"The only constant is change"
Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher, 500 B.C.

"The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.”
Justin Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada

"All change may not be progress, but all progress is the result of change"
John Wooden, Renowned American basketball player and coach

As long as there have been Enterprises, people have been dealing with change. But the sad thing is that even though that spans pretty much all of human history, we, as in humans in general, are still struggling with it. A simple question to ChatGPT will tell you that according to "many sources as much as 60-70 per cent of organisational change efforts do not succeed in achieving their intended goals", and even though there is no empirical evidence to support those numbers, it still seems to be the generally perceived experience of most people, across cultures, continents, and even time. People all over the world, in every period, seem to have had some quarrel with change.

One could try to argue that it is not that we have a problem with change per se today, but rather the pace of it, which has been increasing so much that we simply have difficulty in keeping up. While that seems true to some extent, not even that is a particularly new thing. Just like Heraclitus stated that change is constant, I am also certain so am I sure that the increasing pace of it is also constant. If not only because progress builds on progress, leading to more opportunities for more people with every progressive step achieved. For example, we can see this throughout history with the invention of the printing press, the steam and combustion engines, electricity, telephony, medicine, computation, the Internet, mobiles, etc. All of them are building on top of each other, increasing progress and prosperity for more people faster each time. So, even the increasing pace of change is nothing new, and it is not even specific to people living today.

So why are we still, after all this time, living with change, and even the increasing pace of it, so atrociously bad at it?

Ask Google or Bing or Opera or Meta AI or Gemini or Copilot or any of the other search engines and AI models for why we are so bad at change, and you will get a plethora of reasons, most of them probably correct as a contributing factor. However, one aspect that I find is more critical than all others is communication. Communication is a single factor that affects all, or at least most, of the other factors that contribute to us being so bad at change. We are just really bad at communicating our ideas and thoughts in a way that makes them understandable and relatable to other people.

Let's take a look at it. If we can't communicate WHY we are to change, how do we expect people to be inspired enough to actually change? Because let's face it, change is an effort. It not only means we need to learn new things, but it also causes a dip in our productivity, affecting the work we are already doing, of which we generally do not have too little. And even if we manage to communicate the WHY and inspire people. We also need to effectively communicate WHAT will change, HOW it will change, WHO it will affect, HOW it will affect them, WHAT is required of them, etc. To do that, we need to communicate effectively with various specialists to gather information from them, which we then need to construct and document in a manner clear enough to be communicated to everyone involved. Just reading this paragraph might get some people to think twice before they even attempt to change. With all this complexity, why even bother???

The tools we have historically

Communication has long been the primary tool in the Homo Sapiens tool belt. Being able to warn of dangers, formulate strategies, and coordinate their execution. It has followed us throughout all of history, and we are today taught to communicate from the day we are born and throughout life, at home, in school, at work, interacting with friends, on TV, on social media, constantly being provided with more and more tools and methods to hone and improve this ability. So why aren't we better? Is it the tools we have, the methods, or is it just genetic? I have no empirical evidence for this, but I think it is all of them.

First, the tools we are provided today are a significant limiting factor. Just look at language. As long as we stick to our own tribe, our language serves us pretty well, but once we tread outside of it, things go downhill quickly. First of all, more and more enterprises have people from multiple countries and thus with multiple different first languages. Even when we all speak the same base language, we are greatly affected by the culture we are from, with the same words or phrases having different meanings depending on where we come from, or the discipline we belong to, with each discipline having its own established vocabulary. These unique "sub-languages", if we can call them that, are so completely normal to most people that we don't even realise when others may understand them differently, or not at all.

Second, we are always learning more and more about how we understand, interpret, and visualise words, concepts, and systems and generally perceive the world around us. For example, it is mind-boggling to me that some people don't have an inner monologue. Another is learning how people interpret and make sense of concepts differently. I have no way to even fathom how their brains interpret information or if the final insight retracted from that information will be aligned with the one intended. I mean, how can I be sure that you, who are reading this, interpret it in the way I intended when I wrote it? How do you even know if you didn’t, and if you do, how would you even communicate it back to me?

