Intentional change is puzzling. How do you change things? We know things are always changing. Interest rates go high, real estate prices will change and so do people and the spaces they occupy. Change is a guaranteed constant. But what about the change that we seek to bring through?
What if you work in an organization, at the lower rungs yet would love to play a part in transformation? How can you start right now to make an impact? Let’s start with a simple story. The best bus transport company in the West Nile market is Nile Star safari. I love that they chose a comfortable location for their Kampala offices. When a friend suggested a trip to Arua, I was excited that they existed. They get many things right.
Yet, I was shocked by the scale of litter at their waiting area. When my friends arrived, I suggested that as we waited, we could help clean up the place. We debated it and a friend asked; ‘will you come to clean this place every day?’ It then hit me, that my action would have showcased a new way to things, but it was not that sustainable. However, this moment helped advance the idea of micro transformations.
I love to think of micro transformations as finding ‘small places to be responsible for.’ When I still worked on an engineering team, one of the engineers had a canny habit of bringing Ugandan pancakes for the whole team every Friday. Even on the days when he was on leave, those pancakes always came on Friday morning. And this simple habit became part of our Friday engineering culture. We all looked forward to those Friday mornings and the pancakes that came with them. In hindsight, I recognize that this was a micro transformation.
Micro transformations happen when people are given small spaces to be responsible for. It’s the idea of ‘acting like an owner’ but through committed, intentioned responsibility. In manufacturing companies, the equivalent of this is the creation of Asset owners. If you run a line with a series of machines, you could assign responsibility of a machine to an individual. That means this technician will be responsible for its maintenance, the related costs, the improvements, and they are recognized for their improvements in the asset. This unlocks the potential of micro-transformations.
Organizations are not transformed by one event, but by series of micro-transformations. These micro-transformations add up and create a snowball effect that results in the grand event that’s highlighted to most people. But the grand event couldn’t have happened without those micro-transformations. Micro-transformation is the idea of creating those spaces of perfection, of beauty, that even in a sea of chaos, there should be possibilities of ordering some spaces.
If you are thinking sustainable change, you must be thinking in terms of micro-transformations and how they compound over time.