Welcome back Viphilus*
This month I want to talk
about change. My goal is to help you think differently (better) about change if
change is something that you don’t like. Let me cite a few of my favourite
quotes regarding change:
“It is not the strongest of
the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the
one that is most adaptable to change.” ~
Charles Darwin
“I cannot say whether things
will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to
get better.” ~Georg C. Lichtenberg
“Our dilemma is that we hate
change and love it at the same time; what we really want is for things to
remain the same but get better.” ~
Sydney J. Harris
“If something is not to your
liking, change your liking.” ~ Patricia Ryan Madson
“There is no such thing as
bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.”
~ German proverb
“When it becomes more
difficult to suffer than to change... you will change.” ~ Robert Anthony
“He who rejects change is
the architect of decay.” ~ Harold Wilson
First let me be transparent.
I don’t like change. I have proven to myself time and time again that change
can be a powerfully good thing … but I still don’t like it. Just sayin’.
I want to set the stage for
our discussions over the next few weeks by sharing a perspective that I’ve
developed which comes out of three different stories from my life.
Story # 1
Back in the late 90s I was a
marine meteorologist who also specialized in hurricane forecasting for the
mid-latitudes. I had been one of a small handful of forecasters who had been
specially trained in the 80s to deal with tropical cyclones that might affect
eastern Canada. As the dozen years transpired between my initial training and
the time of this story, I had become one of the primary people who did media
interviews related to hurricanes, I made sure that annual reports were being
written for the Canadian Hurricane Centre (CHC) and I just seemed to be one of
the main couple of people that folks went to on such issues.
I was at a Christmas party
with a few dozen colleagues when someone approached me and asked, “what did you
do to piss off **** (the director)?” I had no idea and asked why he asked.
He told me that he had just learned in a separate conversation with the director
on the other side of the room that he was going to assign me to work on the
inter-branch team that was working on the new classification reform project called
U.C.S. (a federal-government-wide initiative). The assignment was going to be
for about a year and a half.
I wanted to throw up. What
kind of a Christmas present was this? What did I know about H.R. stuff? How
could he do this to me? Hadn’t he been reading the comments that I had been
putting on my annual performance evaluation where they asked me my desires and
intentions over the next five years? (I had written on one of them that it was
my goal to become “The King of the CHC!”)
Moving me out of meteorology and away from hurricane forecasting would
kill any chance of “career” development. That was it. My career was over. I
wanted to cry. I wanted to scream.
Over the next few weeks
(which included Christmas and New Years) I moped around like I was on death
row. I completely ruined Christmas for my family because of my bad attitude. I
was like a toxic waste dump … anyone who came near me was at risk of being
infected.
Somewhere in the first week
of January when I had been into the assignment for only a couple days, my
wonderful wife sat me down (no, she didn’t sit down with me … she SAT ME DOWN)
to offer some sage advice … and gave me an emotional cuff upside the head. Her
attitudinal-adjustment speech went something like this. “Look … why don’t you
just do with this like you do with everything else … make this a point of
purpose for yourself … you know, just flip that little switch in your
head and embrace this. If you just go out there and be the best HR
classification expert that the world has ever seen I bet you’ll really enjoy
it.:
Of course she was right. So
I flipped that little switch … and embarked on one of the most professionally
satisfying 18 months of my career. In the process I go to know every manager
and director in Environment Canada’s Atlantic region, and got to meet virtually
every one of the 300 employees across the 4 provinces. Until this assignment I
might have known 20% of the people.
Story # 2
 |
| Mom and Dad dancing |
My dad was a corporal with
the Ontario Provincial Police; he worked as a communications officer at HQ in
Toronto. The main tool of his trade was a teletype machine. I swear, the man
could type 80-100 wpm using his 2-finger hunt ‘n peck approach (there was no power-assist on those
keys either … those suckers needed about 200-lbs of force per key). He was
always at the centre of all real-time intelligence-sharing between detachments
and other policing agencies, including federal and international.
His world changed in the
late 70s when they took away his main tool and replaced it with a new one: a
computer. My dad was not able to adapt. From what followed and my reflection on
it in the years that have followed, I realize that my dad had always been
unable to adapt. He wasn’t change-resistant … he simply avoided change at all
cost. And the cost was very high, on him and our family.
To make a long and brutally
sad story short, he left work on medical leave and spent the rest of his days
in seclusion. He died in 1984 of a heart attack … but the last half dozen years
were not pretty. The change at work created a fracture in him that never repaired.
He had a psychotic break and essentially lived out his days clinically insane. He
wasn’t a danger to others but simply retreated into a delusional shell that
nobody could intervene or “change.”
Story # 3
I retired from Environment
Canada in December 2012, which meant one thing … I no longer had a laptop or a
cell phone (did you know that when you retire they make you turn that stuff
back in? – go figure eh).
My wife, Deb, bought me a
new laptop for Christmas which ran on a Windows 8 operating system. Harumph!
I was an XP guy. The laptop was
cool though … oodles more power and memory and speed and features. But it wasn’t
XP. No worries, I could learn. I opened it up, turned it on, saw the Windows 8
screen, which didn’t allow me to do anything intuitively (based on XP-style
intuition) … and then shut it down and put it back in the box … where it sat
for 2-3 weeks. Deb’s feelings weren’t hurt … she knew that I’d get to it when I
was ready (she’s the techno-queen in our little world so she also knew that
when I got stuck trying to figure it out she could help me).
Being forced to use only my
desktop computer (which was old) I decided I needed to get past my
learning-curve issues and just make the effort. Within a day I discovered that
it wasn’t so bad after all … it was just different. Over the coming days, weeks
and months I kept discovering new functionality as I explored.
Good?
Bad? Ugly?
OK, I’ve told you three
personal stories. In my own assessment on what I understand about change, I am going
to rank these stories as being good, bad and ugly: but not necessarily in the order
that I told them.
Before next week see if you
can determine which of those stories was an example of GOOD adaptability? Which
story was a story of BAD adaptability? And which story was just UGLY?
I hope to see you back next
Monday.
Blessings Viphilus,
Your friend, Omega Man
PS…. Regarding story # 1 …
when I returned to the CHC after the HR assignment my manager said that they
wanted to create a Program Manager position for the CHC. Since I was the most
senior hurricane forecaster who had invested more in that program than anyone
else I likely had the best idea about what such a position might look like.
Also, since I had this new training on how to write work-descriptions according
to the new classification model, she asked if I could draft a work-description and
statement of requirements for the job for her as a starting point. Of course I
agreed. When the job was eventually posted for hiring I applied for it. I was
later called into the HR director’s office where he and my manager told me that
I was the only applicant and that they were simply appointing me in the
position. Turned out that nobody else applied because they felt they didn’t
stand a chance against the guy who had written the job description. Turned out
that that “career ending” assignment actually made my desired career possible.
I wished that I knew at that Christmas party what I know now … that change can
sometimes be the only painful path to success.
* Viphilus means, "lover of life"
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