Before we get into this chapter, we'd like to ask you a few questions:

• Do you believe the world is getting slower or faster?
• Is it getting simpler or more complex?
• Is it less demanding or more demanding?

Have we cheered you up yet? No doubt, your responses — like those of the thousands of people we've asked these questions — are the same: the world is getting faster, more complex and more demanding. Furthermore, if we'd asked you these same questions five years ago, or even 10 years ago, there's every chance that your responses would have been the same.

Change is not new in our workplaces. It's always been part of how we work, lead and manage. What is different in our workplaces is the sheer speed of change. It's rapid. How you, as a manager, leader and team deal with this rapid stuff — and the conflict that arises with it — will make all the difference in a competitive environment. Your ability to deal with things quickly and to move on — to not hold grudges or waste valuable time on unnecessary conversations — will see you and your team rise to the top. With growing competition in the marketplace, not only for customers but also for talented employees, it's never been a more important time to build a robust feedback culture, one in which tough conversations are addressed effectively.

In addition to an increasingly competitive landscape, we are smack-bang in the middle of the content era. Anything you want answers to can be found online in a matter of milliseconds. Knowing stuff is no longer the advantage it once was — in many cases the sheer accessibility of knowledge is becoming debilitating. It's a noisy world and no doubt you have at times experienced a sense of overwhelm and overload because of the sheer amount of information you need to comprehend, consolidate and deal with on any given day. So it's not hard to understand that if you're feeling overwhelmed then so too are the staff you're leading.

In this chapter we're going to explore some of the psychological changes that are occurring in workplaces as a result of the rapid speed of change, and the impact these are having on addressing the tough conversations. Then we're going to knuckle down on the friction points that exist within workplaces and provide you with ideas on how to tackle these team gatherings differently.

Riding the wave of change fatigue

There's every chance that you've been through a major change in the past 12 months. It's also highly likely that you will also experience a major change in the coming 12 months either at work or in your life. Not just small changes such as a new process for getting invoices to accounts payable — we're talking about a truly significant shift in what you do and how you do it. The reality is that the role you're doing right now will not be in the same in 12 months' time. Sure, you may have the same job title, but the tasks that make up your day continue to change and reshape themselves based on the rapid environment we live in. The same goes for your team. This constant shift of focus and process in the new world of work can result in something you may have experienced yourself: change fatigue.

Change fatigue happens when an organisation embarks on a change aimed at strategically shifting it in a clear direction and then, along the way, it becomes apparent that it needs to move in a different direction. When people start working in one direction and then suddenly are being asked to throw their weight behind a different objective — often with very little clarity about how, and with minimal resources — motivation can slump badly. With massive change we can often see a polarity between people's reactions and motivations. Why is it some people are completely drained and demotivated by a change event when others — sometimes in the same team — are jumping out of their skin with excitement? In short, it has a lot to do with them having (or not having) a sense of progress. We will address this in some depth throughout this chapter.

Waiting for calm is false hope

The rapid pace of technology and, as we saw in chapter 5, the growth of more remote teams, has fundamentally changed how we do work. These advances are not looking to slow down anytime soon. But that's just one area of change in a much bigger wave. We now live in a VUCA world: one that is more Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Waiting for calm among the current chaos is false hope. It's not coming. Despite the fact that our biology riles against this uncertainty, it craves consistency. Therefore, as a leader it's your role to lead among the chaos and to address issues with others amid uncertainty. If you're waiting until things ‘settle down' you'll be waiting far too long.

In fact, in a fast-paced working environment, your staff will crave your direction more than ever. The immediacy of feedback in our work has also changed; this is one of the advantages of our current work environments. We can shorten the loops between effort and feedback, creating greater momentum. It's important also to be encouraging effort without immediate reward. With connectivity and the use of cloud-based technology not only can we literally work from anywhere in the world, the lag factor between our work and receiving feedback from others is next to none.

Use this to your advantage. Create a culture of tweaking and iteration rather than working to the grind to produce perfection.

Cultivating an experimentation mindset

Within this rapidly changing environment, the ability of human beings to iterate and experiment is key to staying relevant and current. For example, cloud accounting software company Xero made more than 1000 changes to its online platform over an 18-month period in 2014–15. Its customers would not have noticed many of these changes, but they're all designed for better user experience. It's the pursuit of constant design development and growth that means an organisation stands out from the crowd. Due to the nature of social media we tend to get feedback from customers almost immediately these days, and agile organisations can tweak, change, adapt and update their offering if they choose. The same principles are true in getting feedback from our employees.

