Change is the only constant in life - Heraclitus
Change is one of the most difficult things we do, both as individuals and as organisations. It is inescapable, and yet necessary for survival. Individuals, products, processes, organisations, and even civilisations all experience change, and follow the same broad change cycle. It starts with initial development, often in uncertain steps. Progress builds and reaches a pinnacle and then levels off, before beginning a slow descent. But what is ‘change’ itself?
What is change anyway?
Change is about adapting processes, rules, workflows and infrastructure in order to deliver a better result. A successful change is one which is adopted, widely supported, optimises resources and delivers more efficiency.
Change is different from innovation and invention, although those terms are often used interchangeably. Change is modification of what already exists and works. Innovation, on the other hand, brings in something new and alters the fundamentals. Invention is the act of coming up with the concept, product or idea in the first place.
Take online shopping as an example. Once the idea of online shopping had been invented, an innovation might be for a particular retailer to build their own online shop to complement their physical high street store. Following that, an effective change could be to add extra features to the online shop such as next-day home delivery, or early access to new products. Invention and innovation are therefore strategic. Change is tactical. To put it another way, change deals with your world as it actually is. Invention and innovation, on the other hand, change your world.
Invention, innovation and change work hand in glove, although the timescales between the three are often quite large. Contrary to popular belief, an invention rarely occurs just the once with a ‘lightbulb’ moment of revelation. It is often a cumulative process, that occurs in lots of different locations and involving lots of different individuals. Some of those individuals may well never have heard of the other inventors, never mind met them or be aware of their work.
Let me use that ‘lightbulb’ idea to explain what I mean. We all know who invented the incandescent lightbulb, yes? Thomas Edison in 1879. What is less well known is that by the end of the 1870s twenty-one different individuals had a claim to have invented or improved the incandescent lightbulb. Those individuals were as far apart as England, Germany, Russia, Canada and Belgium, not to mention two others apart from Edison in the USA. While Thomas Edison does deserve his reputation, as he invented the first lasting lightbulb. It was only after he had made 6,000 failed attempts to find a material for the carbon filament that was sufficiently robust that he finally discovered something that worked: Japanese Bamboo. On 2 August 1880 Thomas Edison unveiled a lightbulb capable of lasting 1,000 hours. Invention, as Edison famously said, is “one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration”. He was not only a co-claimant to the title of inventor of the lightbulb, he had one other quality that differentiated him from others in the field: Thomas Edison was also a successful innovator.
Inventing and innovating
What is the difference between invention and innovation? Going back to our example, the idea of an incandescent lightbulb was the invention. Creating a lasting, cheap, convenient and affordable incandescent lightbulb that brought artificial light within the reach of ordinary people was the innovation. Edison’s real genius lay as an innovator. He turned the invention of the incandescent lightbulb into a cheap, convenient and dependable product with clear and obvious benefits. The fact that it was also less smelly and dangerous than the existing oil and kerosene lamps was an additional bonus. Edison’s lasting lightbulb innovation dominated the market for artificial light for more than a century, and brought about a hugely beneficial change in the way everyone lives. It is a decent candidate for the claim to be one of the greatest ideas created by our civilisation.
Just as innovation builds on invention, change builds on innovation. It is innovation that changes the world though, not invention. That might sound like a curious statement, so let me explain.
Getting the timing right
Just because you invent something does not mean it will make a fundamental difference to the way things are done. It might simply vanish or be forgotten. To be successful, an invention needs to happen when the world is ready to take advantage of it, as well as needing an innovator to push it towards success.
History is littered with things that were invented before the conditions were right for them to succeed, or that lacked an individual with the drive and persistence to make them a success. For example, we managed to put a human on the Moon in 1969, a fantastically complex and difficult achievement. Yet this happened more than a decade before the simple concept of a wheeled suitcase became a common sight in airports and railway stations.
Why did it take so long to invent something that is so obviously useful as a suitcase with wheels? Of course, it did not. The first patent for wheeled luggage with a long handle was taken out in 1925 by Saviour Mastrontonio. Another inventor, Barnett Brook, filed a patent for a wheeled suitcase in 1945. Clarence Norlin patented suitcases with retractable wheels in 1947, followed by Grace and Malcom McIntyre in the same year, and Arthur Browning in 1969. It was only in 1972 that things started to change. In that year Bernard Sadow, who worked at a baggage manufacturer in the USA, was granted a patent on a suitcase design with four wheels, one at each corner of the long side, pulled along by a strap. Success did not come overnight. Sadow tried for years to interest manufacturers and retailers but it wasn’t until the department store Macey’s commissioned ‘bags that glide’ in the late 1970s that his invention gradually began to take off.
Wheeled baggage was given a further push in 1987 when a Northwest Airlines pilot, Robert Plath, fixed two wheels to the short end of a suitcase, and dragged it along with the help of a telescopic handle. The two wheeled ‘roller-board’ design was more efficient than the four wheels of Sadow’s invention, and their use by Plath’s fellow pilots at airports was noticed by passengers, creating demand. Plath left his job as a pilot and set up TravelPro to market the new suitcases, and the rest is history.
The act of inventing or discovery is rarely what changes the world. Inventions happen many times over and go nowhere. What the example of the suitcase with wheels shows very clearly is that you cannot hope for an invention to succeed until the world is ready for it. It was the architecture of railway stations and airports that prevented the idea of wheeled luggage taking off when it was first invented. Until the end of the 1960s train stations and airports were small and often had lots of stairs. Taxies and cars dropped passengers close to the trains and planes and both stations and airports were filled with willing porters to carry bags.
