CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATIONS

"The Humpty Dumpty Effect --
When doing our best isn't good enough"

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall;
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses
And all the King's men
Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.

There was double trouble when Humpty Dumpty fell from his perch. First, he broke into pieces. That was bad enough; but he presented an even bigger challenge. The combined efforts of all the King's horses and men could not put Humpty back together again. Eighteenth century society, represented by the tipsy egg, had hatched problems it was unable to resolve. People are working longer and harder, only to find it less rewarding and far less "fun". We have created problems that are overwhelming presently available solutions in education, community development, social services, health care, or corporate design. The organizations of the day lacked both the people skills and the technology to fix what was broken. Many entities today are at the tipping point, about to crack open.

If you sense Humpty Dumpty wobbling, let us suggest that the SPIRAL DYNAMICS process will help you begin the search for serious solutions. It can lower the walls to make available the possibilities for the necessary consciousness needed to develop new processes. It will help us create new visions of the cosmic egg to see new Humpty Dumpty. The old Humpty Dumpty can never be put together again, but a new organizing principle can help his children prepare for an exciting new today.

Remember that the Humpty Dumpty Effect occurs when doing our best is still not good enough, when more of the same only digs us into a deeper hole, and when the sum of our solutions does not balance the weight of our problems. In spite of the finest intentions and much hard work, things slide more in the direction of for-worse, not for-better. If the Humpty Dumpty Effect continues too long, we reach a tipping point from which recovery is expensive and difficult, if not impossible.

Many aspects of life are approaching Humpty Dumpty points. Racialism and ethnicities continue to plague us. Social and economic gaps widen, not just between have's and have-not's, but know's and know-not's, can's and cannot's, will's and will-not's. Education is in doubt, many politicians are suspect, cities are in crisis, families are in trouble, and the future is more disturbing than hopeful for way too many of earth's citizens.

Meanwhile, the corporate world right-sizes, down-sizes, and teams up, then recommits to quality while reengineering and reviewing visions, missions, effective habits, values, and short-range goals. Flavor-of-the-month consultants hawk their wares through chaos and systems while people entrenched in their own status quo's fight to keep things as they are, only the labels changed to protect the guilty. Executives polish their cutting edges while employees on the shop floors are expected to do more with less and fewer. Far too often, human resources staff are expected to apply bandages and pain killers while the scythe of a bottom line cuts another layer off their own organizations. We continue doing what is not working while pretending that it is.

Such are Humpty Dumpty times, when changing the players or even modifying the rules will not save Humpty Dumpty so long as the game is the thing. Instead, what is necessary is a quantum leap, a profound shift in critical mass, and a major transformation in the way we understand human nature itself because, once again,

"We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves,

and we are applying to the present the habits of the past."

- Winston Churchill

To break from these past habits, both new solutions and a new organizing principle are required. Of new solutions there are plenty - the literature and showcases like the ASTD Expo or the Frankfurt Book Fair are full of good ideas and creative approaches. And the King's horses, men, and women stand ready and anxious to go to work. What they generally lack, though, is a sense of the Humpty Dumpty to-be, a vision of how the pieces of the whole egg will again relate to each other. And they need a scaffold on which to work along with some hooks on which to hang their beloved solutions so they can be applied appropriately to the work to be done, at the right level, at the right time, on the problems where they naturally fit. Finally, without a set of guiding templates to align these participants and some new glue to hold Humpty Dumpty together again, our friend is doomed to lie beneath the wall fragmented. Both the King and the stakeholders will watch in frustration.

If we want to break out of the Humpty Dumpty impasse, we must step away from the fallacy of single-solutions competing for preeminence and begin to focus on the integration, alignment, and synergy of multiple solutions at once. The complexity of today's problems, either in the corporate world or society at-large, demands no less.

Consider, then, that we may live in many different realities, all at once. These parallel universes are all legitimate. They all have unique intelligences and competencies. They are motivated by different things and their priorities shift. They exist as the interaction products of life conditions in the world outside with latent capacities inside each of our mind/brain systems. People do what makes sense to them, as they see "the real world," and put first things first based on those definitions. Change happens as both the external life conditions and the systems inside ebb and flow. Yet, with all these potential variances, we are all part of that single Humpty Dumpty which is us. For example, consider these possible views of human resources . . .

PURPLE - animistic/traditional: "HR must do things just as our people have always done, in keeping with the wishes of the spirits and our ancestors, and to avoid change that threatens our customary way of living or the safety of our family."

RED - egocentric/exploitive: "I see HR as a club to control people without guilt or fear of any consequences. I can do with them - reward or punish - as I please because I am the powerful one. I tell them what to do and how I want it done, or else. "

BLUE - absolutistic/righteous: "The proper role of HR is to find the one true way to be. We are obliged to teach people what is right and where they belong in the scheme of things. We should all work without doubt or question of the rightful authority above us, knowing that just rewards will come later."

