Whether it is strategy or wellbeing programming, we all rely on energy to make them work. There is a tendency in organizational behaviour consulting to focus on the cognitive qualities of decisions, change-making, and action. These qualities are things like our thoughts, ideas, and confidence in doing something. Sometimes they are about emotions. What’s often missing is what converts all of this into action: energy.

Yet, it’s our ability to convert our thoughts and manage our emotions that determine our ultimate success with efforts to change. Without energy, we can’t move from intent to action.

Energy Assessment

When we speak of energy we refer to the capacity to convert thoughts, sensations and emotions into intentions, designs, and actions. This is our ability to sense, dream, hope, plan and take action toward a goal.

This is a simple idea. It’s the application that is complicated. The reason for this is that we need to get in touch with what it is that we think, sense, and feel? We encourage people to think of three things in assessing energy:

Thoughts: What are we thinking about? What is holding our attention? Where does our mind, our attention, and focus wander?

Sensations: What are we feeling, hearing, or experiencing in our body? Where are we feeling it? What is capturing our sensations like touch, feel, sound (even taste)? This is as much about our physical energy as it is our body reacting to the world around it.

Emotions: What are our feelings? Where and how do we feel about things?

These questions shape our energy stores – the amount of energy we have available. Thoughts, feelings, and sensations in their quantity and intensity all require energy to attend to. The more we have and the more intense they are, the more we need to manage this in order to convert energy into action.

They are attractors that draw us toward or away from something. These attractors can also help us to clarify our strategic intent and what we’re really interested in. Our efforts at change, wellbeing, and innovation fail when we misalign our intent and desires with our energy. Pay attention to where you pay attention.

Energy matters because it is what converts our interests into actions. A good sense of what gives and draws energy helps us to determine the attractors that pull or push us to and from things.

Energy Stores and Design

Another important concept in energy assessment is recognizing that sometimes we don’t have much energy. It takes time to ‘top-up’ our energy stores after they’ve been depletion. A highly emotionally charged experience can deplete our energy stores. This is even more salient when we have a prolonged intensive experience (e.g., consider the COVID-19 pandemic, a stressful merger etc., a personal injury).

Design is shaping what is to come with intent. When we follow energy our designs are best when they account for what energy we have and what energy we need to make the design a reality. This approach means that we take energy into account as one of the materials of design.

Launching a strategic change initiative requires that we consider building up energy stores as part of our design process. Leading an exhausted, depleted workforce requires specific strategies. It requires flexibility, modelling, work redesign, and compassion (among others). This is before we even create a specific strategy, plan, or prototype.

We argue for doing check-ins on energy stores — looking at people’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations — regularly throughout the process. This can be done in many ways and doesn’t have to be formal or complicated. Simple check-ins will work. Doing this will allow us to determine if we have the energy to fuel the change we want.

Our human energy is a part of our designs and the limiting factor in making our changes real.

We work with organizations to help them change, grow, and heal. If you want help in creating a culture of innovation and wellbeing in your organization, let’s grab a coffee and talk about your needs.

Image Credit: Matthew Henry on Unsplash

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Change-making is not a singular thing, rather it is viewed more as an index. That means that the more of these different factors that are present, the greater the likelihood of change.

We recently concluded the first season of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast looking at this idea of the index and introducing the last of the ten factors: glue. Glue brings together our strategies, processes, techniques and tools (one of the other factors).

Ten Factors for Change

The previous factors that have each been profiled in episodes in that first season are:

1. Knowledge
2. Skills
3. Confidence
4. Outcome Expectations
5. Conditions
6. Environment
7. Social Support
8. Time and Space
9. Tools
10. Glue

This first season has focused on the building blocks of change. These ten factors that if applied in earnest can help us to grow and transform organizations, communities, and ourselves. We can think of these in two groups: individual-focused change and shared-focused areas of change.

A big myth that we’ve covered this season of the podcast is that we are the masters of our own change and destiny. While we do contribute a big deal to our own change efforts, we can’t separate ourselves from the communities, organizations, families, and teams around us who enable, constraint and support change.

The more of these things, we do the better, the quality of our performance, the amount of persistence and endurance of our efforts. The more likely we are to change specifically glue are the techniques, the methods and the strategies for change. They are something that connects all of these other factors together in the implementation of some type of plan to make changes.

Lessons from Season One

The first is that change Isn’t a single thing. It’s more of a combination of things that we think of less than the list and much more as an index. Second, tools, techniques, strategies, and practice are the glue that ties all of these individual factors. Third, we can design change if we know what to do, and we can draw these 10 factors together to help us innovate and create a difference in the world we’re looking to make.

This is a design challenge. Glue is the systemic design of our organizations or our own personal practices that build up strategies to leverage all ten of these. We’re rarely successful with all of these, but by viewing them as an index it gives us something to focus on for improvement. We also can optimize those things working well to compensate for those areas that are not. Success comes because we have many avenues to change, not just one or two.

This is a different way to view change, but one that we’ve seen show the truth in our many years of working as change-makers and strategic designers.

If you want to learn more about this, please contact us and we can help. Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts.

Photo by olia danilevich

The post Creating Glue: Viewing Change as an Index appeared first on Cense Ltd. .