the unknown. This is very messy stuff.
Harvard Business School professor Michael Tushman extolled the importance of not getting locked into the past in his work on dissent. “The key,” he said, “is to hold paradoxical ideas … to think in the future and the past, simultaneously…. People prefer not to know about the future because it’s so threatening to entrenched interests and to career competencies.”
Innovations often lead to very difficult change; people are losing their jobs and processes and products are increasingly obsolete. It is absolutely possible that we will, if we haven’t already, suffer mightily from innovation and change. Most of the stories I’ve told previously were about how people leaned into change, improvised, and benefitted. But there have been many times in my life where change was difficult, emotional, and life-changing in a painful way.
All the more reason to be an improviser. These behaviors travel across industries and will stand you in good stead no matter what happens. The key is to be aware of your options. Let’s look at three final topics that will allow you to better manage the inevitable change that comes along with innovation. Let’s explore connections, brain science, and letting go of control.
When things go haywire, the first thing we do is look around for someone we trust. Imagine that you walk into work and there’s an unexpected announcement that your office is closing, a buyout is taking place, a leader has suddenly stepped down, or the company has lost a major client. Trust equals safety, and when our fear and worry kicks in due to change we run to someone safe. We want to discuss our surprise and concern with someone to whom we are connected, who has been there before, who has our back. The important part is to create those connections before the crisis.
Granted, crisis is often the driver of sudden, deep connections. We all know the stories of people who’ve formed lifelong bonds over the shared experience of crisis. However, crisis in corporate environments can sometimes be a drawn-out affair. It’s not as though we can pull together for a day and solve everything.
So, spend some time thinking about your connections. There are two levels you can consider: First, how close are you to the closest people? Have you taken the time to really get to know your colleagues, team, and even vendors you work with? Is it always “work as usual” or have you strengthened those relationships through conversation and collaboration? Consider your obvious relationships of family, neighborhood, place of worship, or school; the people who are part of the constant fabric of your life may have so much more to offer if you get to know them better.
Second, improvisation encourages diversity, but getting to know people who are very different from us can be uncomfortable. That’s OK! As long as you approach conversations and interactions with good intentions and a dose of humility, it will be worth it. We all trip up, and it takes some time to get to know people who are different. If you make a mistake, apologize, (hopefully) laugh together, and try again. Most important, don’t hesitate—take the time to speak with, get to know, and engage with people; find commonalities. Even the smallest, seemingly inconsequential connections can have impressive results.
Alex Pentland, author of Social Physics and an MIT computer scientist researching big data, did a study on the power of small connections. He was most interested in human, face-to-face interactions, so he and his team looked for an environment in need of change. They chose to work with a banking call center that had certain individuals and teams suffering from poor performance. Call centers are a great environment for research because everything is measured: the amount of time to pick up a call, amount of time with the client, words used by both the client and the call center pro, and exact results and outcomes. The researchers persuaded the call center leadership to allow the whole team to take their coffee break together. This is normally restricted, because a call center always needs staff covering the lines, but leadership was so desperate that they were willing to try anything.
The group coffee break was the only major change that constituted the study. I know you’re waiting for me to tell you about the special programming or intensive coaching that happened during those breaks. But Pentland and his associates didn’t know or control what the team talked about; all we can assume was that the team took time together, socialized, commiserated on issues, connected with ideas, and got to know one another. Face-to-face.
That was the crux of his research—what is the impact of face-to-face interactions? Rather than working the phone lines and taking solitary breaks, the team was able to have daily human, face-to-face connection time. The results in increased speed and efficacy were dramatic. I’m sure bank leadership must have been dumbfounded when they saw the results. Once it was clear that human connections were clearly positively affecting sales, the bank instituted this practice throughout its call centers, and generated an additional $15 million in revenue.
The smallest connections matter. Don’t discount the power of knowing your colleague’s favorite coffee drink or pet’s name. Those are the building blocks of trust.
One of the most important things to realize about change is that it messes with your brain. Stress and change affect the flow of hormones and chemicals that guide your brain function and can have serious implications. David Rock and Jeffrey Schwartz have conducted fascinating experiments on the effects of change and difficulty on the human brain, and how that is connected to organizational success or failure.
