What Adriana really does…
Here’s what I do for a living. I work with creative businesses who want to grow and make money. Sometimes I introduce them to new ideas and techniques (from Board Meetings to blogs) to help them along the path they are treading.
Frequently, I find I cannot push a client to do what they don’t want to do (or won’t trust me to do). It ends up in a half-hearted attempt to do something that ultimately fails as they move quietly back to doing things within their comfort zone and experience no change at all. [See posts from March compared to other dates. I failed to make a change happen.]
When it works, it’s great. Year End with a client this week; profits up £100k, margins up nearly 10%… happiness and another year to work together.
Here’s what Adriana does…
The way corporate life works is that change needs to come from the
top down, as well as the bottom up. Feverish activity in the middle is
at risk of being wasted."Yes, and yes again. I see change as a laborious and slow building of
a momentum (finding the genie and the neck of the bottle), which must
be based on the understanding that you CANNOT change a system from
within. What you can do is build a parallel alternative
system/process/network with the notion of bypassing the existing one.
Do this by doing things that work i.e. small projects under the radar,
borrowing the motivation and dynamics for them from the
internet…(tools, autonomy, simplicity). Then stand back and watch the
bad bits of the company and its culture fight it. Whenever I get this
far with my clients and the change to their companies, it always
involves getting them into their discomfort zone. There is no ’safe’
way of doing this. Think of it as a controlled implosion.I also know what Hugh means, small things/changes can impact even a
big entrenched system but generally they tend to be too minute and
therefore too fragile. Occasionally they start a snowball or tap into
something bigger and cause a fundamental shift. This however does not
offer companies much consolation as it cannot be easily understood, let
alone replicated.The change may be driven by people from within a system (and yes,
they have to be at the top as well as bottom) but they really have to
understand that they can’t use the system and its dysfunctional process
to change it. There is too much resistance and by the time they crack
it, the outside world has overtaken the company by a long way. And that
is no route to innovation.In my experience, the people who become part of change I try to
bring to companies have what I call an ‘oh fuck it’ moment. They have
tried to use the approved processes, implement tools and generally do
things by the book. They run against a wall and attitudes that firmly
hold it in place. When they realise this - it’s time for ‘oh fuck it, I
am going to do this anyway’. And that’s when we get really started.
So come hear her speak about this (and other things…..30 May, 2007. Breakfast.)