To address this, a plethora of tools have been created, especially throughout the last hundred years or so, with methodologies, language models, diagrams, maps, and dictionaries. Many of them are really great, insightful, and valuable. Some of my favourites are, for example, Cynefin, for dealing with complexity in decision-making and Wardley maps, for business strategy. Many other great tools and frameworks facilitate change, such as the Business Model Canvas, Archimate, Agile, lean, and so many more.

But STILL, we don't seem to be getting any better at change.

Even with a better understanding of how we think differently and a plethora of different tools, we still don't get much better at change. There are, without a doubt, multiple reasons for this, one undoubtedly being that tools can take time to become known and gain traction, especially with most people getting information about them through university studies, where, maybe ironically, change does not come as fast as we might want or expect. But another reason is that most available tools are missing one or a few elements that I think are critical for effective holistic communication, especially when dealing with change in an enterprise or corporate setting.

First, a common language.

As mentioned, the general languages we have are not well enough suited for communication around change. They are complex and coloured with special and often contradicting meanings of words and phrases across cultures and disciplines. Models, frameworks and methodologies that try to address this tend to lean towards one or few disciplines, making them difficult to understand to people from other disciplines, at least without extensive education.

Second, a holistic overview of an enterprise.

Many models, frameworks, and methodologies address specific parts of the enterprise, e.g. the product, the architecture, the customer journey, the strategy, the organisation, the identity, etc. Few give a holistic overview covering all of the relevant aspects and elements. Those who do tend to go overboard in complexity, trying to address every single aspect of any change, no matter how small or detailed.

Third, agnosticism across disciplines

Many models, frameworks, and methodologies are specific to particular disciplines, using the words and terminology of that particular discipline, making it difficult to adopt by other disciplines. This also makes them difficult to use with models from other disciplines as the terminology, icons, and language in general are not compatible.

What is the solution?

Frankly, there isn't any single solution. The most significant single difference is probably that people start to be more conscious of the fact that we are very, very different. This means that we need to work more closely together, be more open to seeking knowledge and expertise from those who actually have it, and adapt the documentation of information so that it can be more easily consumed by as many of those involved as possible. But there are tools that can facilitate this and help us be better at change. EDGY is, in my opinion, first among them.

EDGY

A few years ago I stumbled upon EDGY, developed by the Intersection Group, that incorporates all of the three aspects above. At its core EDGY is a language model, enabling documentation and communication of all aspects of change across organisational units and disciplines.

• EDGY provides a common language that mixes textual and graphical elements in a simple and beautiful way, facilitating communication and collaboration across cultures and disciplines,
• EDGY contains a holistic overview of the enterprise, identifying and defining the principal enterprise elements that need to be accounted for in any change initiative without making it overly complicated.
• EDGY is discipline agnostic, not only facilitating cross-discipline collaboration but enabling specialists to use their discipline-specific tools in collaboration with people from other disciplines by incorporating EDGY into those tools.

Now, don't misunderstand me. EDGY is by no means a silver bullet that makes all changes work perfectly without problems. Rather, by incorporating EDGY in our Enterprise Design work, we can

• better deal with the constant change and its ever-increasing pace
• increase the percentage of change that delivers progress
• be more comfortable with change
• better harness the capacity and intelligence of people in change initiatives
• become better leaders of change

EDGY is still relatively young, only being formally released last year, but it is already gaining attention and traction among practitioners of various disciplines. One of the principal possibilities of EDGY, apart from facilitating communication and collaboration around change, is that it works as a platform that can be further extended and built upon, and made ever more practical and easy to adopt into your workflow without it requiring significant changes. This is something we at the Intersection Group have been working on the last year and at the 10th Intersection Conference, held in Rome next week, we will be introducing the first fruits of that work.

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And reach out to us if you want more information about EDGY and how it can help you in your Enterprise Design work to improve the quality and success of your change initiatives.