Have you ever had a great idea or heard a great way that you could connect with your team, but for some reason it just never took off the way you had hoped it would? Of course you have. The reason why this happens is because when we get a great idea we run with it and immediately try to enforce it as a new ritual — for the best part of a week. But the world gets in the way, doesn't it? A new project is launched, staff go off on leave and the new initiative that we wanted to implement gets put on the backburner, or worse still, discarded completely because we figured ‘if it was important enough it would have stuck'.

The way to change this pattern and to not only shift great ideas into habits but to create even better ways of doing things is to shift into a mindset of experimentation. When it comes to leadership science, you don't need to leave scientific thinking up to the scientists. For example, when you hear a great new idea (such as the many that are outlined in this book), think about an experiment that you could undertake using this idea. For example, you may decide to experiment with having individual catch-ups with each of your team once a fortnight. Rather than have this as an open-ended goal, put it into a process such as ‘10 × 2 × all' — that is, 10 minutes, every fortnight, with every staff member. Then, like a good scientist, start exploring how you can adapt this approach to fit and suit your current context. The things that you could play with are:

• the time of day you have these catch-ups
• the location for the catch-ups (walk and talk meetings, at a café, sitting out in the sunshine) — mix it up
• the topic areas you discuss/address.

A mindset of experimentation is a method that gives you the most objective approach to testing ideas and developing knowledge. Which leader wouldn't want to have robust, evidence-based thinking that is turned into real-world processes with real results? The key in having the tough conversations in a rapid-change environment is to act and be curious about what's happening now instead of waiting for uncertainty.

Let's look at five ‘scientist strategies' that will help you approach rapid-change environments with this mindset of experimentation.

Establish an initial hypothesis or hunch

It's important to have something to guide the experiment. Often your initial hunch can be clarified by two simple questions:

• What positive changes may be possible at the end of this experiment?
• If we don't embark on this experiment (and things stay the same) what will happen?

Start to envisage how you think things may work out and the changes that you and your team could make. It's also important, even at this stage, to consider how things could be, but not to be tied to the outcome. Be open to changes happening as part of the process. Having a fuzzy rather than an absolute goal is the aim.

Create a time frame

Experiments aren't open-ended, so create a time frame for people to calibrate their efforts towards. Generally speaking, the shorter the better. Make them sprint … people will rally harder if they can see a finish line. In a busy world with the constant pull of attention in a million different directions, having an experiment that is focused for, say, one to two weeks provides a tight time frame for keeping your eye on the goal. If this short-term experiment shows signs of success, then the testing phase can be lengthened.

Remain curious

As you move through the experiment, maintain a high level of curiosity by constantly thinking, ‘Isn't that interesting!', or ‘Why did that happen?'. Good scientists are those who are, above all else, fascinated. They're wondering what they may be missing and curious about their own blind spots. Seek to find and gather data by asking the following questions (regardless of whether you believe your experiment is working or not):

• How am I turning up to this task?
• What impact is it having on others?
• Is there another way I could be viewing this?

When you think about it, the world's greatest scientists are constantly searching for answers to a greater challenge they are yet to solve.

See setbacks as learning, not failure

Thomas Edison is famously attributed as saying he didn't fail when prototyping the light bulb — he simply found 10 000 ways not to succeed. Good experiments show us new ways forward even if we're headed in the wrong direction. Too often teams descend into conflict because we place far too much importance on specific success rather than continuing progress. If your team is being pulled into the vortex of defined goals, come back to rule number one: fuzzy goals work best because specific goals tend to only have a binary outcome — we achieved or we didn't. Less-defined goals open up other potential ‘green shoots' of ideas because, while you haven't landed at the intended place, your journey will serve as a wonderfully rich experiment.

Share your findings

Research done in the dark is useless. Share your discovery with others. Among your team, provide the opportunity to reflect on how you each approached the experiment, how you may be able to do things differently next time and which aspects worked really well. Beyond that, share it with your peers, fellow work teams and even your wider industry. Your reputation economy will undoubtedly receive a boost if you do.

By approaching oncoming change through a lens of experimentation you'll navigate uncertainty a whole lot more confidently, but it still won't eliminate conflict; in many cases rapid change brings more conflict to your workspace than any other context. So let's talk about how, as a leader, you can deal with the tough stuff specific to fast change.

Roadblocks: the four ways people respond

When it comes to dealing with conflict and tough conversations it's important to understand how you, and others, respond to rapid change and the roadblocks faced along the way. In our research, we have discovered that there are four ways people respond to roadblocks. As you read through these four ways of responding, consider how the individuals within your team may be responding to rapid change, and also how you can manage these various responses.