Gender also came into it. Most travellers in those decades were men and society valued an image of physical strength. Heavy bags were not perceived as a problem for men to carry, even if they were a strain for some. That all changed with the rapid expansion of travel, and in particular mass air travel, in the early 1970s. Airports grew, distances passengers had to walk between drop off and boarding a plane became much longer, and more women travelled for whom society at the time did not emphasise physical prowess. The world of travel was ready…for wheeled baggage.
As this and other examples show, invention is not something that just happens once or quickly. Invention is a gradual process that builds on the shoulders of what came before. Before Robert Plath’s successful two wheeled ‘roller-board’ bag came Sadow’s four wheeled gliding luggage, and before that there was the invention of the suitcase itself. The suitcase was preceded by the bag and the sack and the pouch, and so on. Each one invented numerous times and each a success only when the world was ready for it, and a sufficiently persistent innovator was pushing it.
It was a similar story with the incandescent lightbulb. Many individuals had a hand in creating the idea and producing prototypes before Edison eventually found a carbon material for the incandescent element that would last long enough to make it (reasonably) reliable and sow the seeds of commercial success. But that success was only possible because other technology at the time had developed sufficiently to make it almost inevitable. A reliable way to generate and distribute electricity was in place. The challenges of mass producing a blown-glass bubble had been mastered. Creating a vacuum inside the bulb, crucial to allow the filament to glow without burning up, had been made possible with the advent of the mercury vacuum pump. Edison brought all these together with his lasting incandescent element and pushed hard to challenge the dominance of kerosene and oil lamps.
Invention, innovation and change are incremental. They build on and link to what went before.
Making change a success
In our modern world the process of change is certainly speeding up in lots of areas. But does that mean successful change is becoming ever more difficult to achieve? On the contrary. Successful change is as possible in today's world, as it was 2,500 years ago in the time of Heraclitus. Then as now, one of the keys to success was to start at the right point.
A successful change requires time, resources and energy to overcome problems that will appear at the start. This can be hard as the need for change at this point will not yet be urgent. But if you wait until a crisis looms then time, energy, resources and support will be in short supply.
Change also has a pattern, or cycle, which I described in the first paragraph of this article. Its technical name is a 'sigmoid curve' and it can be visualised on a graph as a stretched 'S' shape tilted over to the right. On the graph the horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis represents activity. The bottom of the 'S' is where the change develops. Stage two is the introduction of the change and the lower part of the 'S' begins to curve upwards. Next comes the sharp increase in take up, followed by a slowing and halting of growth at the crest of the 'S'. Finally, the change falters and peters out as the top of the 'S' turns down again.
No change is an island
Change does not happen in isolation, or only once. It is a constant process which moves from one sigmoid curve to the next. A good example of this working is how the silicon chip manufacturer Intel produces new chips. One of the founders of Intel, Gordon Moore, of ‘Moore’s Law’ fame, describes the change process of producing each new silicon processor chip:
"We put a product of given complexity into production; we work on refining the process, eliminating the defects. We gradually move the yield to higher and higher levels. Then we design a still more complex product utilising all of the improvements and put that into production. The complexity of our product grows exponentially with time."
Getting the most out of a change means building on the change that precedes it. A single change is not an isolated process but is best seen as a step on the staircase to success.
On the surface managing a change seems straightforward. You spot how a process can be better and then create a plan to do it. Pretty simple really. Except it often does not quite work out like that. You may see your plan as logical and sensible, but others do not. You battle to persuade dissenters your plan is the way forward, but then it turns out not to work quite as well in practice, which damages your credibility. Different parts of the organisation resist your changes, and everything slows down. Within a short period of time your plan is dead in the water, and people go back to doing things the way they did before. This is the reality for many change initiatives. They fail, and the path to failure often follows this route.
How to deliver successful change
Failure is obviously regrettable, but it is not inevitable or a matter of pot-luck. There are processes and techniques that can be used to increase the chances of your change succeeding, and there is a great deal of evidence conducted by academics and industry to show that they work.
Going into detail of all those essential processes and techniques would require a whole other article, but in essence they are:
Leadership - The top management of an organisation needs to define and understand the nature of the change and its impact, as well as their organisation’s capacity and capability to undertake the change.
Clarity – There needs to be a clear understanding of the different ways the organisation will benefit from the changes.
Stakeholders - Identifying, engaging and strongly connecting stakeholders with the change, and doing that using a variety of communications channels and techniques.
Alignment – The change management and project management processes that your organisation uses must be both aligned, managed carefully, and you must make sure that they are appropriate to the size of your organisation and how it is structured.
Support – Look closely at how you propose to support individuals and teams through the change process using good leadership, the right sort of training, and inspiring facilitation.
Advocacy – You need to take individuals on the change journey with you, but you cannot do it all yourself. You need advocates supported by effective information gathering, case studies and an understanding that the lessons of previous changes have been learned.
Of course, this only touches on what is needed, but it hopefully gives an outline of what needs to be considered, as well as offering hope that a structured, planned and above all flexible approach will greatly increase your chances of delivering successful change.
It’s all Greek to me
This article started with a quote from a Greek philosopher who lived 2,500 years ago, and it seems appropriate to go back to Heraclitus to end it. He was right when he said that the only constant in life is change, but while change is a constant, it does not have to be an unstructured and random event. It can be planned for and implemented in a structured way to try and maximise its potential to generate benefits, as well as improving its chances of succeeding. However, to do that successfully depends on people. Individuals. The sooner and more thoroughly that groups and individuals can be prepared for change, then the greater the chance that it will succeed. It’s never too early to start preparing your organisation and its people for a change, and you can never start your change management activity too soon.
