Author: Robert Bogue

Inside change, there is a constant pull between the utopian vision that drives the change forward and the complicated, messy, reality that is day-to-day living.  The tension is necessary for change: to be always striving for the ideal while maintaining an awareness and acceptance that reality is not quite so easy.  Change efforts need their compelling vision with the slightly (or more than slightly) utopian views, because seeking these ideals rallies everyone around a cause.

The Pull – Vision

It’s the utopian vision that everyone wants.  They don’t want to have to struggle with people or parts that just don’t seem to fit.  It’s easier to believe that if we just change one thing about the organization (or everything), we’ll find an approach where there are no more problems and no more threats for survival.

Explicitly or implicitly, the need to cast a vision is a part of every change initiative.  After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, how can you possibly hope to get there?

Importantly, you cannot know all the problems that the new vision will bring with it.  Some things you must experience to know, and you can’t experience them until you’ve created the new reality.  At some level, this means that the vision will always have a slightly utopian feel, devoid of the natural challenges that happen.

The Push – Today’s Reality

Paradoxically, we often sell the idea of change against the problems and threats that we see in our current situation.  We take the known limitations, challenges, and threats to design the new utopian vision without realizing that these are the problems that came from the last change initiative.  If we’ve lived with the current state for any length of time, we’re probably amassed a long list of frustrations and challenges.  If we’ve looked at the larger trends, we’re probably aware of the limitations to our current situation.

So, while we’re selling towards the vision, we’re selling away from the current state’s problems and weaknesses.

The Gap

The gap between the vision that pulls the change forward and the problems of the current state that push the change forward is the awareness that the vision isn’t complete, and there’s the possibility that the outcomes will be worse than pursuing the current course.  People who have been through many changes often get change fatigue – or cynical – because they see oscillations, where old structures are returned to when the new structures don’t work out as planned.  And so it goes, back and forth, trying to eliminate the problems that are inherent to organizations.

The key to engaging people is to recognize that their concerns that things may be worse are real and work with them on how to avoid these possibilities.  Instead of explaining how the vision doesn’t have those kinds of problems, consider how the concerns they have could be real – particularly if the approach has been tried before.

The Nothing

In the end, there is no utopia.  There are only places which have fewer – or better – problems and those that don’t.  Our goal with any change shouldn’t be to find utopia but to cast a utopian vision and accept the problems and limitations that come when we make that new utopian vision our current reality.

Quick: what sunk the Titanic?  Obviously, the answer is an iceberg.  However, the more interesting question is why couldn’t the Titanic steer around it?  In short, because she was the largest ship of her kind at the time, and she was going too fast.  She simply wasn’t capable of making the turn as quickly as she came upon the iceberg.  What will it take to make the turn that your organization needs to avoid its own iceberg?

Mass and Velocity

It’s a physics problem, really.  Once you get a large mass in motion, it’s going to tend to keep going in the same direction.  Newton said it first, but we know that when something with a large mass is in motion, it takes more energy to stop or redirect it.  Large organizations are a lot of mass.  It’s people.  It’s policies.  It’s procedures.  If you want to change the direction, you’ll need to change the way people think and behave, and that means making some degree of impact on the tenor of the culture.  All of that is redirection, and it’s going to take energy.

The Titanic didn’t expect to need to make rapid changes in direction.  It wasn’t designed to navigate rivers or tight spaces.  It was meant to cruise across the Atlantic.  The rudder was therefore relatively small.  Even hard over (fully turning), it would take a long time to substantially change the direction of the ship.  The engines were workhorses of their era but were designed to counter the forces of friction and resistance at cruising speeds.  They weren’t designed to initiate any sort of rapid stopping maneuver.

There was a lot of mass and not a lot of energy to make changes – just like your organization.

Bigger Levers

In your organization’s change, you’ve got to find ways to get more leverage on the ability to change direction.  A little rudder, a little bit of influence, is likely not enough to stop your headlong cruise into your own iceberg.  Consider Borders bookstores, Blockbuster, or Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, or the dozens of other iconic organizations who couldn’t make the changes that the environment required of them.  Some of the brands that have survived are smoking hulks of what they used to be.

