Change is all around us, it can be long-coming like climate change, regular like the four seasons, or even sudden, chaotic, or as seemingly random as what your date fancies for dinner. One thing about interesting about change is that it brings with it the challenge of adapting, and this is a challenge that can sometimes overwhelm even the best of us.
Have you ever been on a date with someone who can’t seem to decide what they want for dinner? It starts with “I might have the…, oh wait, maybe the…” and after a few iterations you might have whittled the list of possibilities down to a selection of two, the steak or the chicken, only to have the fish come in a the last second and win out, even when it didn’t even get a say-in during the process?!
Situations like this can, quite acceptably, drive one crazy. Particularly if you are not one for change. And this scenario is all too familiar for those of us aiming to keep a project on track.
Enter: Change Management
Managing change is a process of preparation, planning and implementation, and reinforcement. Each of these stages is important to the success of our project (in this case, our ‘Date’).
Firstly: Preparation
Preparation is about doing your homework, finding out who you are dealing with, understanding the parties involved (in this case, your future partner), and what he/she likes or wants out of this experience. Assessing your date and understanding the motivators and behaviours that this person brings to the project is key to defining how much change there is likely to be, and what approaches might need to be catered for.
Typical issues in the Date project might consist of, how hungry your date is, what food preferences, allergies, or other limiting factors exist, how much time you have, and what budget you or you date might have.
Secondly: Planning and implementation
Planning for the Date project takes all that homework you’ve done, all the online Facebook stalking you’ve attempted, and any other investigative work you’ve performed like, talking to the potential date, or their friends, and relating this into an action plan for the evening.
He/she loves italian food? Plan = go to an italian restaurant
He/she specifically only likes pizza = go to an italian-pizza restaurant
Refining your plan to accommodate for the date is key to minimizing time spent dealing with issues like, “i love pizza, but what about we try pasta instead..”, through to, “do you think I’d prefer this over that”, naturally these are difficult questions to answer on a first date, and one’s taste is usually their own.
Implementing the plan is pretty straight forward, but you should realise that even the best plans can go a little pear shaped, and that’s why you need to also prepare yourself for the inevitable. All plans are out the door as soon as you try to execute them. So now its time for you to put your second plan into action.. dealing with change.
You need to be able to adapt, and if you havent got a plan for “how to adapt” then as they say; “fail to plan = plan to fail”. Think about the strategies you’d employ if your date got distracted by the plethora of options your italian-pizza restaurant was suddenly now offering, including healthy list of pasta options, none of which your indecisive date had tried. Had you prepared yourself for this situation, you’d be quietly speaking to yourself and saying “its ok, take your time, there’s no rush, we knew this was going to happen, its ok… really”, and instead of getting frustrated with your date, you’re now probably trying to help them.
So.. be prepared.
Finally: Reinforcement
this involves looking at all the evidence, reviewing how the date went, determining where you are at in the relationship and deciding the best path forward. In this stage we need to recognise that there may have been some failure on our behalf, and our date might also have some inconsistencies which could have been better dealt with. But all in all you’ve probably navigated yourself into a position with the option of a second date. Having tested the water, you are now better prepared for round two, and let the planning begin.
Wrapping things up
As you will have figured out by now, this is not a tutorial on change management, nor is it a plan of action for you to implement in any way. Rather it is a reflection on the correlation between change management in the engineering projects I manage each day, and how we already seek to do a similar thing in everyday life (even without thinking too hard about it).
I hope this has been an entertaining read, and I wish you a pleasant Project (date).
Feel free to comment, and share, I’d love it if you’d share.
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