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Letters to a Young Manager


Change Denial, #392
LTYM >

Please note that this letter is in-process; the following are my notes

Dear Adam,
***
Nobody likes change. We tend to avoid it until we can't. Maybe that's why disruption happens. We may be able to blame it on surprise, but usually the signs were present for some time.

Good job on pointing to the increasing change and calling us back to our missions.

As Grant McCracken wrote,
    "You would hope that we were getting better at understanding and managing change. And sometimes we are. Too often however, our response is to ignore and forget change, to fake our way through it, to pretend an engagement and a mastery we do not have. And that’s bad. That means we are not getting better at change, but steadily worse. We are denying disruption, instead of adapting to it.

    We seem to adopt and adapt to something like Twitter by stages, a little like Kubler-Ross’ five stages of grief. Except in this case, it’s a passage from confusion to congratulation. Self-congratulation." [2]
***
Sincerely yours,
Ed
________________________

[1] 11/4/14 email to Lauren Woodman, Subject: The Five Stages of Disruption Denial - Grant McCracken - Harvard Business Review
[2] Grant McCracken, "The Five Stages of Disruption Denial," April 15, 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/04/disruption-denial
. Also see: Innovation and Death & Dying https://hbr.org/2012/03/the-five-stages-of-strategic-g/

Takeaways:

Changing is a bit like dying (dying to the past)

Discussion Questions:


For Further Reading:

Also see the story of the frog #288]
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross "On Death and Dying," 1969, which first discussed The Five Stages of Grief: where in the five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
See Kubler-Ross model, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model




© Copyright 2005, 2024, E. G. Happ, All Rights Reserved.


and Innovation and Death & Dying https://hbr.org/2012/03/the-five-stages-of-strategic-g/

2) my 2011 Blog on the Relevant IT Manifesto, based on the NetHope values, which may have been a bit early, but now may be aligned with where you are calling us to:

http://eghapp.blogspot.com/2011/07/relevant-it-manifesto.html

3) the rise of the beneficiary, which I raised five years ago (also too early) :
http://eghapp.blogspot.com/2009/08/peering-over-horizon.html
And the 2011 IFRC report on Beneficiary Communications:
http://www.ifrc.org/PageFiles/94411/IFRC%20BCA%20Lesson%20Learned%20doc_final.pdf