Foundations of change

- DEIB requires change, and we need to manage it to achieve progress. There's nothing to sustain otherwise. In case change management is new to you or not part of your daily responsibilities, I'll cover some foundational concepts. But, first, let's take a moment to reflect. Why do you want change? Is this something that's internally driven and meaningful to you or externally influenced? Perhaps it's a little bit of both. But your intrinsic motivation is the initial fuel you'll need to get started. I encourage you to pause this video now and reflect on these questions for a deeper understanding of the change you're looking for. Why do I want change? How would I describe the gap between where we are and where we want DEIB, and how bad do I really want it? In other words, how important is this to me? How'd it go? What did you envision and why? Your answers articulate your intentions. Change disrupts the status quo. While it might have the capacity to briefly disorient us, we know that people are capable of change. Humans are constantly evolving. Research shows that change becomes problematic because of how it's managed or not managed. Good change management is done with awareness, intentionality, and flexibility without losing core purpose and meaning. By now, I hope you realize that change doesn't just happen to you. Leading change and having sustainable impact is something we can all do if we learn how. Remember that change lives or dies because of people and their relationship to change. Look for sources of blind political or ideological resistance to change, and look for opportunities to engage the three parts of the mind: the cognitive, the what and the why; the affective, emotions; and the conative, drives, behaviors, and actions. Blind resistance is the fear and intolerance of change, any change and every time. Give those with blind resistance reassurance and more time and space to process the change. Political resistance comes from people's belief that they'll lose something of value if change is implemented. For example, power, influence, or privilege. Address this through negotiation and dialogue. Practice active listening to get a sense for where people are coming from, even if you don't agree. Help them understand long-term gain versus short-term loss. And ideological resistance comes from a perception that the change will fail or deeply held values will be violated. These are intellectual or philosophical differences, so offer data, facts, and substance, not just opinion, and work toward gaining alignment. When people resist change, it's because they care. That creates an opportunity to engage people in genuine dialogue, leading to deeper understanding, new possibilities, and collective intelligence. What we want to watch out for is apathy. I was on a project once where the sentiment was, "I'm okay with change "as long as I don't have to do anything." The motivation wasn't there to collaborate. When we encounter apathy, we come up against one condition for lack of change in sustainability, and that is the failure to create dissatisfaction with the status quo. What we've just gone through here is the substance, or what I call the content of change. It's concerned with what capabilities are needed, how people need to be engaged, and what needs to be communicated through dialogue to support the narrative we're trying to facilitate before, during, and after it happens. Look forward to when we discuss the process of change in chapter four.