People resist change just when the need is greatest. This reading list will help

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

This quote by Vladimir Lenin was from a different time and place, but it feels super-relevant now in the age of coronavirus.

It’s just over seven weeks since the prime minister announced the nationwide lockdown on 23 March.

We still don’t know how, or when, we come out of it.

Nor do we know what life, work and business will look like when we do.

Big changes are coming. Are we ready for that?

Your people will resist

Consider this frustrating paradox:

Your organisation’s capacity to evolve is inversely proportional to the degree to which your people feel psychologically safe.

And people feel least psychologically safe in times of great change.

It means that the moment when you have to change fastest is exactly when people are the most resistant.

I’m working with a leadership team charged with bringing about considerable change, and they agreed to research and develop a way to strengthen psychological safety throughout their organisation.

The leader asked me which books they could read to understand psychological safety and do something positive about it.

I was happy to oblige, because psychological safety is a hot topic in organisational development, and it has featured in many of the books I’ve read recently.

Here’s my reading list, including a few classics.

Read these books if you have the time

1. Deep and Deliberate Delegation – by me. I have unashamedly put this at the top of my list because it is about growing new capability in your organisation, working with whom you have. If you can’t effectively delegate stuff, none of the following books will be of much use, because you will not be able to scale up.
2. Brave New Work by Aaron Dignan. This is the best book I have read in ages. It’s jam packed with insights on how the world of work works, or doesn’t, and how to transform it for the better. It’s all about psychological safety.
3. The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer. Another great book about Inner Work Life and an astonishing, yet seemingly obvious, discovery from their research into what makes the biggest difference to the way we feel about our work, something ‘management’ has completely missed.
4. Who Moved My Cheese. The read-it-in-an-hour classic by Spencer Johnson. Our cheese has been well and truly moved, so how are you and your people reacting to that?
5. Thank You For Being Late by Thomas L. Friedman. This is about how the exponential growth of physical technology has outstripped our ability to cope with it, and how the only way to regain any sense of control is to accelerate how we adapt and evolve. It contains many insights into mental health and psychological safety.
6. Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. I include this because whatever you end up doing at an organisational level, you are going to need a strategy, and most strategies examined by the author are bad. I agree.
7. The Power of Positive Deviance by Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin and Richard Pascale. If your normal mode of thinking is “What’s the problem and how do we fix it?” – and that’s most people in the construction industry – you need to read this book. Honestly.
8. The Little Book of Clarity by Jamie Smart. If you are a leader, this is for you. If you haven’t got clarity, no one in your team, department or organisation will, either. The fish gets fuddled from the head.
9. Doughnut Ecomomics by Kate Raworth. At some stage, we are going to get through coronavirus and start thinking about the climate emergency again. Raworth explains how our economic thinking and policy-making are two hundred years out of date. She proposes a new approach.
10. Active Hope by Joanna Macey and Chris Johnstone. Subtitled, “How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy”. You get the idea. It’s scary because they talk bluntly about the mess, but it’s also uplifting because we can do something about it.

Or check here if you need distilled learning and hacks

Change is rapid and now, so you may feel you haven’t got time to sift through all these great books, and you may be looking for a short cut.

If so, just read my blog posts and my Linkedin articles. I have the knack of ‘simply presenting what is essentially required’.

And I’m a hungry learner when it comes to people, teams and organisations and how they respond to change.

So, I am constantly reading books like these and distilling the hacks for my readers.

All of my blog posts are on my website; maybe check out the recent ones and the next few. Psychological safety is currently at the forefront of my mind, so it will continue to feature.