One of the most problematic effects of change is that when things don’t match up, and are unexpected, the brain sends out an error message. Warning: Things are not correct from a cognitive standpoint. When that happens, our frontal lobes—which are responsible for logical, rational, higher-level function—are besieged by hormones, such as cortisol, that our ancient brain releases. Those chemicals are responsible for our more instinctual behaviors, such as fight, flight, or freeze.
To simulate these experiences for our clients we created an exercise called Hands Up, Stand Up!, which teaches three or four very simple activities cued by nonrelational words. For example, when I say, “Hands up,” I am actually telling my audience to stand up. When I say, “Sit down,” I’m telling them to put their hands up. They often giggle nervously as I teach them the different aspects of the game. When we practice as a group, they are often completely successful.
However, when the game begins I randomize the instructions and speed up the pace. Suddenly, the group is trying to translate the instructions, match them with unrelated activities, and keep up with a much faster pace. They are having to learn, implement, change, and improvise all at once. The game is very disconcerting by design. Some people are focused and have an intense look of concentration; they usually report feeling angry or drained afterward. Some people become so confused they can’t think straight, so they sit down with a laugh and bail out. Others lose their place, try to jump back in, or watch another person to get back on track. Of course, watching another person who is also floundering doesn’t work.
The point is that there are many different, extreme, and funny responses to this difficult experience. And those responses to the game are the same that often happen during change in an organization. Consider the strange behaviors of people during a major organizational change, such as a merger. People are being asked to do things they’ve never done—sometimes their instructions are in direct conflict with the ways they are used to doing things, they are struggling with fear, and the pace of events has accelerated. Their brains are dealing with a daily dose of stress hormones. Like the game players, they bail out by quitting their jobs, try to force control through concentration and anger, and emulate others around them, which may lead to multiple people engaging in bad behavior.
We must realize that change can lead to some freak-outs.
The question is, how do we deal with it? We breathe, observe, and ask questions.
The first, most effective step is to breathe. Remember our discussion about focus in chapter 3? Disorientation and wild behavior often come about because we are multitasking and trying to manage stress at the same time. When that occurs, we stop breathing deeply. We hold our breath (often unconsciously), slump (which forces our breath to become very shallow), and tighten our neck and shoulder muscles. These responses cut off the oxygen to our brain, which in turn, makes us more stressed.
Performers have known this for centuries! We get nervous and scared before every show, so we have a process to take care of this. Have you ever the seen funny scenes onstage or in the movies of actors or singers warming up? People love to lampoon the ridiculous breath, mouth, and body exercises we go through to get ready for the stage, and I will admit, they are goofy. But they work.
Now don’t get worried. I’m not going to ask you to do a tongue-twister and deep knee bends in the middle of the office. But I am asking you to reevaluate how you manage your oxygen. Do you stretch or breathe deeply at home every day before work? If not, you are heading out onto your own stage unprepared. When we work with professionals who negotiate deals, we teach them breathing techniques they can use in the car or before a meeting, and even really sneaky ones they can use right in front of another person and they’ll never know. You need ways to calm your nervous system and get grounded.
So, find a breathing technique! I don’t care which one it is; you can use yoga techniques, search the Internet, or make one up on your own. I also highly recommend any singing class or choir. Just understand that you need a technique in your pocket to use during stressful moments. Breathe, calm down, and you’ll have a clearer head.
Next is observation. On the improv stage, we are in a heightened state of observation because we rarely get a clear explanation of the activities going on around us. Our troupe member is engaged in a silent activity and we must figure out what they’re doing before we can jump in. If you are in the middle of a scene and someone walks over with a strange gait and look on his face, you’ll have to gauge how to react.
During change, it’s easy to hole up or become myopic. This is the time to look around, not only at your environment and companions, but also at anything else that can inform you. Keep an eye on the media, industry, government, or culture around you. Look for the unexpected next to the familiar; if something seems unusual, watch it for a while. Why is it happening? The more you know and understand, the better choices you’ll be able to make.
