Struggles Of Change: A Star Wars Lesson

Have you ever wondered why change is so difficult for so many people? What if it isn’t a question of difficulty but a question of balance?

Imagine a room that contains 7,500 LEGO pieces say for the Millennium Falcon. The room has a table in the corner for building, and the pieces are all in sorted bags. What happens if we let a 4-year-old into that room to build the structure? Now depending on if you are a parent or not, that might have struck a minor tear into your heart.

The 4-year-old is in a room of balance. Things are easy to find, and it is easy to create because there is space and resources to make anything that child wants. The child doesn’t understand the instructions, so an imbalance is now in play. The probable outcome certainly is not the Millennium Falcon, but it is probably a massive pain in your foot when you step on a piece.

Beyond the pain in the foot, a new imbalance has come up, forming a pain for you somewhere else. The room is now in chaos. The amount of time and energy to restore it to balance is daunting. It is work. It is a lot of work that may make you want to throw your hands up and say it isn’t worth fixing.

At this point, you look at the 4-year-old and recognize as much as you do not want to change the order of that room, you know you need to. You enlist the master of chaos in the clean-up effort, knowing that it will also be a lot of work. Chances are someone is going to end up crying that they are too tired, but you aren’t sure who that is going to be yet.

That is change. Change is discovering an imbalance and having to bring it back to balance. It is work that can feel unnecessary and even frustrating. Often it comes with questions of “why” or realization that “if someone had just done X, Y or Z.”  

The work that goes into it almost fights the very laws of thermodynamics and entropy. You have to put in more energy to create order than you would if you allowed disorder to just randomly happen.

In the context of your job, you get a ripple effect when you start making systems that are based on other systems that are imbalanced. This compounding effect is often what leads to many people feeling it is just easier to start over. That might even be true, that starting over would be easier. It certainly is potentially faster if lessons from the first F.A.I.L. are taken into consideration.

However, even to start over, you need to bring in the people that had the imbalance to begin with that are going to be resistant to fixing their own imbalance, just like our 4-year-old. Perhaps though, like the 4-year-old, they aren’t aware that there is an imbalance. That is where communicating and actively seeking to understand become important.

That is a fast track to less work. Putting in the time to seek to understand how to bring awareness to imbalance has an enlisting effect. People will want to help fix things when they see you trying to understand what is imbalanced for them. Then you can form a plan to go after the imbalance. By the way, that is called Breakthrough Thinking™. It is the most natural way to ideate or brainstorm to fix things. It isn’t just about the ideas; it is about the teams making them come into balance together.