3.30.2009

What Changes When IT Changes? (The Prologue)

I've been away. While away I've been paying attention to all the fuss in the economy and to my own responss to that fuss. I read the Financial Times every day because it is a great newspaper. It is proving its worth now as it covers the complexities of the recession. The depth and width of change that is happening everyday is breath stealing.

All this change is Burning Platform of Change (BPC). It is the change that is forced on a person or a company or an industry or a country or a planet when events on the ground gives one no other options. It's either death by fire or you take your chances jumping from the high platform into ocean turbulence.

While this activity is change, it is rarely the type of change we seek. It never occurs at the right time or at a pace that we can absorb. BPC comes at us like water shot from a fire hose and surviving is our primary strategy. As this global recession rolls forward, we are witnesses destruction as many entities do not survive and the people associated with them suffer real loss. It's been said that people do not fear change, they fear loss. There is a great deal of both moving through lives today.

This creative destruction is being forced on us by large structural and process failure in organizations and governments. Most of us are moving through these occurances with a "response strategy." We are working to make the most out of the pieces that are left after the descruction has hit us. This response strategy is useful in the short-term but it has no legs to carry us for the long-run.

This is one of the great historical moments in modern history. We are living each day of this long moment when the order of so many structures and processes are being trashed and tossed aside.

To be replaced by what?

The answer to this question lives in the act of creating. Creating new structures and process demands change but it is change by design, not BPC. I'll explore this change by design over the next few days because while it is the best type of change, it is also the most difficult to pull off. Having a strategy to execute that change is helpful. Stay tuned.