Here are four big levers that you can pull to help your organization make the changes necessary to survive and thrive:

• Gather the data – You need to know that the iceberg is ahead – or at least that icebergs are in the area. You can sell a story or a vision, but you’ll need to be prepared to back it up, so do that first.
• Build the story and vision – The data will be too unclear and complicated. We’ll listen to a story, and we’ll share a vision.  If the story is backed with data, it will be believable.
• Gather the troops – Figure out who is willing to support the change – and the degree to which they’re willing to stick their neck out for it. Building a collection of people who are on board is essential to getting enough critical mass for the change.
• Direct your efforts – Ultimately, you need to get the whole organization to change but many people are going to need bright spots to follow. That means getting some wins in and then publicizing them.  Rather than spreading your efforts out across the entire organization, focus on an appropriate part of the organization where the benefits of the change can be seen clearly.

It’s hard to believe that your change initiative isn’t amazing.  The vision of where we’re going looks amazing.  Your executives are all on board, yet somehow the people that you need to make the changes aren’t changing and you don’t know why.

Translation

Most professional translators or interpreters won’t use the best-in-class automatic translators.  They know that they’re okay – but they’re not great.  They’ll often get you to the general gist of what is being said, but they’ll simultaneously not help you to understand the nuance, the feeling, or the beauty of the concepts.  It’s a blunt edge, not a fine point pencil.

The translation between the amazing vision and the actual behaviors that need to change often has the same characteristics.  The leadership and sponsor of the change has a rough idea of what behaviors that need to be changed, but the details and nuance are left up to those doing the work – and that doesn’t always work out.

Gemba

In lean manufacturing circles, there’s a concept called Gemba, which is Japanese for the “real place.”  However, in this context, it’s used to refer to the person – or people – who do the work.  It’s only the people doing the work who can articulate exactly what is happening and what would need to happen to accomplish the change.  Their practical know-how of exactly what really happens instead of what is supposed to happen is critical to change success.

For those organizations that believe in the power these individuals bring, they are consulted and encouraged to participate in the change.  However, even in these organizations, the Gemba isn’t always connected with the broader market changes and therefore may not understand why the changes are necessary.  Thus, they may not be excited about changing what they know works for something that they don’t know – not without some clear and compelling reasons.

The opposite is also true, however, where organizations don’t consult the people doing the work and make up answers about what they believe will work best, only to be confronted with reality and resistance when they go to get everyone to implement their grand plans.

Building Bridges

If we want to prevent the translation problems between those who see the big-picture need for change and those who do the work, we’ll need to build the kinds of bridges that help both parties understand the practicalities, realities, and pressures.

On one side of the bridge is the future vision of the change and the planned destination.  Under the bridge is the uncertainty of the change and the reasons for needing the change.  On the other side of the bridge is the current reality.

The Gemba and those doing the work need to fully understand the vision and see the challenges that the leadership foresees in the change itself and the larger market issues or opportunities that the change is meant to address.  In return, they provide solid anchoring in the ground-state truth of how things really work.  The leaders need this ground-state truth to ensure that the plans they’re making will work.

Conceptually, it’s a simple exchange of information that the other party doesn’t have.  It’s the reaching of hands across the divide.  In implementation, however, we often find that it’s hard to listen to each other, because the languages and perspectives are different.  Just like any translation process, time is necessary to understand the nuance and to ensure that everyone has the same – or at least a substantially similar – understanding.

In my post Trust Your Instruments, I raised the issue of whether you should believe your intuition about change or whether you should have solid metrics – and a set of them so you can cross-check.  What I didn’t explain was how to be careful about how you measure the impact on change.  For that, we need to understand a bit about statistics – but don’t be concerned.  Some parts of statistics are easy and powerful.

Base Rate

Base rate is the probability of something happening without any intervention.  For instance, some amount of water will evaporate with a given set of conditions.  Factors include the surface area, amount of time, temperature, pressure, and the amount of water vapor already in the air, called relative humidity.  I can establish a rate of evaporation if I know all these variables.  When we’re measuring change, we want to know the difference between the base rate and the rate we observe in the presence of our changes.

Someone recently told me, “100% of the people treated for COVID-19 with ivermectin at the clinic recovered.”  On the surface, this sounds like phenomenal results.  100% cure rate.  However, base rate tells us that the probability of a person not recovering from COVID-19 with no intervention is very low.  The numbers vary, but let’s just say that you’ve got a 2% chance of being hospitalized for a COVID infection – and an even lower rate of mortality.