Finally, ask questions. It seems so obvious, yet our need to shore up our ego may keep us from speaking up for fear of looking dumb. Or we may not want to draw attention to ourselves. But how will we truly know if we don’t understand? Open-ended questions are the secret to managing life’s challenges because they demand long, narrative answers, rather than a simple yes or no.
For example, if you are in a tough negotiation or confusing situation with your team, ask an open-ended question. This gets other people talking, so you’ll learn a lot and get a chance to breathe and think all at once. This technique can even help you save face. If someone fires a tough question at you, it’s not necessary to answer right away. Instead say, “That’s interesting. Could you tell me more about your view on that?” It’s disarming; they’ll start expounding, which gives you more time to think about your response.
One of the first things we do when we sense change is clamp down; we believe that by strong-arming a situation, we can maintain control, get what we want, and force the change into submission. And sometimes that’s successful. We do get our way, and it seems that if we continue to be tough, we’ll always be able to stem the tide of change and keep control. But as history will prove a million times over, change will not be kept locked in a box. Sometimes you must let go and see what happens.
The key is that when you let go, you don’t do it alone. To get through change, even when it’s scary, we must collaborate with others. Improvisers work with their troupes to get through times of uncertainty. They are never alone, so giving up control and facing the future becomes a group experience. The first thing to ask yourself is, “Who’s in my troupe? Who has my back?”
There’s a great improvisational game called Time Dash. In the game, the first two volunteers are asked to choose a moment in time around a major life event (like a baby’s birth or a car accident) and play out a scene. For example, if the event is a wedding, one volunteer might say, “Six months before!” at which point she’ll bump into her partner onstage, fall over as if she’s spilled a huge bag of groceries, look up, and go googly eyed. We can all see that through this crazy moment of accidentally bumping into a person, she’s trying to set up a story about how they met. And if her partner is staying flexible, he or she will play the scene, also falling and looking struck by her—literally falling in love at first sight.
But Time Dash can’t be about one moment in time. Even if those first two were successful and got a laugh, they must give up the stage to another member of the troupe who chooses a different moment.
This game can be fantastic, but I’ve also seen it fall apart. As with the concept of “scriptwriting,” failure in Time Dash comes when someone wants to control the game. Somebody will decide that he has a great idea for the story and doesn’t like the fact that someone else messed with his preconceived notion. So, he’ll step out and “tell” rather than collaborate.
In improv, “telling” happens when a player steps out as a self-appointed narrator and lays out the facts, characters, and plot lines for the audience. It can be a very effective device, but not when someone uses it to squash other storylines. By denying other contributions, telling the audience (and therefore the troupe onstage) what they are supposed to know and do, she forces a kind of hierarchical control. Let me tell you from experience, it annoys the troupe, confuses the audience, and usually smashes the laughs. The worst part is that it is so obvious; even the most novice audience member has commented to me, “What was that when she stepped out and told everyone what to do? That was so weird, and didn’t follow the story onstage.”
Some readers must be thinking, “That’s great. But how do you change a hierarchical, controlling organization?! That’s crazy-talk….”
It’s possible! My company once worked with a large pharmaceutical and biotechnology company that was struggling with change. They were in the difficult process of acquiring multiple companies, developing and distributing new drugs, and opening new markets. Their core business had been around for many decades, and up to this point had functioned very well using a hierarchical command and control kind of management model.
Whether they were scientists, factory workers, salespeople, or part of management, if people entered the company in junior status, worked hard, and did what they were told, they were often able to have nice, long careers at one place. But we all know how that story ends. Suddenly, everything was changing. Scientists learned that the research they started five years earlier was no longer part of the strategy and the funding was going away. Factory and distribution workers learned that previous timeframes, resources, and processes were all under review, and starting to change. Salespeople had to move their families to new territories with no guarantees, and executives were trying to deal with new pressure from the market and shareholders.
Brains were under siege and people were having all sorts of wild, emotional reactions. There was a constant refrain echoing through the halls of senior management, “I told them to do it, but they didn’t!” And employees were saying, “I can’t do that because it’s impossible!” Everybody was frustrated.
