Written by Josie Kornelson
Anticipation and Ability
By the third part of this series, you might be able to recite Adam Grant's quote without looking at it:
“People who see change as a threat to the past reject new ideas and get left behind.
People who treat change as a challenge in the present embrace new ideas and adapt.
People who anticipate change as an opportunity for the future initiate new ideas and lead.”
We have talked about awareness of change, movement toward change, and posture around change. Next, we'll focus on the ability to change. To anticipate change as an opportunity sounds abstract. It sounds like a version of who we would like to be with all the new ideas and leadership capabilities, but there's a gap.
The final two steps in the ADKAR model are:
Ability - to implement required skills and behaviors
Reinforcement - to sustain the change
Combining ability and reinforcement makes sense. You learn, you do. You learn, you do again. But…learn what? Do what?
Psychologist C.R. Snyder developed a cognitive process called "Hope Theory" that bridges the gap between anticipation and opportunity. He says that the main components of hope are goals, pathway, and agency. According to Oxford dictionary, these three components are defined as follows:
Goals: the object of a person's ambition or effort; an aim or desired result
Pathway: a way of achieving a specified result; a course of action
Agency: action or intervention, especially such as to produce a particular effect.
We can approach anticipation and hope similarly. We set a goal as the object of our ambitions and efforts, we determine the way to achieve the results, and we establish personal movement to achieve what we have set out to.
When you are at this final point of change where you are naming it as opportunity, it's time to ask yourself these three questions:
What are the goals that I am seeking to achieve?
How am I planning to reach those goals?
What do I need to do to make sure that I am able to follow my chosen pathway?
When we attach concrete process to the abstract, we give ourselves a foundation to grow from. Before we can anticipate change as an opportunity, we need to first look at how to anticipate. How to hope. How to lead.
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