Given a perfect sample of 100 people with COVID-19, it’s likely that two will be hospitalized – but due to randomness, to be sure that you’d see at least one patient who gets hospitalized is much larger.  The probability of seeing a hospitalization in 10 patients is ~18%.  For 50 patients, the confidence moves to ~63% that we’d see one hospitalization.  To get to a 90% confidence that you’d see even 1 hospitalization takes 114 people (given our 2% hospitalization rate).  So, if you’re not at 114 people in the clinic, you can’t be reasonably confident you should have seen one hospitalization without treatment.  The math gets more complicated from here, but to show a reduction of 1% hospitalization rate with 90% confidence, you’d need 670 people.

For those interested in the probability math, the formula is:

ObsAtLeast1Event = 1 – (1 – prob)^quantity

In our case, probability is 0.02.

The above statement has no way of proving that the treatment is effective, because a single clinic has nearly no hope of treating 670 people with ivermectin and showing less than 3 of them getting admitted to the hospital.

Uneven Distribution

Admittedly, this is a simple version of the problem designed to expose how people don’t think about base rates correctly.  This works because we’re assuming a perfect sample, and the problem with this is that a sample of people at any given clinic will be non-perfect to the problem being studied.  The greater the deviance of the sample from the normal, the greater the number of participants to remove external influences from the results.

In our work with change, we need to be very clear not about the number of events that we are or are not seeing but rather about how we’d know whether those results are statistically significant.

Sometimes, when we plan our metrics, we fail to realize how much – or how little – change will be required to achieve the metrics we’re looking for.

Whether you’re wondering why there’s a 70% failure rate of change projects, why your personal change projects are failing, or you are hearing it from others, the conclusion that change is hard isn’t hard to come by.  What is sometimes hard to come by is the awareness that all things you do for the first time are hard, and they gradually become less difficult and more repeatable.  Change is the same way: there are ways to learn how to make change easier.

Driving a Car

I remember drivers’ education.  I was stuck in a car with a slightly militant instructor and two other teenagers who, according to the instructor, each wanted to take the lives of everyone in the car.  When it was my turn, I could feel my heart rate quicken, my breaths get shallow, and my blood being squeezed from my fingers as I gripped the steering wheel like I was holding on for dear life.  The first 20 hours of driving were the worst.  The next 20 with my mom and stepfather sucked – but less so.  Driving on my own required focus but got better.

With a few decades behind me I can honestly say that I don’t focus that much on it.  I’ve learned the rules of the road, what to pay attention to and what to ignore.  It’s all much more manageable.

Learning the Rules

In the case of change, the rules of the road aren’t that conceptually difficult, but they go against everything you’ve ever learned.  It’s hard to accept that just telling someone doesn’t work.  They’re not going to do it because you said so – even if they heard you.  There’s so much noise and so many demands on our time that we can’t command people to change even if we’re in a position of power.

The rules of change are communicate and motivate – and keep doing it.  The problem is that most people don’t.  Most people complete the task on the communication plan that says to notify the users, and then they trick themselves into believing that this was enough.

Building the Skills

If we want for it to be less difficult, we need to develop the skills that are needed to succeed in change.  We need to look at our communication and motivation skills honestly and find ways to make them better.

Our communications skills fall into the categories of strategy and individual communication skills.  In the case of strategy, we need to make a plan – and we have to build the kinds of epic stories that resonate with people.  One way to generate the epic stories is to use Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a guide.

On the individual communications skills side, we need to learn from marketing, science, and human resources to find ways to get people’s attention and to get them to read what we’re writing.  (We’ve got a free communications tips course that teaches these skills.)

Motivation skills means learning what’s important to others and speaking and engaging with them in ways that connect with the things they value.  Our Basic Motivators Resource Book explains how to do this.  You can also learn what things influence all people.  Everett Rogers’ Knowledge-Attitudes-Practices model explains one of these views.

Pulling it Together

Change is natural.  It’s not inherently hard.  It’s only hard when you’re trying to do something when you’ve not been trained.  When you get the right training and support, change isn’t any harder than driving a car.

There are a handful of things that stick with you when you’ve been trained as a pilot.  They’re life lessons that have specific applicability to flying.  They’re necessary to be fully understood if you want to be safe.  One of the most important is trust your instruments.

