When I introduced the topic of “ungovernable change” in my last email, I promised to elaborate on what research firm Gartner notes as the 4 factors creating it and the 3 strategies for routinizing it. I read about Gartner’s four and three from a recent HBR article on why keeping up on the pace of change feels harder than ever right now. Gartner notes it’s due to these four converging factors that are different from anything leaders have navigated before.
- 📚 Changes are stacked. It’s not just that there’s more change — it’s that each new initiative lands before the last one has settled. Like processing a reorg while absorbing a new technology rollout while adjusting to a shift in strategy. There’s no breathing room in between.
- 🚀 Changes are continuous. Traditional change management assumed a beginning, middle, and end. Today’s changes have no clear start date, no clear end, and therefore no “light at the end of the tunnel”.
- 🔀 Changes are interdependent. For example, a new software implementation can unravel a workflow in a completely different department. A shift in one system creates unintended consequences in three others.
- 🧭 Changes are externally driven. Perhaps what’s most destabilizing is that many of the biggest changes are arriving via economic shifts, political decisions, technology disruptions, and societal pressure. Leaders are being asked to respond to forces they didn’t create and can’t control.
This is the “ungovernable change environment” that overlays today’s business environment for leaders. And what’s worse, Gartner found that employees are increasingly skeptical of their organization’s efforts to change effectively, creating a distrust that’s getting in the way of driving effective transformation.
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Gartner’s answer to governing ungovernable change is to treat change as an everyday business process and implement these three strategies to ‘routinize it’:
👣 Communicate that change is a journey: Last time I mentioned creating urgency around the cost of inaction and framing small wins as progress. Yet it is also important to pace your communication. Not every team needs every update. Keep them informed without flooding them with information they can’t act on.
🤗 Enable change-ready employees: This means building change skills until they become second nature, like helping employees understand the source of their discomfort or resistance to the change. By helping them name what’s actually driving their reaction, people are far more likely to move forward.
🔮 Foresee multiple possible scenarios: Routinizing change means developing your team’s foresight too. For example, assign employees an emerging change trigger and then discuss as a group what this might mean and what skills would be needed. This will allow the team to stop waiting for guidance when change arrives.
I recently had a conversation about how to maintain high-performance in high-pressure, unpredictable environments with Bernadette Boas, host of the Shedding the Corporate Bitch Podcast. We discussed the need to ‘slow down to go fast’ and step off the unstoppable change treadmill rather than always just running faster on it to push through the stacked changes. We also talked about the importance of leaders being self-aware of how they are leading through the change, matching their internal beliefs about how they are doing to what their external world believes.
The Self-Aware Leader 1:1 Executive Coaching Accelerator is designed to help build the kind of leader who doesn’t just survive constant change but routineizes it, models it, and brings their team along for the journey.
Ungovernable change is the environment. You are the variable. Slowing down to go fast gives leaders the opportunity to not only govern the ungovernable change but also learn how they are actually showing up through change.
Here’s to bringing your best self forward,
Loretta