Grandma’s Blue House: A change management case study
By: Stephany Medina
Growing up, I was the kid that hated change. My grandma had a very blue living room--walls, couch, shag carpet, even the picture frames were all blue. One year she decided to yank it all out and upgrade to a more nuanced look. Six-year-old Steph was not having this sudden and unexpected change. As an adult, I’m better with change, but there are some key aspects to change management that make it easier for me. Let’s see what the research has to say.
Adaptive leadership is the ability to inspire teams to work together to create change, often in complex systems. Instead of decisions in a hierarchical structure, adaptive leadership finds ways to include contributions from team members and bring them along in the change. There are 5 steps to managing change through adaptive leadership.
Table Source: Building Strategic Skills for Better Health: A primer for public health professionals (2024). Book released by ASTHO and the de Beaumont Foundation.
Step one is to practice systems thinking. Systems thinking can be hard. Many of us aren’t asked to look at things through that lens very often, or maybe we’ve even been told to “stay in our lane.” We’re in the details of planning our program, evaluating specific data points required by funders, and more. That’s all incredibly important work! But systems thinking allows us to step back and see the complex contexts our programs live in. For example, I’ll bet when my grandma changed her carpet, she didn’t stop to think about how it would impact her 6-year-old granddaughter, yet these are the things good change managers need to think about to get people on board. My grandma may have nailed steps two and three, she knew the scope of her change and planned out the details. But she stumbled on step four: she didn’t communicate the scope of the change. It left me wondering what else might be changing, if anyone would tell me, and why it was changing.
While my grandma’s house is a silly example, and a bit of a stretch to incorporate step five relating to building a learning culture open to change, it shows how even a simple change can leave people feeling like they don’t have answers to critical questions like:
What’s changing?
What’s not changing?
Why is it changing?
Why now?
What happens if we don’t change?
What is my role in the change?
What’s in it for me?
What are the next steps?
Confusion around this can make change feel hard, when many times, it should feel exciting!
Interested in learning more about change leadership using an adaptive approach? Check out the book Building Strategic Skills for Better Health. The Region V Public Health Training Center also has free courses like Leadership and Whole-Systems Change, and Managing Change: The Essential Leadership Skill.