What if change management, as the key to our organizations, was a question of energy, both on a structural level and on a personal level? A question of energy displacement, of flow.

Termites build a substitute of their body (a physiological extension to paraphrase J.Scott Turner - The extended organism) to save or store energy, the crystal is periodic: it repeats the same pattern to save energy, bodies and organizations have capacities for resilience, or homeostasis, energy regulation; the influx of a certain energy causes “catastrophes” to use the language of René Thom (catastrophe theory): rupture, tearing, curve, reversal, these are still energy flows. But remember your major personal changes, your ruptures, the before, the after, your great joys or revelations, epiphanies, they seem identical: it’s an influx of energy or a sudden void, that makes your positions bifurcate.

Emotion

In this world that dreamed itself Cartesian for the comfort of the mind – I think therefore I am, phew – the irruption of emotion is a nuisance. It appears as irrational. But why deny it? For 30 years it has returned to the forefront (evolutionary psychology, Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio, etc.). None of our important decisions is made without emotion. In this complex world we must rally Cartesian reasoning, and instinct or intuition, the fruit of our life and those of our ancestors. We must combine the complicated and the complex, the predictable and the emergent.

Moreover, no one ignores this reality when it comes to making major life choices: choosing a partner, choosing one’s path, etc.

If therefore this emotional, intuitive, instinctive aspect takes such a large part in our life, there is no doubt that it is key in our way of changing, of apprehending a new way of doing, of thinking. The image used by the Heath brothers in their book Switch is well found (and the title evocative): it’s that of the mahout, the Indian elephant driver, and his elephant. The mahout is the Cartesian, reasoning face of the duo, but it cannot go anywhere without the support of the more wild, instinctive, emotional part that is the elephant. To lead the elephant, you must seduce it, show it obvious passages, make the dead ends visible too. But perhaps it’s also the elephant’s instinct that will help it avoid the tiger’s trap.

To take up this image, ignoring that without the elephant’s agreement we will go nowhere means failing from the start. In all change management one must play on reason as much as on emotions.

Announce that you’re playing on emotions, and you’ll arouse fear. For some, it’s manipulation in its most perverse form. But in saying this you confirm the importance of emotion in our choices, and our weakness in managing it. Frank Taillandier reminds me of the shock doctrine by Naomi Klein; I think of reading thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman, or the treatise on manipulation for the use of honest people by J.L.Beauvois, which depress me about our enslavement to cognitive biases.

I cannot tell you anything else, it seems to me that like each discovery, it can be used for good or bad purposes. But I don’t think that genuine personal or organizational change management will unfold without emotion.

Remember your changes in beliefs, ideals, principles, didn’t they occur with an emotional influx? Like an energy made available for another path, a catastrophe, event, singularity, to use René Thom’s terms. Like laughter, which occurs, for example in the absurd sketches of Monty Python, when we have stored up energy (by projecting ourselves, here we find again storytelling and mirror neurons – read Social by Lieberman –) and it leads to an absurdity, it pours out through laughter, the only outlet for this influx of trapped energy.

Also think, as Oana Juncu reminds me, of sudden breaks with some of your loved ones, a barrier has been crossed, a behavior judged beyond the boundaries of the possible. We immediately dry up all communication. There will be no more energy going in that direction. This change is very rapid, very violent, very sudden, and often definitive. And yet we’re talking about a close friend. The rupture, the change, the catastrophe (Thom again) is proportional to the energy present, that associated with a close friend.

Echoing the discourse of Switch by the Heath brothers, reason indicates the path, but it’s the flow of emotional energy that will push us to move forward in that direction. As in an irrigation game, the paradigm shift is like a diverted river.

One must therefore know, like laughter, how to allow this influx of emotion and give it the opportunity to orient itself differently. There too one might see the face of manipulation; I can tell you nothing against that. As always it depends on the intention we put into our actions. Everything can be used for good or bad purposes. I hope to use them for good purposes.

We could take two examples: the transformation of Unilever during the 90s recounted in To the desert and back by Philip Mirvis, and the Open Agile Adoption by Dan Mezick.

Events, singularities, with emotional charge

When Mirvis tells us the story of Unilever’s transformation, he analyzes a posteriori that it was made possible by key moments that enabled significant shifts. Each of these shifts having very often been crystallized by extraordinary events (in the desert, in the Ardennes, etc.) with artistic staging, and which appeared symbolic a posteriori even if they weren’t necessarily intended at the start.

Crystallized or rather made possible by these events that made available this emotion conducive to generating clicks, epiphanies, shifts in modes of thinking. By “epiphany” I mean sorts of revelations, awakenings, realizations, without falling into mysticism.

Very often these events were amplified by an artistic approach, genuine staging. This is precisely the meaning of the word to sensitize. This allows for better understanding that something is happening. To create a gap, or an aspiration to borrow a term from the art world.

One can be for or against, depending on the degree of orchestration, of premeditation, and especially the intention, which one will relate or not to manipulation. The best way to protect oneself is to announce what one seeks to do, why one does it this way, and to leave people free to participate. As always it’s the intention that counts.

A safe, benevolent space

It’s this freedom to participate that we find in the Open Agile Adoption proposed by Dan Mezick. By invitation, we will set a conducive framework, a safe space. And it’s this safe space that will be able to allow the emergence of emotion. Emotion itself being the energy that transforms.

When Olaf Lewitz speaks of protection, of benevolence and vulnerability, he typically describes this type of framework: a protected space conducive to emotion. A sensitive moment. Having experienced a certain number of open agile adoptions (I was able to meet and forge bonds of friendship with Dan Mezick at the very beginning of his proposal), it’s surprising to observe how this emotion only asks to emerge.

Much more modest, but outside of time, raid agile aims to be this type of space with emotional charge.

Leading change

Try to observe and be attentive to ways of opening these flows of emotional energy to provoke change.

Particular places (raid agile in the Cévennes, the Ardennes, the desert, etc.), different positions, immersions, abandonments, etc. Particular postures, particular discourses. By “particular” I mean “unusual”, “destabilizing”, “protected”, “intimate”, etc.