Trusting Intuition

Most people have spent their lives listening to their thoughts and bodies and have therefore developed a “sense” about right and wrong.  We’ve got all sorts of systems in our body that can measure orientation and which way is up, and for the most part, they work well.  In the same way that you learn to ride a bike by feel, you learn to fly a plane by feel.

Everything is fine until you’ve got a bit of an ear infection and your vestibular system misleads you.  It’s the system designed to measure orientation, and it’s often why people feel dizzy and motion sick.  Motion sickness is, in most cases, a mismatch between visual and vestibular inputs that the brain can’t reconcile.  The result is we feel sick because of the uncoordinated inputs.  That’s bad when our life depends on keeping the top of the wings away from the ground.

An Instrument

In a plane, there are many different instruments.  There is an attitude indicator (sometimes called an artificial horizon), a turn-bank indicator (and coordinator), a directional gyro, and a compass.  These all provide information about the tilt of the wings, left to right, and which way you’re headed.  Similarly, the attitude indicator, altimeter, and vertical speed indicator provide input about the distance between the ground (terrain) and the aircraft – and how it is increasing or decreasing.

Any individual instrument in the aircraft can – and does – fail.  Many instruments are driven by gyros, and those gyros will, over time, wear out and fail.  Pilots are taught to expect these failures and cross-check instruments with one another so they can detect a failure in one instrument.  The directional gyro is quicker and more reliable than a compass (particularly at high angles of pitch), but it’s always good to check it against the compass, which works on totally different principles and likely won’t fail at the same time or in the same way.

Instrument failures are rare, but they happen.  Multiple instruments failing simultaneously in a way that gives bad input is exceedingly rare, but too often, people trust their instincts instead of the instruments.

The Instrument Cluster

There are numerous notable deaths where the flash of the strobe light inside of a cloud disoriented someone, and they started trusting their intuition – instead of trusting the instruments in front of them.  Discounting one instrument (or even two) is fine, but when multiple instruments are telling you one thing, and you’re feeling another, your feelings are wrong.  If you want to survive, you have to trust – and verify – the instruments.

Change Instruments

In your change project, what are the instruments that you can trust?  They’re the metrics that you’ve identified.  With a mixture of leading and lagging indicators, you’ve got different approaches to ensuring you’re on the right course.  By having multiple different measurements about leading behaviors, you have even better data to understand your course.  The difference with change projects, however, is the metrics can often be in conflict.

Metrics in Conflict

In change projects, some metrics may be saying everything is fine, while others may be indicating a problem.  An aircraft can have only one objective orientation and position in space.  Change projects are much more fluid.  That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t trust the metrics.  It means that you should cross-check them and make an assessment – based on the metrics more than your intuition.

Do the same principles of good change management apply when the change is reactive rather than proactive?  How can we draw the line between the change that is proactive and the one that is reactive?  What would it be like to view every change from the perspective of how much ahead of the need you are?

Leading Change

To start, we must perceive change in the context of a leadership event.  That is, organizations change because of awareness that changing environmental conditions will make the organization unviable in the future if changes aren’t made.  In this context, changes are always made some degree ahead of the failure of the organization to be viable.  The question becomes how far ahead of the organizational failure the change appears.

When we are far ahead of the impending disaster, we call it a proactive change.  We may even frame it in the context of an opportunity to be capitalized on rather than a potential disaster.  Done well, the change is insightful assessment of the environment well before the environment threatens the organization’s survival.  As a result, it’s possible, at least conceptually, to do all the steps that we know lead to a successful change effort.

On the other hand, what happens when the organization is in an acute state of crisis?  The change must still happen, and, in Conner’s language, there’s a burning platform.  (See Managing at the Speed of Change.)  In these cases, there is a very real sense of urgency – one that seems to argue against the work of communications planning, building trust, creating safety, and the other activities that change managers know are necessary for successful change.

Building the Plane in Flight

It’s certainly not ideal to build a plane in flight – but it may be the only option left if you need to get going now and you know you don’t have time to do everything you need to do.  Reactive change projects are a bit like this.  You get the project going, and then you come around the back side and put together the planning you know you should do.

You launch the project with minimal communications and plan to do the communications plan later.  You develop the personas for those impacted after the project has been kicked off – rather than beforehand.  You beg for forgiveness for not getting people’s input and pray that you can accomplish the course corrections you need to make while you’re moving forward.

