Navigating Change & Transition: 3?s for Alice Chen

KHP:  Alice, I am so glad to have you here with me today. I was thrilled to see the announcement of your virtual course on navigating change. I'd love for you to start by introducing yourself… and I'm curious, what got you interested in change in the first place?

Alice: Thanks so much for having me, Kelly. I appreciate it. My name is Alice Chen. I'm currently an executive coach and an experience designer around things like navigating change. I started out as an elementary school teacher and moved into working with all sorts of leaders in all sorts of different sectors and am working mainly in education nonprofits at this stage. In terms of what got me interested in change… When I was a kid, I realized I had a really bad memory. I had a really hard time actually memorizing facts and dates and things like that. It led me to only want to focus on learning things that are universally useful. It’s led me to kind of look out on the world and look for the universally useful bodies of knowledge that exist out there and change feels like a constant in the world. So I just started trying to learn as much as I could about change, because it was something that I was always personally and professionally experiencing and saw other people around me doing too.

KHP: Right now, a lot of us are really struggling with the amount of uncertainty and change happening in our personal lives, and our work lives, and the world. What have you seen makes the biggest difference between folks who navigate this moment well and manage it in a healthy way and people who struggle?

Alice: People who actually understand how change works and the different levels on which it impacts us. I think many of us think only at the tactical, but actually change impacts us on a physical and emotional level. And so when people actually understand that and then make space for that, give themselves permission to slow down and attend to the emotional experience of change and the physical experience of change, and then build tools and skillsets that help them work with the change that they're experiencing as opposed to kind of resist it or push back on it or pretend it's not there… that's the biggest distinguisher in my experience between people who are navigating change “well” and people who are really, really struggling with navigating change.

KHP: A lot of my clients are leaders of teams, leaders of organizations, and they are so hungry right now for any sort of advice- What should I read? What should I be thinking about? What would your starter pieces of advice or recommendations be for someone who's in the position of leading others through change right now?

Alice: First, I actually think there's a big difference between navigating change and navigating transition. Change is sort of like the big eruption, the big thing that shifts in our world. For example- school is closing.  That’s a big change… but then there's a transition period that happens after that, which is really all the things that occur as a result of that change.  A lot of times I notice that people are planning for the change and trying to manage the thing that happened rather than thinking about, “What am I going to do next? How am I going to make space? How am I going to help my team through the transition period?”  Right now we have a lot of rolling changes that are occurring- school is closed, then this happens and then that happens, and it just feels like this constant wave of change and people are trying to catch up with the change. I think if we step back and think about, okay, if I know that there's going to be a lot of change that's going to roll through, how do I actually carve out spaces and systems and structures to attend to the transition stuff? And the transition stuff is going to be things likehaving conversations about how, about how people are doing and feeling.  Also, slowing down a little bit and taking a little bit off of our plate, making space for that, because change and transition takes that mental and emotional psychological space, and we can't always do all that we're used to doing. It might be things like really getting rigorous about prioritization, so that as new things shift in your world, you don't have such a full plate that there's no room to actually pivot. I think it's often paying attention to some of the things about transition, as opposed to thinking solely about it in terms of a change management.

I think another piece of advice I would give to people is just acknowledging that in times of change, particularly in times of rolling change, the personal and the professional are going to collide and intersect in ways that sometimes we don't really feel that comfortable with as leaders. We still often live in a world where people try to silo their professional world and their personal world. And when we're experiencing change at the magnitude that we are right now, kids are running across video screens and sometimes you just can’t separate your personal and professional life in the same way. I've seen a lot of leaders who are resisting that. They want to insist no children, no personal stuff, working nine to five… they’re not shifting the ways of being. That’s making it harder to navigate the changes. You can instead come from a place of acknowledging that these things are going to intersect. I think that's going to be really powerful.

And finally, I always recommend to people that take an emergent planning approach versus a backwards planning approach. I think oftentimes as leaders, we are conditioned in this world to try and figure out where we want to go. What's the thing we're reaching for, the outcome we're trying to achieve? Then, we try and forecast and see all of the different steps along the way, and things we're going to need to do in order to get to that destination and get a really intense strategic plan going before we actually take any action on it. And particularly in times of change and transition where the world is really volatile and things are changing rapidly, it's really tough to actually be able to execute that. And so I recommend that people take an emergent planning approach where you get clear about where you're hoping to go, but then come back to this moment in time, whether the next chapter is a week, two weeks, a month. Look out for a short distance, and then make your plan, and have a plan for when you're going to come back and think about the next chapter. So rather than trying to feel like you got to figure it all out before you get started doing anything, really communicate with your team, “Hey, we're going to have to take an emergent planning approach here. Here's what that's gonna look like. We're aiming for this. Let's focus on the next two weeks. Let's focus on the next four weeks. And here's where we're going to sync up to look a little bit further ahead.” When people get really good at doing that, it relieves a lot of pressure on them to know all the answers. And I think it actually helps them be more flexible, and also supports the people around them and not feeling quite so much pressure that they need to know and control all of the steps between points a and b, which is just not possible right now.

KHP: Oh, I love that. I hadn't heard that articulated that way before- backwards planning versus emergent planning- and it is such a great distinction to make now. And I'm thinking about it in my own work as well as for my clients. So thanks for that. Tell us a little bit about how people find you and this course you have going now.

Alice: You can find me at my website, wayfindingwisdom.com.  I do coaching particularly for people who are navigating through change and transition. I also do a lot of experience design teaching some of these principles. I just launched an online course, which is all about navigating change and transition. It’s simple practical tools and strategies for finding your way from point a to point b when things are kind of all over the place. I really recommend it to people who are in a place where they're just trying to out what action to take, how to do that strategically and how to do it in right-sized ways that don't cause overwhelm. I work with a lot of high achieving people and we tend to think we need to take big action in order to move forward in our lives. And so this course is really about how do you right-size things so that you're moving in the direction you want to go, but not doing it in such a way that just becomes a task on your list or something that really adds more stress to your plate.

KHP: Very cool. Thanks so much, Alice. I've so enjoyed reconnecting with you and look forward to staying in touch.