Imagine this holiday season that someone in your family brings a youthful guest for the big day. Being a hospitable family you welcome this person into your home, your family home that you have spent years loving, cherishing and getting just the way you like.

The visitor, who looks a bit strange, is a follower of fashion… a different fashion and they speak in a parallel dialect that is similar to your own but has some strange secret words they keep using. Bizarrely, they seem amused by you, even though to your family they are the ones who look and sound strange.

Everything seems to be going well, until this newcomer wants to reorganise things.

They insist on changing what you eat, when you eat and how you eat. They even rename the meals and tell you all where to sit. They bring alcohol where it is not welcome and remove it from where it is. They change your bed times and your waking times and they make you stand up when you want to sit down. Then they insist on portion control so that everyone can become appropriately lean and insist on exercising in the garden to help with something called your agility!

The final straw comes when they start to replace your Christmas decorations with post-it notes!!

You ask them to leave.

Shortly afterwards you are browsing the web and you notice an article by them…

Apparently, only one or two of your children “get Christmas”!
You as parents completely miss the point of modern Christmas and celebrate Christmas in Name Only, which is apparently now derided with an acronym CINO!!
And your other children are practicing Zombie-Christmas due to the draconian restrictions imposed by dysfunctional parenting anti-patterns!!!

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Does any of this sound a little familiar?

Here are just a few lessons that I have learnt along the way if you are interested in finding a more useful place as a change agent…

Be aware of the invite you are receiving, are you being invited to rescue, to blame or to be the hero leader? Will this style conform to existing organisational norms or be helpful in encouraging real change?

Listen to and surface the voice of the system, what unspoken truths and loyalties are its current patterns an answer to? What change or support might be useful from here?

Listen past the words that people are using for the emotion and the needs that need to be met for people to be ready to change. Organisations don’t change, people do.

If you have to force something. Don’t. It will make things worse.

Better is best defined by your customer.

Compassion and empathy are much more useful tools for unlocking potential than judgement, analysis and “being right”. Notice your judgement and give it a holiday too

Happy Holidays.