Fear of Change

Wayne Haubner
Vunela

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Throughout my career I have found myself leading organizations through change. I know in my heart the only way to achieve our goals is to change. Standing still has never been an option. However, the pace of innovation in recent years has made the need to change impossible to ignore.

Ask yourself a simple question. Which companies do you consider to be the most innovative? Who did you select? Apple? Google? Amazon? How did they do it? How did Amazon go from selling books online, to being the #1 IT cloud platform in the world? How did Google expand from an internet search engine to autonomous driving cars? How did Apple transition from building fancy personal computers to delivering market leading smart phones? Successful companies are amazingly adapt at managing change.

Now think about companies that were not on your list. These companies probably no longer exist. What about Digital Equipment Corporation? Blackberry? Blockbuster? Or Kodak? Did these companies recognize disruption early enough? History records the failed companies because of their inability to navigate the seas of change. I am an alumnus of Digital Equipment Corporation. At the time we were the #2 computer company. Digital had the most passionate, talented team, pioneering many of the technology wonders we take for granted today, such as Alta Vista.

In 1995 Alta vista was the fastest and most popular internet search engine. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the founders of Google, started their research project at Stanford in 1996. Which search engine do you use today? Unfortunately, Digital is now only a fond but distant memory for all of us that worked there.

What about companies that are some place in the middle? These companies are still titans in their industry, but the waves of disruption are crashing on their shores with increased intensity. Have companies like IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft recognized the disruption? Are they prepared to meet the challenges of the future? Microsoft’s appointing Satya Nadella as their CEO was a bold statement their commitment to change. Satya said Microsoft’s mission was “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”

Does your company embrace change? Are you personally an agent of change? Or are you frozen with an inability to take bold action?

There are thousands of examples of the success that comes with embracing change, and the consequences for standing still. With such overwhelming evidence why are we so reluctant to change?

I believe the primary factor that keeps us from taking the action required is Fear. What are we afraid of?

1. Fear of Failure?

2. Fear of Loss?

Fear of failure is probably the most common fear that effects trying to change to new ways of thinking and doing. We all want to succeed, we all want to be successful and when we aren’t it usually leaves us feeling badly. We easily remember the successful innovations, however, we don’t always get the same focus of the failures it took to reach success. How many failures do you think it took before Google’s autonomous car drove itself flawlessly down El Camino in Palo Alto? It probably didn’t happen on the first try.

The 2nd fear I see in organizations and individuals is fear of loss. I have countless examples throughout my career where some small rouge group of engineers within the company has developed “product 2.0” that is smaller, faster, cheaper, and more capable than our market leading “product 1.0”. This usually results in a David and Goliath epic style story where the entire company from the executives, sales, and engineers tries to kill “product 2.0.” The rallying cry is “product 2.0” will kill our existing revenues and margins.

What if instead of trying to kill the new idea, the company got onboard and invested and supported the new idea for what it could be? After all, maybe product 2.0 will be the next wave of innovation to keep us a step ahead of our competition. Do we prefer to be forced to change based on our own innovation, or wait for the innovation of our competition to come crashing on our shores?

Creating a culture of change is like dieting, exercise, or running a marathon, it sounds so simple and yet it first requires the commitment to change and a willingness to let go of fear and loss. And it requires practice, learning and iteration. Here are the attributes I’ve seen lead to success:

1. Communication. CEO and executive leadership must communicate daily that we are a company building for the future not the past.

2. Education. Educate individuals and teams to embrace the unknown and not cling to their previous successes. We all must continuously learn, seek out new ideas, and challenge the status quo.

3. Reward. Leadership creates a safe space to discover and to fail by rewarding failures and successes as equal opportunities to learn from and to innovate.

Many companies send their employees to entrepreneur classes trying to create the “startup culture”. There is no need for a class to understand startup culture. Startups almost by definition have nothing to lose so they have nothing to fear. Their enthusiasm for their next invention is contagious so they never consider the possibility of failure. Fear of loss and fear of failure are simply not in the vocabulary of successful startup companies.

If you want to achieve great things in your career, for your team, your company and your clients, you first must let go of the fear of failure and loss. Always look forward to the opportunity that is possible with change.

Robert F. Kennedy said: “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”

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Innovative technology change agent, with a passion for agile fast paced result oriented engineering teams.