2020 has definitely been a year full of change!
Global pandemic? Check.
Millions unemployed? Check.
Months in isolation/social distancing? Check.
In the context of all of this change, I found this article on our bandwidth to handle change very interesting. Specifically these two sentences:
“Consider a leading global wealth manager whose employees, we recently found, had to deal with approximately 250 changes per year. These included operating model changes; new leadership structures; new productivity procedures in areas such as travel booking, digitized financial planning, and HR; new enterprise resource systems; agile ways of working such as sprints; and new legal and risk requirements and compliance procedures.“
Holy smokes, 250 changes per year! I bet that’s true for most of us. Just take a minute to think about it… benefits changes, staffing changes, position responsibility changes, organizational changes IT systems, physical moves, etc. The article doesn’t clearly state this but I would guess their research doesn’t account for changes outside of work like kids moving grades, aging parents, new neighbors, etc. Add on to that realities from COVID-19 and you've got a real storm of change!
I know it’s true that I fail to account for the ‘other’ changes going on when I am pushing ‘my’ change effort. With this newfound understanding, I want to start thinking about capacity for change like a bucket of water. When the bucket is full, it doesn’t matter how much effort we put into a great communication plan or training module, there’s just no room!
How full is your bucket? What about the bucket of the people you are working with?
photo credit: pixabay