Skill 1—Build Safety—explores how signals of connection generate bonds of belonging and identity. Skill 2—Share Vulnerability—explains how habits of mutual risk drive trusting cooperation. Skill 3—Establish Purpose—tells how narratives create shared goals and values.
The funny thing is, when I visited leaders of successful creative cultures, I didn’t meet many artists. Instead, I met a different type, a type who spoke quietly and tended to spend a lot of time observing, who had an introverted vibe and liked to talk about systems. I started to think of this type of person as a Creative Engineer.
It’s not a bad idea to let people take away something from this celebration too, a memento of the transition process that is now behind them. The idea is not unlike giving people a piece of the past, as mentioned in Chapter 3. In this case it may be a T-shirt with “I Survived the Merger” across the front or a certificate of thanks for their participation in the Transition Monitoring Team. Serious or humorous, the memento further acknowledges and winds up a difficult time in the organization’s history and the person’s career.
The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is because no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers all too often forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the desired outcome and how to get there, the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you remember that.
Before 1066 and the advent of the Normans, Wales had been the domain of some of the earliest settlers of the British Isles – the Britons or Celts – who are generally thought to have migrated from Continental Europe some three centuries before the birth of Christ. Anglo-Saxon conquerors had pushed these communities westwards out of England from the fifth century AD onwards, and they became known as the ‘Wallenses’ (literally the ‘borderers’). Early medieval Wales consisted of a complex patchwork of determinedly independent, rival provinces and realms, with three major principalities – Gwynedd, Powys and Deheubarth – coming to prominence.
The task before you is therefore twofold: first, to get your people through this phase of transition in one piece; and second, to capitalize on all the confusion by encouraging them to be innovative.
People can deal with a lot of change if it is coherent and part of a larger whole. But adding unrelated and unexpected changes, even small ones, can push people to the breaking point.
“As humans, we are very good at reading cues; we are incredibly attentive to interpersonal phenomena,” says Amy Edmondson, who studies psychological safety at Harvard. “We have a place in our brain that’s always worried about what people think of us, especially higher-ups. As far as our brain is concerned, if our social system rejects us, we could die. Given that our sense of danger is so natural and automatic, organizations have to do some pretty special things to overcome that natural trigger.” The key to creating psychological safety, as Pentland and Edmondson emphasize, is to recognize how deeply obsessed our unconscious brains are with it. A mere hint of belonging is not enough; one or two signals are not enough. We are built to require lots of signaling, over and over. This is why a sense of belonging is easy to destroy and hard to build. The dynamic evokes the words of Texas politician Sam Rayburn: “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one.”
