Jimism #008: Change Muscle

Organizations love talking about agility.

Far fewer actually practice it.

That’s why I think of adaptability as Change Muscle.

You don’t build muscle by announcing that you’d like to be stronger.

You build it through repetition.

The same is true of organizations.

Teams become good at change by changing.

Trying something new.

Running experiments.

Learning a new tool.

Changing a process.

Testing an idea.

Recovering from something that didn’t work.

And then doing it again.

The organizations that struggle most with disruption are often the ones that spent years optimizing for stability.

Everything worked.

Processes became fixed.

Roles hardened.

Risk avoidance grew.

Then the world changed, and suddenly the organization was being asked to use a capability it had never exercised.

Three ways to build Change Muscle:

• Normalize small experiments. Frequent low-risk change teaches people that change itself is manageable.
• Reward learning, not just success. Experiments that produce useful knowledge are not failures.
• Practice before the crisis. Don’t make the first major test of adaptability an actual emergency.

You cannot suddenly become agile because the market demands it.

You cannot suddenly become innovative because disruption arrives.

You cannot suddenly become resilient because a crisis appears.

Those are trained capabilities.

The strongest organizations rehearse change long before they desperately need it.

Build the muscle.

jimisms.jimcarroll.com