Seek opportunities

In every situation lies an opportunity for those who are willing to seek it and act on it. In fact, most small businesses are started because someone was frustrated by a roadblock they hit and decided to do something about it: the mum who starts an organic bamboo clothing line because her child has sensitive skin; the hipster 30-something who opens a coffee shop in their suburb because they couldn't get a piccolo. Most great initiatives in workplaces start out the same way. These are the people who seek out opportunities.

Managing opportunity seekers

Managing those who see possibility and opportunity in a challenge sounds like a dream come true, doesn't it? It's certainly the response to change and roadblocks that you want to see from your team, and what you want to role-model to others. It's this second point that you need to really focus on. All too often we hear risk-averse managers bemoaning their staff because they ‘want to do everything yesterday'. Get out of their way! Let them go, and set good guidelines for them. The key to managing an opportunity-seeker is to encourage ideas and ownership while also keeping them focused on getting the ‘business as usual' work done.

Be aware and seek

Being aware and seeking is about being aware of change and ripping into what needs to be done in the here and now. This response involves getting real about the current situation and having the conversations that need to be had in order to move forward. The aware-and-seeker is cautiously optimistic and a great person to have in your team.

Managing aware-and-seekers

These people are doers. They are the workers who see a problem and get it sorted straight away. While this works in the moment, this response can be narrow-focused, working only to get through the immediate challenges. The risk is that they may miss opportunities for a new project or a new way of doing the work. Manage this response by encouraging possibility thinking.

Be aware and hide

These are people who are aware that change is here but hide from any action that's required, spending their time instead stressing about the small stuff (such as how to divvy up who orders the coffees for the team in a way that's fair and equitable). These are the worrywarts who seem to disappear from the room during conversations about the topic of change and progress — but they're in your face about everything else.

Managing aware-and-hiders

The frustration in managing this type of response is trying to get people to have a sense of ownership about action. Manage this response by understanding their fears about change, providing clear behavioural steps for the next action and encouraging them to consider alternative perspectives.

See ignorance as bliss

This response is the equivalent of the person who has their head in the sand when change arrives. They float through the days and weeks in ignorant bliss because they fundamentally believe that nothing is really happening differently. These people stick their metaphorical fingers in their ears hoping that simply by ignoring it change will go away.

Managing ignorance-as-blissers

On the plus side, these are the people who keep the work ticking over. Of course, this is only useful if the work they're doing is still relevant in the new environment. If it's not, have the conversations early and deal with resistance to change using the ideas outlined in chapter 7. Remember that if you hear, ‘I can't', generally it means either, ‘I don't know how to', ‘I'm scared to', or ‘I don't want to'. Figure out which one it is and address it specifically.

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The key to roadblocks and the four responses that the people around you will elicit is to normalise the response, no matter which of the four they are stuck in. If your conversation with the other person comes across as judgemental, they will resist the change even more. Avoid this by letting them know it's only human to be where they are, and then invite them to see something bigger and better. It doesn't have to stay the way it is forever.

Typically, your tough conversations as a manager will happen with the last two roadblocks, ‘be aware and hide' and ‘see ignorance as bliss'. In the midst of any tough conversation it's always useful to have a guide. As it turns out, the guide to rapid conflict is in the word itself.

Get RAPID

If you need to have a tough-stuff conversation in the middle of a rapid-change environment, you need to look no further than the acronym RAPID to get it done. This is our five-step fallback guide to managing a tough conversation in the midst of fast-paced change.

Reset

Far too often we try to attack the problem by getting on the front foot early and addressing it directly. This is a great strategy, but trying to address problems derived from chaos in the middle of chaos isn't a smart move. Find the space to hit the reset button. Literally.

Change the space in which you're connecting with others. Embrace the power that our brains have of being refreshed and able to consider new perspectives when we physically move — for example, get into a walk-and-talk habit with your team to hit ‘reset' in the middle of a busy day. Maybe it's a meeting room outside your shared workspace, or it's a day off-site with your team. People think differently when they're in a different physical environment. It's a great way to challenge status quo.

Accept

Just for a second, let's try a little game. We want you to respond to a phrase:

Just accept it.

What went through your head? Did you have a response?

Many people don't like the response. Acceptance carries a social stigma. It often feels like giving up. It feels passive, it feels like there's nothing you can do because, really, what's the point, right? Picture the following examples:

• The house you fell in love with went to a higher bidder at auction: you've got to accept it.
• Your organisation is going through a major restructure: you've got to accept it.
• Someone else selfishly ate the last piece of chocolate in the house: you've just got to accept it.

Damn acceptance! It's just giving up. Giving in. Well, maybe not.

