Stop waiting to be ready: kickstart transformation today
At the start of your change journey, the road can feel incredibly long and hard. Where do you begin? The indecision and overwhelm can leave you frozen, preventing change from ever getting off the ground.
That's why I love this advice from Gemma, ex interim CEO of Save the Children UK and CEO of Refuge. When asked for her top tip for making change happen, she said, ”Just do something. One thing.”
“Just do something. One thing.”
That’s it: just do something. Take the first step. Start small, scale up. Experiment. Test and learn. In coaching we ask you to think of something tiny you can do right now that takes you closer towards your ultimate goal. This is important because it shifts us from overwhelm and procrastination mode into solutions mode, where we spot small opportunities for action.
What counts as a small thing?
You might be wondering what that small thing should be. What does small even mean? It’s something that is in your gift to change. No budget or board sign-off. It’s down to you to take the first step. So, start with yourself. What actions or behaviours can you change right now? Look for inspiration through the lenses of People, Process and Tech.
Gemma suggests changing how you talk to People, how you engage your team or how you listen. You might book a coffee to improve a relationship or forge a new connection. Looking at Process, you might change the setup of a meeting. It could be a new chairperson or drawing up new meeting guidelines. Or refresh the way your week is planned. For Tech, you might think about disabling a default setting. When Shopify cancelled all recurring meetings with more than two employees and instated ‘meeting free Wednesday’, they managed to relieve jam-packed calendars and make space for productivity.
Another way to find inspiration for that first small step is to work backwards from your long-term vision. Let’s say the goal is cross-functional teams working to agile principles. Your small thing might be deep listening with your team or co-designing solutions rather than issuing instructions. These are the small steps that will help get you closer to your goal.
Once you have that small step in mind, break it down into even smaller pieces. Ask yourself, “What action can I take right now?” If your plan is to catch up with that person in a month, what can you do today that leads to it? You might put in a calendar invite or get your colleague to introduce you to the right person. It’s about committing and *doing* something small today. Right now.
Why do we resist starting small?
Pressure
We often feel pressure to make a massive two or even five-year plan with a massive price tag to match. We think we need to make a business case with lots of detail and lengthy risk calculations. Add to that the pressure from trustees and leadership to see results, ta-da moments.
But it doesn’t have to start that way. In reality, all that planning means we’re likely to get it wrong because projects fail, circumstances change, the world constantly evolves. Starting with a smaller scale experiment shows you whether something is going to work or not. And you can flex and adjust as you go along. Moving people from a small pilot to a bigger project should be easier because you’ll have reliable data proving what’s possible. And people will have a sense of how all this works. So it will feel less like a massive change and more like a series of adjustments.
What you don’t want is for your small action to amount to nothing more than a pet project or test. To avoid this, collaborate with others. Find likeminded people to bring on board early on. You’ll be better equipped to scale up or switch off the project because more people will feel ownership and accountability.
Readiness
Making change can fall to the bottom of our to-do list time and again when we don’t feel “ready”. And it takes a little bravery to start before you’re ready. It’s safer to just keep everything the same. Often, managers won’t allow teams to experiment in case they fail. I heard a story of an employee who was handling monthly direct debits manually, even though the process would be much quicker and easier with AI. But that employee and their manager were resistant because they felt there wasn’t the time to invest in setting it up. Maybe there was some that their role would become irrelevant. They need encouragement, reassurance and the time and space to take those initial steps.
Curiosity
There’s one more thing the employee and their manager need in that scenario: curiosity. They need to get curious about how much better things could be. They need to be open to learning new things. As someone said recently, the pace of change in AI is such that Microsoft Copilot is already different today to yesterday. It’s almost impossible to train people to use technology fast enough to keep up. Instead, we need to encourage our employees to think of training as a rhythm not an event.
Gemma says,
"The biggest thing that I've seen time and time again is about people with a growth mindset that are willing to try and learn new things... every time we've had that more fixed mindset, it's very difficult."
Encourage curiosity in your teams. It’s essential for change. Before, we looked to plug skill gaps with new hires. Now, we need to plug the curiosity gap. Curious people pick up the necessary skills and keep up with today’s rapid pace of change. Our job is to simply foster that experimental environment. Buddy schemes and providing a space for experimentation and trying things out are two ways to start making this happen.
Why does starting small work?
The power of starting small is you don’t need sign off from anyone, wherever you are in the hierarchy. No managers, no board, no budget. The upshot of that is that there’s no pressure on your small change to work right away.
When Prostate Cancer UK switched to cross functional teams and agile ways of working, they started with just one team. The rest of the organisation saw how well it worked and were enthusiastic and ready for the change.
Hold your nerve
You might not pitch your change quite right the first time. If it doesn’t seem to work at first or you don’t get the desired result, don’t stop. Course-correct and try again. Let’s say you’re working to change a behaviour pattern, for example, how your team gives and receives feedback. It’s unlikely you’ll all get it right straight away. Like a muscle, behaviours need work and practice to become second nature. If you’re changing the way something works, give it time for people to adapt.
Once your team gets the hang of it, they can change the feedback process outside the team. Often, colleagues from other teams will notice it working and adopt the practice themselves. Watch the ripple effect of the change you made. Keep adjusting and keep doing it.
So, what’s the smallest thing you can do right now?
