Tag Archives: holidays

Christmas time again – long live the Easter Bunny!

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It’s Christmas time again — and I just heard a joke about Christmas time: Christ Child, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny have a dispute about whether they are real.

It starts because Santa challenges whether the Christ Child really exists. But Christ Child fights back and doubts if Santa Claus can be real. Arguments and reproaches fly back and forth, and they have a loud and fierce dispute.

Then Easter Bunny, sitting very relaxed in a chair at the pool (as he has really still a lot of time at that season of the year), complains about the noise and excitement of their dispute — he finds it silly and unnecessary to question if they are real or not, because the truth is so obvious:

He is just there, alive, breathing, existing and enjoying life — why all that fuzz? Why even question if they all exist? So, he tells them to shut up and not disturb him in his relaxation. That doesn’t go well for long, because now he becomes the focus of their attention and anger, and quickly the situation escalates to a point that Easter Bunny sees the pool from the inside. And even worse, his arrogant attitude has made the other two so furious that they — now acting jointly against the new enemy — keep pushing him back into the water until poor Easter Bunny doesn’t move anymore and finally drowns and is dead.

What is the lesson of that tale? The lesson is: Now what is certain is that there is no Easter Bunny anymore.

Aha…? What…? So, like me, you might also wonder what that joke really wants to tell us? What is the real lesson from this? The real lesson that I take out of that joke is this:

When you question and challenge whether love and the good exist in this world, and if you really insist and question that to a point that you stop believing that love, peace, and the good in humanity exist and act in this world, you will end up killing it, just because you stop believing in it. Because when you stop believing in it, you stop acting for it, you stop acting to make it real.

Sounds a bit like a logical perpetual motion machine or a similar circular argumentation — nevertheless, what we have seen over centuries in this world since the last 2000 years is that Christianity has created very human civilisations and societies out of pure belief in love and the good in human beings and the power of not only caring for oneself, but also for others. And that’s just the reason why this joke comes up at Christmas time — you remember, certainly, it’s the celebration of love… and we believe that if we do good, Santa Claus will come and reward us with presents — and if we are evil, he will punish us with his long stick.

I reconfirm: Yes, the pure belief that something better is important and possible and the belief that it deserves and needs our efforts and our will to search for it and to achieve it — that pure belief makes all the good and better in the world happen at the end. If you lose it, if you stop believing, you give way to a world where the bad, the egoistic and selfish will win.

And that kind of world then turns out to be not such a nice place to be, because it is a world of violence, exploitation, wars and crime and destruction, where a few win and many others lose. A hopeless, dark place without any belief or action for a better world. Everybody may judge for herself/himself in what direction the world will be moving in the year 2026, soon to start. But certainly, we have a choice to believe in and act for a better world.

This principle of making change happen because we believe in it is also the driver for working in cultural change management in large organisations. That belief comes out of the knowledge and imagination (in its best meaning of having a vision of something being possible) of how much better organisations can work. And how much better that will be as an experience and life for employees, customers, managers and even business owners, because what works better for employees and customers will create clearly better business results as well. If ever that count of roles makes sense at all, because at the end they are all human beings with the needs, feelings, dreams and aspirations of human beings: We want safety, wealth and peace. We want to feel fulfilled and enriched by what we do all day long. We want to feel proud of what we do and are. We want to see that what we do is meaningful for ourselves and others.

We want challenges to grow and learn, and we want to be able to use the wings of our talents to fly freely. And last but not least, we want to have a fair chance to get our work done with manageable efforts and in a way that we can return home sane and with time, attention, patience and inner peace left for our families and friends as they deserve it.

Of course, in cultural change for organisations it is not (directly) about spreading love, acting altruistically, sacrificing for others, and it is not about solving “the world food problem”. My gosh, how frequently do people bash us with that cynically devaluated phrase, which is a hidden version of the logical fallacy called ‘slippery slope’.

Such comments are made to push us back when we try to really change something fundamentally and not just do little modest optimisations of the status quo. No, obviously, it is not directly about solving the world food problem. But it is about tackling bigger problems and about looking for better solutions that will finally solve it for good and will bring a real big gain in performance. And in cultural change in organisations it is certainly about making an important part of this world significantly better.