ORANGE - multiplistic/materialist: "If HR is clever, the objective is to check out several options and find the best, most efficient course to progress. Since I am convinced we can take control of our own destinies, I focus on personal development based on my own right-thinking mind and experiences. Competitive advantage is the name of the game."

GREEN - relativistic/humanistic: "If we even use the term HR, we need to emphasize human far more than resources. We should sense the situation and respond to the needs of everyone, then consensus and harmony will be available to the whole team and each person will be free to become what he or she chooses."

YELLOW - systemic/facilitative: "One aspect of HR is to discover the natural connections between persons and functions so as to create effective linkages that blend the strengths of a wide range of thinking in getting important things done in responsible ways."

TURQUOISE - holistic/experiential: "HR is a sensory system among the many energies in all living things. As part of the overall human ecology, it can play a significant role in the emergence of what humanity is becoming."

These multiple realities can be bolted together to form the scaffold where everything begins to connect to everything else. If we stand on this platform and drop a mason's plumb bob - a pointed weight on a string - over the work to be done, the mission to be accomplished, or the purpose for doing what we are doing, it is possible to align any number of training models, organizational forms, teamwork strategies, management philosophies, and change technologies to their points of best fit. The question, HOW should WHO manage WHOM to do WHAT, WHEN? takes on both more specificity and a far broader perspective. By stepping back to look at the entire operation, it is possible to see the integration of the once-competing methods into a seamless whole where all can be useful, but none pretends to be the final, ultimate answer since both people and conditions change. Finally, if we set that now-integrated whole in motion, we may sense the synergy that accrues when Humpty Dumpty is reassembled into something even more elegant than what he was.

To effect the change, however, there are six Conditions for vMEME Change which must be met.  The extent to which each of these conditions is addressed determines which sort of change is feasible, Variation 1 through Variation 7 (see below).  The conditions are:

> Potential for more complex thinking in the individual or collective mind/brain.
> Solutions found to present Existence Problems at the present level.
> Dissonance about the fit of present thinking with the realities at hand.
> Barriers to change (both extrensic and internal) identified and dealt with.
> Insight into alternatives and viable options as a change to strategy.
> Support during the transition and Consolidation of the new thinking.

The more of the Six Conditions which a system can meet, the more likely will be order of magnitude Vertical change. Meeting all Six Conditions is essential for change in large scale systems and avoiding the Humpty Dumpty Effect.  If few of the conditions can be met, then the change effort should be very basic.  When only some of the Conditions are fulfilled, Oblique outcomes are more likely wherein some aspects of the system shift while others remain fixed, despite appearances or new labels.  When there are severe limits, then 1^st and 2^nd Variation Change may be all that the system can handle.  Thus, the effective change agent assesses the Conditions before forging ahead with Change initiatives. The skill of change management is to fit the appropriate Variation of change, the congruent Change technologies, and the requisite Support into a system so that neither too much too soon nor too little too late is the rule. 

We asked those who attended our session at the 1995 ASTD Conference in Dallas, "The Humpty Dumpty Effect - When doing our best isn't good enough," to respond to a series of questions about their organizations and their worlds. The following conclusion emerged:

"When all the King's horses, men, and women are doing their best, yet that is still not enough to put things back together again, a total systemic reframing is called for."

First, participants indicated how much they agreed or disagreed with 10 HD statements on 1-9 scales:

• We (our company, community, society) are experiencing large-scale regressions
• We are over run with simplistic, narrow cures that don't match the complexity of our problems
• Stress levels are high and wide spread
• We have become "trendy" with a series of flavor-of-the-month initiatives
• Many have a shaky feeling about the future but don't know why
• We have "new wine" but have only "old wine-skins" to contain it
• Many of our good efforts to fix things are blocked
• We are trapped in an Age of Limbo, rocking uncertainly between the old and the new
• Many of our solutions are making things worse, not better
• The past holds us back more than future pulls us forward

This is the result of those questions regarding their perceptions of the Humpty Dumpty condition:

Participants also completed a four item ^vMEME questionnaire where they were to distribute 15 points among seven options to indicate their priorities regarding the following issues from a Gravesian perspective:

• "I like a job where..."
• "These words and phrases describe me best...."
• "I prefer an organization that..."
• "Pay and rewards should be determined by..."

This gave a ^vMEMEmetic profile of the group. In essence, they had 60 points to spread among seven ^vMEMEs (those core intelligences which attract ideas, beliefs, and attitudes to form value systems and world views). Here are the group's averages, along with the high and low scores for each ^vMEME.

Note that this self-selected ASTD group was strong ORANGE-YELLOW with a notable GREEN band, as well. The competitive, progressive, improvement-oriented ORANGE continues to be a strong theme in ASTD and would probably have been even higher in other sessions and on the "sales" floor. The GREEN would be higher in more participative, experiential-learning modules with more sharing time. The increasing YELLOW reflects the Humpty Dumpty Effect at work as we move from First Tier (old paradigm models) to Second Tier problems that cannot be resolved with solutions rooted in the past.

New Times Demand New Thinking!