There's another side to acceptance. It's not the enemy that it's made out to be. In fact, acceptance — without judgement — is the catalyst for action and change. When we accept what's happening, we fully grasp the current situation.

Acceptance doesn't mean doing nothing. Don't get the two confused. Acceptance can actually be quite liberating if you respond in the right way. It's about getting free from the clutches of the past, and getting into action for the possibilities of the future

It's not bad. It's not good. It just is.

From this point of full acceptance, we're able to make a choice about what to do for real, meaningful action. The next time you get frustrated with a decision at work that you have no control over, a project that's not going to plan or a conversation that didn't go as well as you'd hoped, take a couple of deep breaths and accept it. After all, it's hard to change what you don't acknowledge.

Once the situation in front of you is fully grasped, and accepted, the actions you take are 100 per cent your responsibility. The point of acceptance may just be the most active thing in the whole process.

Prune

In a busy world, often we simply try to squeeze more in. But having too much time is not one of the problems that your team faces. So if there are new things you want them to be doing, then something has to give. And far too often, existing, entrenched behaviours tend to win out over new behaviours.

So be conscious about finding time and space for new behaviours to flourish in. Remove the clutter of legacy behaviours. Stop before you start.

Fundamentally, the pruning is about acknowledging our limitations. Sport science reminds us that athletes have limitations to physical output: try to push past them and the body shuts down. Similarly, we all have limitations to our energy output — physical, mental, social or work-related. There's a finite amount of energy each person has to allocate each day to thinking, doing, moving, feeling and so on.

Intention

Set your intention for how you're going to turn up. Next team meeting, set a clear intention for what you want to achieve or how you need to be. For the next conversation you're planning, set a clear intention about why you're getting together. Clever teams continually check in on the purpose driving their work; and you should too, especially in uncertain times driven by rapid change.

Ask key questions such as:

• Who are we here to serve?
• How will our work make the world a better place?
• How can we take care of each other?
• What's the absolute best use of my time today?

Be courageous about asking these questions. Strangely enough, it's hard to play small and engage in petty behaviour if you're guided by grand intent. Having said that, don't just rest on your intention. It can quickly become lip service unless it's followed up by action.

Define

At the end of the conversation, set a psychological contract about what's coming next by asking the following two questions:

• What are you going to do next?
• What am I going to do next?

Plenty of managers ask the first question, but only the great ones ask the second question. Define the next steps and then make a time to come back together again and check in. Define each other's expectations, and by doing so, you'll build trust along the way.

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So use RAPID when the heat is on. It will serve you well. But after the final point (Define), it's important to keep motivation high and momentum rolling. The best strategy from this point on is to obsess about progress.

Map it, chunk it, see it

Our colleague and great mate Dr Jason Fox outlines in his book The Game Changer the motivating factor that having a strong sense of progress has on human beings. One of the key ways to create a strong sense of progress is to identify where you are now, where you want to be and the steps you need to take to get there.

In workplaces there are various ways that this can be visualised, including project plans, GANNT charts and even the good-old ‘to-do' list. But the most important factor is to go visual.

One great example of a way to get visual about direction and behaviours within a team is an approach known as ‘scrum'. Jeff Sutherland's book Scrum introduces the scrum methodology, whereby groups work in two-week sprints. Jeff's approach is based on short, sharp periods of activity with opportunities to check in and tweak direction. His approach is based on small teams having a wall, board or space with a constant visual reminder of tasks by means of three lists:

• Backlog (ideas of actions for the future — the ‘stuff we've gotta get to').
• Doing (the tasks that as a team we are currently working on).
• Done (what has been completed so far in this sprint).

Why is this important when it comes to addressing the tough stuff? Having a visual progress tracker is an accountability tool. It provides a place for you to meet with staff to discuss any differences in understandings and have a candid conversation about which tasks have been completed and why certain tasks haven't been completed to date. The benefit of a whiteboard or a chart is that it provides a strong use of a three-point (see chapter 4) around which to have the conversation. This keeps the conversation about the behaviour rather than about the individual, which is relevant for both one-on-one and team conversations. What we recommend is to grab a whiteboard and get creative.

Conclusion

Rapid change has arrived on most workplaces' doorsteps in recent times and it isn't likely to go away anytime soon. Think about the managers and leaders you admire the most and the qualities they bring. It's often their humanness — their ability to be real — that allows us to connect, but there are times when this is put to the ultimate test. When times are uncertain, volatile and ambiguous, you're not expected to be perfect, and when the world is changing as fast as it is, being perfect today may not serve where you need to be tomorrow. What is critical is your ability to deal with the tough stuff quickly. Flexibility in mindset and a strong sense of humility are the key.