It is about how people who work in organisations experience their work and lives: Is it an experience of being commanded, directed, and controlled? Is it feeling like being chased, pushed to do more work in bad conditions, just by pure effort and pain? Or is it an experience of good learning, good faith and trust and collaboration, full of fun and insights and success? Does it feel like a good, well-working flow, not all easy, but highly productive? Does it leave a feeling of pride for the results and a feeling of fulfilment of using one’s own human talents and capabilities to get there?

And it is about how customers experience what they get from organisations that serve them or sell products to them: Does it simply work, or do I always have trouble and headaches because it does not? Are they interested in what I need and want as a customer – or am I just being processed and just ‘getting sold’ their product for the purpose of making more money?

And finally it is also about management and the owners’ experience of how well and on which ways they can develop an organization and a business to make it very successful and to make a lot of money, wealth and other value: How well are we able to find out what customers really want to buy and are ready to spend money for and what makes them stay with us for long?

How easy or difficult, or how much pleasure and fun and good or bad experience is it to get all that coordination, quality work, ideas, creativity, and innovation needed out of the company? And how well do we achieve that customers are willing to pay more money for better service?

Overall, it is about creating a future and a (very large) better part of the world where there is more learning, growing, fun, value, pride and wealth of all kinds for all these stakeholders. It is about believing that it is possible and very important to work on a change that will create a future with a win-win-win situation. We should not drown it in a pool of doubts and reserves of what we think we have under control and in our own power so far, and don’t want to let go on to new ways of coordinating, steering and decision making (some managers react like that).

We should not drown and trouble such belief and vision in doubts or lack of fantasy — we should let all that imagination and belief and exploration go its way and see what good mood and spirits and light it can create in this world.

Don’t beat yourselves up with doubts about if that change exists and works, while you all are just about to act and do some of the many very good steps that create real ‘miracles’ (in the eyes of uninspired not-believers) and all these good things that so many people in this world want, because they are human beings and not just ‘employees’ or ‘managers’ or ‘customers’.

Listen to the Easter Bunny, follow his example, and save him! Just be what you are and what you want to be: You are hope, imagination, love and the light that let people’s hearts stay warm in cold, dark winter times. You are the stars that lead humanity to create a better world. And nothing less.

Escape the rat race – not only at Christmas

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Christmas has arrived. This is a magical time. We remember how we stood as children in front of the Christmas tree with big eyes and curiosity for the parcels, silently listening to stories and songs while the snow fell just as silently outside. After all the seasonal rush, the holidays have finally arrived now also for us adults. We step back and get distance. Relax and redirect our attention towards our loved ones. Different thoughts and a wider vision of life may come into our minds. We can enjoy a healing break full of contemplation, walks in the snow and joyful family dinners. Mind and body get a rest, our professional ambition paused momentarily until the new year.

We might reflect and see our busy job life from another point of view. Not from the productive, planning, executing side or simply getting through all the busy-busy-bang-bang work, but from our sense of achievement – what we now enjoy as a result of all that effort, and taking pride in knowing we tried our best. Different views and ideas flow up to our conscience that had to wait behind all this busy activity at work. We can watch it now from a different angle, in a clearer light. We might think about what it was good for at the end. With this calm and distance, now in our reflections we see that much of it was pointless.

In the middle of the usual work rush we have by far too few occasions where we allow ourselves to get this distance and honesty. Daily we get pulled into the busy-busy-bang-bang noise, feeling a necessity to react quickly, reacting with no time to think, no time to reflect or to choose what really makes sense. Our attention is more and more absorbed by the details and urgencies of these things. We become reactive and try to hurry with all what we do, up to a point where we do not even see any more our original purpose. We find ourselves overwhelmed in noisy activity for the sake of activity, creating the impression of motion – but without real progress. While we keep on moving like this through the weeks, we do not pay much attention to how we can create conditions to have more of these moments of distance like at Christmas. But how do we stop the noise and listen for the right signals?

