Two Points Make a Line

Most of the time whenever a change is proposed, we would discuss what the future looks like.

Oh, our devs need to do more testing.

Ah, we want to have this quality mindset.

Hey, there should be more communication between these two departments.

We know the destination, and we’re itching to get there.

There is however, an implicit condition that we assume to be present but we are not actually stating out clearly: that we know where we are coming from.

Change means that there is something that we want to do differently from the way we’ve been doing things, either because the “old way” is inefficient, ineffective, or just plain unnecessary.

We need to remember that the “old way” was the “new way” in the past, and that these behaviors are there because they solved a problem. There are reasons why the organization ended up adopting these ways, and it’s our job as change managers to figure this out and state them clearly.

By determining the reasons behind why we do what we do now, we can better find out why we need to do the change in the first place: is it because the problems being solved by the “old ways” are not there anymore, or were the “old ways” wrong in certain assumptions?

Then it becomes so much easier to map the change out, because everyone understands that we’re all going in the same direction.

Two points make a line. Similarly, two things make a change: knowing where (and why) you came from, and knowing where (and why) you want to go.