Still Moving Field Guide

Change Vitality At Your Fingertips

Deborah Rowland

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119715771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The companion to the bestselling book on leading change, Still Moving

Still Moving Field Guide is a companion to the bestselling Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change. Designed as a practical resource, the Field Guide takes the reader on a journey to hone their leadership skills in order to lead change with confidence. Step by step, readers will progress through the Still Moving concepts.

New to the guide is the innovative Change Vitality model (an energizing holistic way of leading change) that puts all the Still Moving concepts into one effective picture. The author breaks down each element of the Change Vitality model and explores what the element is, how to recognize it, and why it helps leaders lead change well. The model also shows how to rate your own leadership in a particular skill, and includes tales from the field on putting the skill into action. The guide also contains further reading and resources to help cultivate the skills presented. This important book:

• Offers a practical guide for developing the change leadership skills outlined in Still Moving
• Contains application stories with real life leaders in change
• Presents the Change Vitality model - a new, holistic and research-based framework for how to lead change with greater ease
• Provides an interactive immersion journey into the Still Moving content
• Includes spaces for journaling and self-reflection

Written for all curious change leaders, change coaches, change consultants, and HR professionals, the Still Moving Field Guide is filled with practical ideas on how to use the Still Moving concepts with yourself, your team, and the wider systems you are seeking to transform.

Part 1
Understanding Change Vitality

Grounded in empirical research, Change Vitality is a framework we use to set out the fundamental capacities that are key to the successful leadership of large complex change.

What Is Change Vitality?

Today's world calls for a different way to lead change. Gone are the days when change was an episode, a one‐off event, a “thing to be managed.” Nowadays, we live in a world that swirls in ongoing change. Rapid technology innovation is also causing major disruption and the need to lead from a new, emerging future. We also now live in a more joined‐up and interconnected world, where the pace of change has exponentially increased, and it is harder to control or unilaterally dictate to others what to do.

All of this calls for an approach to the leadership of change that we call creating movement, rather than staying in busy action. Change that is about movement takes you to new, unprecedented places. Change that is about busy action, while creating heat and noise, might just keep you stuck in today's routines. It's paradoxical, as creating true movement might mean slowing down the pace a little and looking to the source of today's routines, how things get done.

So, the core insight underpinning Change Vitality is that successful change demands leaders to not just launch actions and initiatives—getting busy—but instead cultivate deep awareness of, and movement in, their own and hence their organization's routines. We define change as “the disturbance of repeating patterns.” If leaders do not pay attention to a new “how” (way of operating), they will get the same “what” (results)!

What Makes Up Change Vitality?

Change Vitality is therefore a call to a new “how” of leading change. It is made up of four interconnected capacities, or Factors, which in combination lead to movement—that is, tangible change outcomes—and not just busy action, the repetition of past routines.

The four Factors are:

• The Inner Capacities—the quality of your inner state as a leader, how people experience your “being”
• The External Practices—the effectiveness of your outer behavior, what people can see you “doing”
• The Change Approach—how you choose overall to implement change across the system that you lead
• The Ordering Forces—the quality of the overall systemic health of your organization that impacts if your change effort will flow with ease or get stuck

We visualize these four Factors as a flow of energy that rises upward through the spinning Change Vitality cone. Sometimes, change can feel a bit like this! A bit wobbly, risky, hard to stay in balance. And, we all know that the essence of a cone's ability to move at pace, yet remain stable, rests on how it pivots on the ground.

That is why we start from the quality of a leader's internal state, their Inner Capacities, and work upward. The entire quality of your ability to lead the swirl of today's change well starts here: in stillness, with your ability to both notice and regulate your inner mental and emotional response to experience. When you can do this, you will perceive and receive the external world more clearly, and therefore take more appropriate action. We call this being before doing.

However, it does not stop at your personal leadership, as we also know that the successful leadership of change requires attending to factors at the whole‐system level. And here we have the final two Change Vitality Factors: your choice of overall Change Approach (top down vs. decentralized, programmatic vs. emergent) and how well you attend to the vital Ordering Forces that govern the flow of relational energy in all human systems. Ignore both of these systemic Factors at your peril.

What Change Vitality Comprises—in More Detail

Each of these four Change Vitality Factors breaks down into individual Elements—as seen in this list. Most of these Elements are promoters of change success: we found them highly correlated with the ability to lead complex change well. Some of them are detractors of change success: we found them to be highly negatively correlated with successful change. In total, there are 19 separate Elements.

Change Vitality Overall Factor	Change Vitality Individual Elements
Inner Capacities The quality of your “being”	Staying Present
	Curious and Intentional Responding
	Tuning into the System
	Acknowledging the Whole
	Non‐Mindful*
External Practices The quality of your “doing”	Attractor
	Edge and Tension
	Container
	Transformin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• A Few Words About the Front Cover
• About the Companion Website
• Introduction
• Part 1: Understanding Change Vitality
• 2 Field Guide—The Inner Capacities
• Part 3: Field Guide—The External Practices
• Part 4: Field Guide—The Change Approaches
• Part 5: Field Guide—The Ordering Forces
• Still Moving—Epilogue
• Index
• End User License Agreement