Transition Training: Managing Flux & Innovation
By Irving H. Buchen, Ph.D.

All training follows a paradoxical rhythm, combining reassurance with change, affirmation of the status quo with incremental advance—all while straddling present and future. It is thus inevitably persuasive, coaxing the now and the given to include more that is different beyond its original benchmark position. To encourage learners to venture forth from such comfort zones, typically only modest and digestible bites and bytes are selected. But as of late, the need for innovation has raised the question of whether this standard incremental process is up to the challenge—the answer is yes and no.

Affirmation of current competence and common departure points is still clearly critical for a journey that is more venturesome and even dislocating than conventional fare. But settling for immediate and familiar gains falls far short of what is actually needed. Getting beyond mere incrementalism runs minimally into two obstacles: identifying models of creativity and targeting a process to focus on.

The first requires examples and characteristics that are not completely intimidating. Indeed, they should be somewhat familiar and thus reachable. Otherwise, innovation remains the non-replicable monopoly of genius. The second is a little more oblique, requiring the selection of a process that is akin to the fertile soil of creativity, but also is sufficiently mainstream so that if innovation does not occur, there is still the consolation of mastery.

Who are the most innovative types? Invariably, three cluster groups appear. The first are the entrepreneurs, the perpetual motion and restless startup protean types who live on the edge of change. Their career path is measured not by how many jobs they have had, but how many businesses they have created. They generate unlimited variations on a theme, exhibit spin-off thinking and often display the uncanny ability of being ahead of the pack. As Wayne Gretzky claimed, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it is.” They are a marvel and often exhausting to be around.

The second group is made up of the consultants and coaches whose stock and trade are challenging clients to change. Their value resides in their ability to read signs, decipher the handwriting on the wall and operate as early warning and opportunity systems to their clients. Recently, many have added original and anticipatory research to their problem-solving and coaching kit.

Finally, there are the exceptional leaders and managers found in all organizations and sectors, who are routinely transformational and transactional. They are the endless advocates of training and learning, finding collaborative ways of doing things differently and endorsing leap-frogging: “While we are catching up, let us also get ahead.”

What characteristics do all of the above have in common?
* Living and even leaping ahead of their time.
* Impatient with or perhaps disdainful of current paradigms.
* Always negotiating change—one state to another.
* Keen sense of the dynamics of implementation—reality checks of scenario and simulation.
* Imagining and creating what did not exist before.
* Inclusive, integrative and collaborative.
* Patchwork cobbling, always putting together holistically what is separate.
* Thriving on and managing risk and blur.

What stirs such innovative types? Are there special contexts, conditions and cultures that are not only a match and a spur for creative professionals, but also provide a common (though not always happy) reality for everyone else? If one steps back and observes current workforce dynamics, what performance changes appear?
* Goals change so often, they are called stretch goals.
* Performance evaluation correspondingly occurs more often, sometimes daily.
* Mid-course corrections are routine adjustments.
* Metrics have become the art of multiple measures.
* Job descriptions are regularly exceeded and outdated.
* Crossover operations and functions drive integration.
* Nothing and no one remains intact.

If such workforce behaviors and conditions are turned back on themselves so that they do not merely reflect but also identify what, in turn, drives them all, what is made transparent? The typical and familiar answer is change, but that addresses symptoms, not causes, business-as-usual, do-whatever-it-takes practices, not basic assumptions. The argument here is that we have generally failed to engage directly in training the new working reality of employees.

The standard expectation is that when dislocation or disruption occurs, it is both temporary and non-recurrent—but it is a singular event that happens periodically. However, if we are just patient enough, everything will return to the way it was. After all, cycles of ups and downs are inevitable. But suppose the transition lasts a very long time—much longer than previous transitions. Or worse, suppose that the transition finally gives way not to reassuring and familiar stability, but to another transition. And suppose further that the transition is replaced by another and still another, and so on. What then?

When that happens often enough and embraces many different sectors, while making the last line of all job descriptions (“do whatever it takes”) the first line, transition—not stability—becomes the norm. We then confront the paradox of continuous discontinuity. However, the only problem is that we have not been trained to accept transition as a permanent and recurrent reality. Instead, we have worshipped the absolute god of stability.

But what if instead, one were to acquire another outlook entirely and perceive transition as not the exception, but the rule? With such expectations, we would not have to develop surprise-free forecasts. Rather than avoiding

change or running away from threats of novelty, they would be a daily occurrence. They might even be welcomed as the constant of reality. Above all, transition would normalize continuous improvement as the minimum response of keeping up with ongoingness. It also would optimally stir innovation as the new version of incremental gains.

There is a definite need to provide transition training for the entire workforce. But how? Three immediate directions seem to surface. First, consideration should be given to creating a special and separate workshop on transition as a common orientation for all new hires at all levels. It would extend the typical statement of “This is how we do things around here” to “This is why we do those things this way.” Above all, it would fuse performance expectations with metrics as the company’s operational reality. Second, mission and vision statements should be reviewed to determine to what extent if at all they embody the norm of transition and the performance expectations associated with workforce reality. Third, transition should be employed as an overlay, not an overhaul, and all offerings should be examined to determine to what extent they support both the continuous and the disruptive nature of transition. Where lacking, a healthy dose of the temporary may have to be injected. All offerings thus would embody the new principle that all performance is a work in progress, where there are no longer any final goals. The endgame has become the ongoing-game.

Persuading employees to embrace transition as a permanent condition of daily work may be eased by developing and offering a taxonomy of transition as a performance template. Although additions and supplements can be encouraged, the following perhaps can serve as common ground:

Taxonomy of Transition

Trust is based on truth. In this instance, it requires telling the truth about the “new” reality of work. That, in turn, needs to be followed by the various ways new performance expectations and evaluation metrics are being shaped and driven by the new norm of transition. Far from shrinking from the challenge, the workforce not only will welcome the truth of the daily reality, but also bring new mastery and creativity to the reality of permanent change.

Reprinted from  Workplace Performance Solutions Magazine - Mediatec Publishing

Irving H. Buchen, Ph.D., is director of international programs for IMPAC University and senior research associate of Canis Learning Systems. He can be reached at ibuchen@wpsmag.com.