Hi. My name is Daryl Conner and I’m a methodology bigot.

It takes a strong ego to be a successful change agent (it’s not a role for the timid), yet it is this very ego that can pull us over to the dark side of professional arrogance. What can temper our self-confidence enough so that we sustain the inner strength we need, but maintain mutual respect among the different approaches? In my experience, three things can help keep strong egos in alignment with, instead of against, each other.

• Common Goals—The various methodologies we represent have different tools, techniques, and nomenclature, but they are all trying to accomplish the same thing…successfully executing change initiatives within the organizations we serve.
• Criticality—Certainly not all, but some portion of the endeavors we help implement have real and lasting impact on those affected. These are the projects intended to create positive outcomes and/or minimize the negative implications for people we care about. These are the change initiatives that really matter. Their successful execution isn’t just a good idea—we need to bring our best game to the table and do all we can to ensure the desired results are achieved.
• Interdependence—Sharing the same bottom line (common goals) and acknowledging that there are significant consequences for the success or failure of certain changes (criticality) both represent important reasons for strong personalities to come together. However, these are necessary, but insufficient, elements for corralling robust methodology-based egos. In fact, with only these two in place, the attitude could easily be, “We cannot afford a misstep with these initiatives, so if you’ll just move aside, me and my approach will get this done.”

For strapping egos to stay in check and truly relate to each other as representing different but equally viable methodologies, the parties involved must acknowledge that they can’t unilaterally provide all that’s needed.

This is the tough one. It’s one thing to agree that we are after the same kind of successful implementations and that it really matters whether or not some of the changes are realized. It’s a very different requirement, however, to have to recognize and openly declare that one’s chosen approach doesn’t have all the answers, and that only through genuine collective learning across frameworks will it be possible for practitioners to deliver on all their execution promises.

This is not a call to abandon our separate methodology preferences or proprietary brands. Synergy requires differences in perspectives or 1 + 1 > 2 can never materialize. Nor is this a plea for the elimination of healthy competitiveness among the various approaches. The distinction I want to draw here is between being competitive and being adversarial.

Spirited competitiveness fosters needed individual and collective learning. However, methodologies that are antagonistic toward one another (even if veiled as polite disregard) are ill-prepared for client challenges requiring more than one approach or more than a single practitioner’s experience can address.

I’m sure you know of examples where practitioners have transcended their competitiveness to create opportunities for mutual appreciation of their respective methodologies. (Please share any you think would be of interest to our readership.) I’ll offer up one—it’s a European collection of innovative individual change practitioners led by Holger Nauheimer (www.change-facilitation.com).

Inclusiveness and the honoring of multiple methodologies is at the heart of this change agent community. Holger and his partners have their own change practice with their own preferred methodology, yet he has created something called the Change Journey—a generic process that allows participants to utilize any set of concepts, tools, or techniques they find helpful. It doesn’t promote any single viewpoint; it supports all approaches to executing change (www.changejourney.org).

So, even though Holger and his firm use a proprietary set of frameworks themselves, they have also developed a methodology-agnostic mechanism that can be used as a learning tool for any practitioner’s chosen framework. I highly recommend you check out what they are doing. It’s a wonderful example of how we can both remain true to our biases and avoid the trap of becoming overly promotional or unnecessarily protective of our own approaches.

I’ll close out this series with a couple of questions for all of us:

• Are we ready to recognize that our chosen methodologies may not always have all the answers?
• Even more challenging, are we ready to admit that maybe a “competitor” actually has a better way of addressing something than we do?

How can we even entertain such questions if some part of us (even a small part) has fallen victim to the shadow side of our commitment to a preferred approach. The only way to manage the potential bigotry in all of us is to shed light on the dark region of our methodology loyalties (note how shadows disappear when exposed to light).

It is only human to have such latent tendencies. The inclinations themselves aren’t problematic. It’s through our denial that such affinities might exist in us that they are given the opportunity to manifest. Our task, our responsibility, is to face the methodology bigot in all of us, regardless of how prominent or concealed, and minimize its chance of becoming any more than a dormant demon we attend to on a regular basis.

Next series: Patterns

Go to the beginning of this series.