The real job that we have to do is not trying to find how fast we can do what we already do but how do we do things differently and better to create new value and possibilities. Time for reflection is important as it provides a much needed course correction back to our purpose. Admitting this, we have to ask ourselves: Why is this hardly done in daily work? Why is it so difficult to shift behavior? To say “we are too stressed and busy” leads us back in a loop and that does not help to escape the trap – in contrary, if we say this, we surrender to the rat race and accept to live with the damage every day. And we might not even be fully aware of what the damage and cost is.

What I can say about the months of September and October this year, which were driven by a lot of work and overtime, effectiveness started to suffer as soon as the noisy workload took me off course. I lost my sense of direction and purpose because I had chosen to forsake reflection. The necessary timeouts were cut off by just too much overtime in the evening. I did things where I said after three days of fervent activity “Oh, this could have been much simpler, a more effective way would have created more benefit.”  If I only had had more time to think about a better approach… So many times I chose to ignore these thoughts, reacting to the busy-busy-bang-bang noise, having lost the sound of purpose in all the clamor. I was so busy getting it done…But to be honest, I was just running fast on cumbersome detours, running after the needs and issues of average or even pointless, purpose-failing approaches. Isn’t it frequently like that, that in the middle of all these details, issues and struggles of execution, we lose sight of the purpose? 

With this running, we are the driving force in a vicious circle – we are the ones who keep it spinning and thus it is us who have a choice to stop it. Ask yourself honestly: What is the relationship between the level of value that a busy piece of work produces and the degree of how busy (or overloaded) we are with all our tasks. Consider two backfiring effects in that relationship. First: Being busy and stressed causes a lack of time and distance to reflect and to identify better approaches. Second: Vice versa, the lack of better approaches causes us to be very busy and stressed. Because our not well reflected approaches are relatively ineffective and misdirected. This is keeping us busy with all the issues, insufficient results and even more negative side-effects that we or others have to deal with.  So there you go, the vicious cycle is closed and the rat race is accelerating.

Isn’t that a great insight, a great opportunity found? We are the ones who keep ourselves busy, thus we also have a choice to do it differently. To continue the struggle and just refine and make our action more efficient, is not an alternative, because this will always still suffer from a lack of effectiveness and a lack of right direction. We will just feed and accelerate the vicious circle to turn even faster and to create even more damage. The way to escape this “hamster-wheel” is to make ourselves aware that taking time for reflection will not make us slower, but will let us go the shorter way to better results. We escape the struggle if we admit that taking time will save time and increase impact.

It can be quite simple and does not need big seasonal events like Christmas. I have found one way to pull myself out: Just two weeks ago, in the middle of a pile of other tasks and deadlines, I was reviewing a draft newsletter, and while I was rushing through the detail changes a feeling of doubt got stronger and stronger as if this was the right thing to do at all. Would this have the impact that we needed? I noticed that I had lost focus on what we were trying to achieve. I had simply stopped thinking about what made a really good approach. Frustrated, I felt the wish to have a break, turn away from the computer, that darned mind-absorbing-machine, and to just take a piece of paper, a pencil and a coffee – and think. Get distance from the text and from the whole busy activity. Let my mind escape from the busy-busy-bang-bang mode, see what I have in front of me, think about what counts as a result and look at what I am doing right now. Why let my thinking be constrained and captured by my own prior choice of what seemed to be a common sense action? Why must possibilities be limited by the worriedness to execute fast enough an average approach with doubtful impact?

So I retreated to the coffee-corner and thought about what we knew, what we needed and what might be better options. As a result, I decided to talk to colleagues about what they usually took away from newsletters and adapted the frequency and content based on their feedback.

There are so many opportunities that are not seen, not thought about, not explored because we get too busy, too deep, and too quick to action. We miss the signals and opportunities for great leaps because we are doing noisy, ultimately unproductive quick fixes. I hope I will take a lot of this Christmas silence, reflection and distance into the New Year and I will remember to choose to go for the paper-pencil &coffee-approach more often. When I want to move faster, I will remind myself that I will be faster if I take the time to reflect. And more importantly, I will consider how I can make it a standard for the planning and review of new work-tasks. A piece of paper, a pencil, a coffee and the good feeling that this investment in reflection will pay back not only in saved time and effort,   but also in more value and more impact on what I do every day.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year full of distance, reflection and purpose.