Managing Change Anxiety: Winding Your Watch In The Eye Of The Storm

My grandfather was born in 1894 and died in 1976. During his lifetime, he went from riding a horse and buggy to watching a man land on the moon on his own television. Talk about change!

We’ve been dealing with exponential change for a long time, and it’s always been unprecedented. So, what’s different now? In today’s rapid world of change, we are dealing with forces almost designed to exacerbate our stress — forces that our grandparents were fortunate to have avoided.

Social media bombards us with articles from professionals whose business models depend on stoking our change anxiety. Then we have industry conferences where “experts” drum into your head that being behind on whatever adoption curve is currently at maximum hype is an existential threat.

Beating the Cynical Industry Hype

Perhaps most soul-crushing is the feeling that if you just stop for a minute to think and reflect, the experts will label you as entrenched, unwilling to adapt, a dinosaur, or something worse.

I know I should prove my understanding of this, show that I’m not a dinosaur, and write an article about some form of popular “thought leadership,” but I won’t do that.

Instead, I’m going to give the same advice that flight instructors have been handing down to student pilots for generations:

When you have an emergency, the first thing you should do is wind your watch!

Pilots are familiar with this maxim, and it’s the first rule for how to deal with emergencies. The idea is that there’s almost nothing that will happen when flying an airplane that requires the pilot just to start doing stuff. Instead, the pilot is trained to step back, take a deep breath, assess the situation, plan a course of action, and execute (usually using a checklist).

So, when the world is going to hell, wind your watch. Then act.

The Suitable Response to Sourcing Deals

I’ve spent most of my career working with clients on transformational programs, so I tend to see microcosms of the more significant stresses that permeate my clients’ professional psyches.

In deal work, one of the first places you see this is when an RFP  is supposed to reflect a progressive vision. It’s fascinating, exciting, and horrifying at the same time.

It’s fascinating and exciting because there is a lot on the table; it is game-changing. The change is challenging, and we may very well be creating some new ways of operating.

Each new relationship — each new deal — has the potential to be the first to solve a problem or exploit some unforeseen opportunity. If you’re in this business and love it, this gets you out of bed in the morning.

The horrifying part is the same as the exciting part: there’s a lot on the table, and it’s game-changing. Also, the opportunities and new ways of operating could go either way and in many cases, execution is happening faster than the speed of thought.

The purposeful chaos being dumped on the humans in this industry is taking its toll. It may be okay to “fail fast” when you’re automating a process or two, but there are times when failing fast just makes you a fast failure, and there are times when this can have real and dire consequences.

Rooting Out the Cause

Suppose you’re in a situation where your team or you are feeling some unusual change anxiety about a transformative program. You may be bothered for reasons that transcend the challenge of the transformation itself.

You may feel that something is somehow off, not fit for purpose, too rigid, or undisciplined. You also may think it’s best not to speak up because somebody may not appreciate a contrarian point of view.

This can be tricky to handle. Luckily, taking a step back and doing a little basic blocking and tackling can still go a long way. This is particularly true in the current environment, where terminology can mean different things to different people.

Learning From The Past

You may recall when innovation was the hot buzzword in outsourcing. Well, one we recently worked on was supposed to be transformative, was procurement and IT-led, and had a respected technology-focused sourcing adviser involved.

The RFP contained the statement: “Client will retain innovation.”

Everyone knows what that means, and the team members who wrote it were ready to defend it to the death!

The requirement in the RFP meant the vendor was expected to provide commodity-type services, leaving the interesting work to an internal team of crackerjack industry-leading technologists, who are masters of their domain and bring incredible technological innovation.

Despite what the RFP said, the requirement was very different.

The client’s business is constantly changing, and it has to be responsive to very challenging market demands requiring relentless product, delivery, and promotional innovation. In reality, the client wanted to be liberated from technology constraints but retain its ability to direct product development and deployment.

The requirement in the RFP had nothing to do with technology at all!

This client was looking for a partner who could bring new and innovative solutions to bear based on the demanding product innovation cycles noted above. In other words, the actual requirement was for the vendor to be very responsive to quickly changing conditions and to bring new development methodologies that would enable the tech cycle to be as short or shorter as the product development/marketing cycle it was supporting.

This is very different from saying in an RFP that the “client will retain innovation.”

Had that clause been left as written, the RFP would have (1) completely missed a critical requirement for the relationship, (2) set up a point of failure by requiring the client to take on a responsibility that it did not intend to take on, (3) used a word that was essentially devoid of meaning in that context, and (4) prolonged the contracting process, because an issue like this is more challenging to deal with in the contract stage than the RFP stage.

This example came to my attention through a member of the RFP team who had worked with me on another deal and called to ask if I knew what that “innovation” statement meant. It’s an excellent example of the positive impact of someone who felt uneasy about a requirement and took a minute to wind his watch and reflect.

In today’s environment, you may get called upon to participate in pretty “interesting” work and wonder whether that pain in your stomach means you’re an entrenched, unadaptable dinosaur.

I respectfully submit that before you come to that conclusion, take a minute to wind your watch.