We developed a five-part series to teach improvisational behaviors and make collaboration an intrinsic part of the culture. The first step was rolling out a full-day workshop called Managing Tough Conversations. The crux of the issue was that culturally, when things were rough, management had fallen back to the old ways of telling and then expecting people to follow instructions without comment. Because of all the change, especially the integration of new cultures from acquired companies, that mode of leadership was never going to work again.
In the workshop we divided the senior management team, which was composed of more than 350 people, into groups of 30. The groups were always a mix of executives, distribution center leaders, science leaders, and sales leaders. Those workshops were intense! The leaders were so used to total control that we first had to prove the higher efficacy of collaboration and how it could make their lives easier. You see, the irony of giving up control is that it allows others to come up with solutions, which makes them feel ownership because they are involved. Having skin in the game inspires them to work harder to make sure their process or solution is a success. Although it can be scary to give up control, we practiced using role play and then applied those lessons to real situations that were happening back at the office or facility.
The senior managers also learned key communication techniques, such as reflections, open-ended questions, and straightforward opening statements. They learned that there’s no hiding behind euphemisms. We worked on observing situations before making snap decisions, and breathing to keep clarity. They also learned, role played, and practiced a three-step process for collaboratively, positively managing any tough situation that could occur.
And boy were there some doozies! One manager told us, “Thanks to this process, I’ve been able to literally save my team. Before the workshop, I was on the brink of firing 50 percent of my people—we didn’t understand each other at all and were constantly at odds. Once I gave them the trust and room to be part of the solution, everything turned around. I feel responsible for some of the initial problems, but now feel really proud of the turnaround—we did it all together, and my team came up with most of the creative solutions.”
The leadership had to implement the process right away. Part two occurred 60 days after the workshop, when we held a virtual reunion through a videoconference to hear about their successes and concerns. We all responded, gave suggestions, and included email follow-up of one-on-one coaching or curated resource materials. One leader said, “I didn’t realize how much I would need the videoconference. I’d been integrating the process, but hearing about my cohorts’ struggles helped me realize that change is hard! That videoconference allowed me to give myself a pat on the back, and realized I was making progress.”
Right after the videoconference, step three was making an internal cohort. One of the leaders would agree to keep the learning going, and the entire group would commit to connecting internally to support, learn from, and advise one another every month. We reminded them that the key was to keep one another honest; when someone was falling back into “control” mode, the group’s job was to help them devise a way to reenter “collaborate” mode. The outcomes from this connection time were surprising new innovations.
For example, one sales leader told us, “We’re all so busy, I didn’t think I had the time to get to know our manufacturing supervisor. But the forced cohort time made me realize we had a lot in common. So I went to visit the plant and realized we’ve been telling the story of our product all wrong! There’s huge benefit to our customers in the way we manufacture—it’s transformed our conversations in the field, and sales have blossomed.”
Step four was an evaluation four months after the workshop. Workshop participants evaluated themselves, and their peers, managers, and employees also rated them on how well they were integrating collaboration into everyday life at the company. One employee commented in the online survey, “I’m really glad you cared enough to ask me about my opinion. My manager shared this process with us, and I’ve been impressed with how much she is working to improve. Understanding what the company is doing has helped me be a better employee. I feel hopeful again.”
Finally, we rolled out an e-learning version of Managing Tough Conversations. Now, thousands of employees could benefit from understanding how the process could help them collaborate with their managers and peers. The program integrated lessons from improv and humor to help drive the lessons of collaboration, and make a serious topic easier to digest.
In the midst of massive change, everyone was learning to improvise. One of the best outcomes of the experience was a calmer approach to reality. There were some people who didn’t change because they believed the upset was temporary, and that everything would go back to “normal” once it slowed down. But as one employee noted after watching the e-learning program, “I feel as though I have techniques to handle my work conversations now. I thought this might all go away eventually, but my manager has helped me realize that this constant change is how we are going to function. It’s the way we are going to grow, and improve. So I have to grow and improve right along with it.”
You have the ability to transform, change, and create in ways we can’t even predict. And yes, fear, failure, uncertainty, and discomfort are part of the package. But you’re an improviser. You will prepare, play, and think upside down, and you won’t be alone. Your troupe, which will be changing constantly, will be along for the ride. So get up on your stage, look around, and improvise.