Ashley Goodall has spent 20 years in various roles in HR, covering everything from performance management to leadership. He spent six years at Cisco as the SVP of HR. He left Cisco to write his book, “The Problem with Change,” which was just released. In it, he addresses the problems that accompany change.

To write his book, Ashley interviewed people around the world, asking them to tell their stories of organizational change. Many people told miserable stories, stories of unending change propelled by mergers, new leadership, new strategies, and much more—much of it unnecessary. What was the result?

People were struggling to do their jobs because of the constant change. Yet organizations are rewarding leaders to do things that make it hard for their employees to do their work! That’s a problem, right? So, what should we do instead?

We have to understand the conditions of human performance to understand how we can “do” change better. Ashley begins to dissect that complicated yet fascinating topic in this episode of Workplace Stories.

You will want to hear this episode if you are interested in...

Join the RedThread Community [1:34]
Why you should listen to Ashley Goodall [4:49]
What is the problem with change? [7:09]
Why Ashley wrote another book about change [10:34]
The problems that accompany change [12:45]
Looking at meaning and purpose differently [18:53]
The story of Alexander the Great [23:38]
The connection between meaning and ritual [25:29]
We need to stop treating humans like “SKUmans” [29:10]
The lightning round [33:08]
Getting good at stability management [36:38]
What we can learn from “the pistols” [39:59]
How to create belonging on your team [44:21]
Focusing on your teams to create stability [45:43]
Learning how to radicalize HR [48:53]
Ashley’s biggest takeaway from writing a book [53:11]

The problems that accompany change

Ashley addresses five core problem areas that accompany change:

Uncertainty
Lack of control
Lack of belonging
Displacement
Loss of meaning

The feeling of belonging is intuitive. Humans form social groups. Those groups are massively important to psychological health, sense of identity, and cognitive processes. The way we think is socially mediated. A team gives you a sense of belonging. It’s a source of massive stability.

Teammates complement each other so together they can meet a goal that couldn’t be achieved alone. When reorganization happens, all of the social groups at work are upended. In his book, Ashley also dove into the science of “place attachment.” People get attached to places. Place is a thing strongly tied to work. But there’s also a connection between ritual and place.

Our habits are a mechanism by which we grow attached to a place. Habits and rituals tied to place have people saying “It’s where I do this” or “It’s where we do this.” When offices are changed or people are moved, you disrupt the rituals attached to that place.

Those places are a source of stability. And for people to do their best work, they need stability. All of these facets of a human—certainty, control, social groups, sense of place, ritual—are the foundation of showing up at work and being useful. Everyone wants to be useful. How we design the workplace hinges on these things.

Ashley is clear: “Sooner or later you have to ask people what they want and listen to what they tell you.”

How Ashley looks at meaning differently

Ashley points out that the world around us must make sense. You can’t be uplifted by the mission of an organization if you can’t figure out what the mission is. Science tells us that the coherence of our world is so important that when it’s taken away in one place, we find it in another.

There are two ingredients to meaning:

Things have to make sense (which is shredded when things are changed)
You need to find your own purpose. Someone can’t tell you what your purpose is

We encounter the world and question, “Do I understand what’s going on here? Is this something that speaks to me?” If it does and someone asks if your work has meaning, you’ll say “yes.” Unfortunately, people think everyone around them has to have the same meaning. It doesn’t work like that. As much as they dislike it, employers aren’t massively important to someone’s purpose.

We need to stop treating humans like “SKUmans”

What characteristics of humans do we capture in our technology at work? How does that inform how we think about people at work? We track the “cogs in a machine” stuff. We record names, date of birth, someone’s role, their certifications and experience, etc. but we don’t record what amuses someone, what makes them smile, and the weird things they love to do. Maybe they’re always late for meetings, love to bake, or love creating spreadsheets.

If you think humans are interchangeable and emotionless beings, how would you describe them? As a “SKU” number. SKUs are stock-keeping units. They track what something costs, where it is in the store, what the margin is, etc. We’ve been doing the same to humans. And that’s massively inhuman. We can’t capture human work this way. How might we capture a human at work?

Ashley argues for getting better at understanding what people are like at work. It’s about asking questions like, “How are you offering your best to other humans? Why did you show up today?”

Now that we’ve covered the problems with change, how do we address them? Ashley shares how stability management just might be the key (and how to navigate it) in this episode.

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The Problem with Change: Author Ashley Goodall