The risk is higher – but that is to be expected when the organization couldn’t foresee the need to change ahead of time.  Quick decisions and rapid changes are always riskier, like turning a car at high speed around a curve.

Getting Control

Often, reactive changes seem out of control to start.  An explosive force is used to get things moving and the trajectory isn’t ever truly certain.  During the COVID crisis of 2020, many organizations unleashed work at home and web meeting software by enabling service with little or no planning or instruction.  The result was the IT departments feeling that they couldn’t possibly control all that was going on and employees who didn’t know what to expect or what to do.

Gradually, policies, procedures, training, and support caught up with the rapid changes, and it seemed a lot less chaotic and more and more like an aggressive push towards keeping people safe and employed.

No matter what degree of proactive or reactive you are with a change project, there will always be things you didn’t get done in the planning phase.  The key is to continue to develop them as you get the project kicked off.

There’s a children’s book, The Little Engine That Could, that speaks towards constant striving and productive output – to making progress.  The book and others like it have instructed us that we should be constantly busy, but sometimes busy isn’t what we should be.

Creating Chaos

Is there a person in your life for whom there must be constant chaos?  When they start to get things under control, they find a new and exciting way to disrupt their world so they remain in a constant state of chaos and turmoil.  Perhaps as they’re close to getting their financial world in order, they make a risky investment or spend too much on a vacation.  Perhaps they’re in a long-term relationship with someone who might be “the one,” and they decide to have a one night fling with someone else.

Most people have others in their lives for whom a cloud of dust seems to follow, like Pig-Pen in the comic strip, Peanuts.  However, few people realize that some organizations are prone to the same sorts of self-destructive behavior when they feel the need to create structural or organizational changes simply, so it appears as if they’re responding to changing market conditions even if they have no idea how to respond.  It seems like the bias towards action over careful contemplation knows no bounds.

Careful Contemplation

Well intended executives, directors, and managers seek to accomplish real organizational change by changing the structure.  Having not been in their role long enough, they fail to realize that the very structure they’re proposing is the one that was in place before – and the one that the organization moved away from.

Seeing only the problems before them, they seek to solve them; in the process, they create new and unexpected problems.  Unexpected, that is, if they don’t look into the history of the organization and see what the challenges were when the structure was in place before.

The sad part is that by pausing to investigate what the organization knows about their “new” approach, they waste precious resources that could be invested in learning more about ways to make meaningful change in response to the changing environment.

Change is Expensive

There are times when a change – like a structural change – is absolutely the right answer and is necessary for the organization’s survival.  However, change is always expensive.  It requires more thought, preparation, and action than the previous way of doing things.  When organizations are caught up in the constant churn of change, they often fail to stop and ask the question whether the change is necessary – or whether the change should even be made at all.

The Change that Shouldn’t

Finding the change that shouldn’t is easy.  Find the change that moves the organization backwards, serves no purpose, or for which no one can articulate a compelling reason.  However, stopping a change that shouldn’t be made is much harder.  Some degree of momentum has already been built, and that momentum must be stopped before the change can be put to bed.

Many times, the energy it would take to stop a bad change is greater than just allowing it to come to completion and letting the natural forces of the organization to rip it apart.

Whether you are able to stop a change that shouldn’t be from happening or not, it’s important to keep looking for them to save energy for yourself and resources for the changes that really matter.

Standing still doesn’t seem like you’re getting much done.  It’s not productive.  It can’t be efficient.  However, it’s possible when holding space for people in a change that you can be effective, and being effective is much more important than being efficient.

Allowing

Dan Richo in How to Be an Adult in Relationships explains that we need five things to be in adult relationships: Attention, Acceptance, Appreciation, Affection, and Allowing.  We all know that we must pay attention to those doing the work, accept their perspectives – even if we don’t agree – and offer appreciative words of affirmation.  Affection doesn’t find its way into most organizational contexts, but allowing does.  Allowing is creating the space that others need to process their experiences and understand reality through the lens of their perspective.

Too often in our rush to get thing done, we don’t allow people time to react, adapt, and connect to the news of the changes that are coming.  We are pressed by productivity and efficiency to the point that we cannot find the time to create space for people, and the result is that we often push them into a mode of resisting through lack of agreement.  They don’t agree, because they’ve not had the opportunity to reach the conclusions that the change leaders have reached.

