Chapter 33. No Pain, No Change!
And Watching Late-Night TV Does Not Help…
Go, go, gooooo!
A colleague of mine once attended a “digital showcase” event in his company, which highlighted many innovative projects and external hackathons the company had organized. Upon returning to his desk, though, he found himself in the same old corporate IT world where he is forced to clock time, cannot get a server in less than three weeks, and isn’t allowed to install software on his laptop. He was wondering whether he was caught in some twisted incarnation of two-speed IT, but that made little sense; after all, his project was part of the fast-moving “digital” speed.
Stages of Transformation
I had a different answer: transformation is a difficult and time-consuming process that doesn’t happen overnight. People just don’t wake up one day and behave completely differently, no matter how many TED Talks they listened to the day before. (A talk I once attended illustrated how difficult it is to change which part of the body you dry first with your towel after taking a shower in the morning. I guess the speaker was right—I never changed that.)
To illustrate the stages a person or an organization tends to go through when transforming their habits, I drew up the example of someone changing from eating junk food to leading a healthy lifestyle. With no scientific evidence, I quickly came up with 10 ...
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