Improve Something Today

When planning a change in the workplace, the topic of resistance always comes up. And when it does, it seems bad—resistance as debris to be cleared away or routed around.

In this way, labelling people “resistant” is a complaint without recommendation. It’s a wish that things were other than they are.

Resistance prioritizes the wannabe change-maker over the people being asked to change.

Resistance is not a problem. It’s a signal

People who resist a change are telling you:

• They care about something. What are they afraid of losing? Someone in this state might not be able to articulate their worry. So draw pictures, make models. Once a shared explanation arises, frustration disappears.
• You’ve overlooked something. Find the details you’ve missed. Are people burned out after many botched changes? If so, take special care.
• They are your future champions. Convince them of the value of the change and they’ll support it wholeheartedly.

The purpose of resistance

Consider this, from Sara Fine’s 1986 study of how librarians resist change:

“Resistance will always exist, … acceptance of a current innovation is no assurance that the next level of change won’t be resisted, perhaps even more vigorously, as people make commitments to what they have achieved and mastered […]. Perhaps the purpose of resistance is to give us pause, force us to slow down, and impel us to pay attention to our basic human needs and values.”

2023 is the year of economic headwinds, of the “soft macro,” and the return of an old, wet noodle of a rallying cry:

“We have to do more with less!”

This cliché keeps coming around. I first heard it at my first job after college, where it was issued as a resource for bravery, an utterance that utterly backfired. In the decades since, I keep hearing it.

Each time, something about the phrase makes me want to fill in the blanks—“Do more (of what?) with less (of what?).”

As far as I can tell, the general usage seems to be:

• Doing more of this → Making money for the company
• With less of this → People

OK, that sucks! But first, wanna know where the slogan came from?

Bucky Fuller’s “ephemeralization”

Back in the 1930s, Fuller coined ephemeralization—which he defined as the capability of technological advancement to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.”

Here it is, on page 279 of Fuller’s Nine Chains to the Moon (1938):

If you are not fluent in Fullerese, please skip hundreds of pages of turgid reading and know that in his framework “doing more with less” entailed:

• Doing more of these things → Curing disease; eliminating infant mortality; providing housing and food for every family on Earth; and increasing the standard of living—and the freedom available for science, for art, for play, for leisure—with no upper limit
• With less of these things → Time, space, and energy

What I wonder is… how’d we get from all that—from the translation of “science into bread and butter for people”—to the current jargon, where it means nothing other than “do the work of five people but with 3, even though our company already sheds cash like a housecat made out of money.”

In the 2023 “soft macro” condition of “doing more with less,” the mechanism by which people are meant to actually accomplish this lessening is deliberately undefined. It’s the same old management-by-objective horseshit: “more with less,” but with no material or managerial support, an effort totally unlinked from the value chain.

From five to three—but what of the two?

In lean management, there’s an answer for what to do when people come up with improvements—even improvements so effective that they take the work of 5 people and turn it into the work of three. There has to be an answer, because as soon as an organization starts a serious practice of continuous improvement, it will find improvements like that. Always. Opportunities are just lying around, and the methods will uncover them.

Anyways, the lean management answer is this: OK, three people will now do that work previously done by 5, in a way that is safer, faster, more reliable. This frees up the remaining two to go do something else within the organization. Maybe it’s helping another group get ahead, or helping peers learn continuous improvement. Maybe it’s starting a new project. Nobody loses their job. Nobody is catapulted to the next stage of their career via layoff. And all this gets accomplished in a way that everybody can see the changes in quality, cost, and safety.

It’s critical that management believe in this answer, communicate it effectively, and stick to it over time.

Why? Because that’s what moves an organization:

• from the (bad) condition where people worry about working themselves out of a job, or observe that they will be punished and/or ignored for noticing problems at the workplace…
• to the (good) condition where people become deeply engaged in noticing problems and designing improvements to their own work.

It may not be Bucky’s Utopian, humanist vision of translating “science into bread and butter for people,” but it does mean helping people get the work done on time, with less hassle, and respecting the wisdom and capabilities of everybody involved. And… at least for now, you know, I’ll take it.

A passage from Jerry Weinberg’s The Secrets of Consulting:

Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next. Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients. Your primary tool is merely being the person you are, so your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.

I first read Jerry Weinberg around 15 years ago, at a time when I was comfortable working as an independent consultant, but remained deeply uncomfortable with existing in the world as a human being. I wasn’t yet ready to take seriously the projects of caring for myself, or for others, or understanding what it was like to be a person.

That passage really stuck with me. Let’s read it together.

“Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next.”

The best job description for my kind of work that I’ve ever seen. It opens questions like:

• Which people? Who is excluded yet should be included?
• What constitutes their world?
• How do they make that world intelligible to themselves or to others?
• How might they (as a group) produce explanations, find consensus, or make a decision and stick to it?

“Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients.”

If we’ve worked together, you know what this is like. The garage door is up, where somebody is always making a mess and then cleaning it up so it shines.

As a consultant, I will come and I will go. After I’m gone, I hope some of the methods of working I demonstrated might be retained. This is why I enjoy cycling through approaches, methods, and techniques. At the start of an activity, neither you nor I know what will work best, but we can hope to uncover it together.

“Your primary tool is merely being the person you are, so your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.”

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to recognize myself as an object truly capable of being helped, much less being worth the effort. Weinberg’s words gave me an important, early reason, which I now see as evidence of how deeply damaged I was (and still am) as a subject of capitalism. But that’s fine: you’ve got to go at the rate you can go.

These days, I work to keep things quiet in my head, so I can listen carefully to others. I sit still on my cushion so I can get up and move skillfully. I practice kindness so I can act kindly. Would it be better if I had come to these on my own, or earlier? Certainly. But I am grateful they came when they did.

No two go by one way; this one was mine.

Thanks, Jerry.