Effective not Efficient

We’ve been fooled by the Industrial Age in thinking that efficient and effective are the same things.  However, efficient is simply getting something done with fewer resources, where effective is getting the right things done.  It’s like a work force traveling through a forest.  They are making such great progress that they decide to forgo waiting on their scout to share their position before continuing forward.  When the scout catches up, he explains they’re not headed in the right direction or, more critically, they’re in the wrong forest.  It doesn’t matter how efficient you are if you’re not effective.

We may believe that we’re headed in the right direction, and we’re going to get the right things done if we can only get there.  Without checking to make sure that we’re continuing to head in the right direction for everyone, we may find that we’re going the wrong way or that we’re not even in the right forest.

How to Hold Space

It’s the pause you hear when a daughter tells her parents that she’s pregnant.  No one speaks.  Whether the response will be one of joy, concern, sorrow, or a mixture of those feelings hasn’t been decided, and the daughter anxiously awaits the response.  It seems to take forever as the parents process what they’re being told.  Moving nervously into the gap often creates anxiety for everyone.

Holding space is learning that silence can be productive.  It creates the opportunity for people to process their thoughts without the intrusions of others.  Like the pregnant pause, time seems to flow unevenly when one is holding space.  For those who are holding it, it seems like an eternity.  For those who are learning about new changes or trying to interpret what they’re hearing, there is no time whatsoever.  It passes for them in the blink of an eye before they return to the conversation.

The way to hold space isn’t complicated, tricky, or expensive.  It is, however, uncomfortable as you must fight off the urge to fill the silence and thereby prevent any chance at discovering if you’re heading in the wrong direction or inadvertently creating resistance to your idea because they haven’t had time to process it.

Leaders who are perceived as surer of their message are more likely to be followed.  We crave certainty, particularly in uncertain times.  The more uncomfortable we are, the more likely we are to seek out certainty.  We must accept this fact as we lead changes in our organizations, because the degree of certainty of the direction decreases as the message is transmitted down the line.

Necessary Uncertainty

In most changes, the end vision isn’t something that has been done before – certainly not by this organization with these people.  As a result, there is some uncertainty whether the vision is achievable and the degree to which the end state will look like the vision.  Continuing down the same path leads to comfortable, predictable, relative certainty.  We know what to expect, and our minds like it because of that predictability.

When confronted with the awareness that we must have some degree of uncertainty in any change, it becomes incumbent upon the leaders to increase the degree of relative safety so that everyone can respond rationally to the changes rather than responding out of fear.

Unnecessary Uncertainty

While some uncertainty is unavoidable in change, much of the uncertainty isn’t of the unchangeable variety.  People are concerned with the mundane aspects of continued communication and the intent of the change.  Built on trust, the belief that the organization intends to keep everyone throughout the transition can go a long way to quelling unnecessary uncertainty.

Regular communications can also quell fears by establishing order inside of the change.  Knowing that communications will be coming monthly – even if there isn’t much new to share – reduces anxiety, because it’s one less thing that they must predict.  It also increases trust, as beliefs about communications are a part of trust.

Seeing the Uncertainty

Often, change leaders experience uncertainty on the part of those they’re leading through perceived resistance.  (See Why People Don’t Resist Change for more.)  Uncertainty creates a desire to freeze and learn more before committing to action, which is exactly the thing that can prevent success.  In change, establishing and maintaining momentum is one of the most challenging aspects.  As a result, when we see uncertainty, we must do what we can to reduce it and eliminate the fears that it brings.

Reducing Uncertainty

Regular communication is one way to reduce uncertainty, but that’s just the start.  You can address uncertainty by sharing “bright spots.”  That is, who has been successful with this approach both internally and externally.  (See Switch for more on bright spots.)  Case studies and repeated references to where the vision has been successfully implemented leads to greater confidence in the vision even if complete certainty isn’t possible.

Repeated work to translate the big change into the meaning and impact for individuals will be rewarded as their uncertainty about their role fades.  All changes come from individual changes, and in big organizational changes, individuals are often uncertain what changes will be asked of them.

Safety Nets

Finally, if you want people to get comfortable with uncertainty, they’ve got to be given a set of safe possibilities.  Even if the vision isn’t certain, where are some of the places that the organization or they themselves can land that will be okay?  In the end, getting comfortable with uncertainty means reducing it to an acceptable level, and that level is different for every individual.