Friday Thoughts with Lucy

Work, people, change and whatever else has caught my attention this week.

Change Has a Start Date. Transition Doesn’t.

Here we are at the last weekend of August. A Bank Holiday, the end of the summer holidays for many families and, when we emerge on the other side, September and the beginning of the ‘ber months’.

I’ve always thought September feels more like a new year than January does. Schools go back, university terms begin, people start new jobs and organisations seem to collectively return from summer with renewed enthusiasm for getting things done before Christmas. There’s a definite sense of one thing ending and another beginning.

I’ve been thinking about transitions a lot this week, partly because I attempted to record one of my Walk & Talk videos on Brixham Breakwater during rather spectacular weather. The idea was to use the stormy sea on one side and the calmer harbour on the other to talk about transitions. Unfortunately, the wind had other ideas and most of the video involved my hair trying to leave Devon without me.

The metaphor still worked though.

1. Transitions need more than a start date

There’s a fairly significant transition happening in our house at the moment. My daughter is heading off to university for the second time, and we’ve been preparing for it for around six months.

That preparation hasn’t simply meant buying bedding and working out what will fit in the car. She’s been volunteering, working part-time, travelling independently and deliberately working on socialising and communication. We’ve thought about accommodation, identified some of the things that could trigger overwhelm, explored what support might be needed and worked through Disabled Students’ Allowance.

In other words, the transition doesn't start when we pack the car. It started months ago.

I think there’s something organisations can learn from that. We often treat a transition as a date: the new system goes live on Monday, the restructure begins on the 1st, the new manager starts next week. For the people experiencing it, however, the transition begins much earlier and can continue long after the official change has happened.

One practical thing I find useful is to ask three questions:

What will stay the same?

What will be different?

What can we put in place now to make the different bit easier?

That works whether you’re starting university, going back to school, joining a new team or facing a major organisational change. Predictability doesn’t remove every difficulty, but knowing what to expect and having a plan for the difficult bits can reduce a huge amount of uncertainty.

2. Is awareness training in a transition too

I’ve also been thinking recently about whether neurodiversity awareness training actually works.

I think awareness has done an important job. Ten years ago, many of the workplace conversations we’re having now simply weren’t happening. More people understand neurodiversity, employees have more language to describe their experiences and organisations are much more willing to talk about adjustments and inclusion.

But I think we’re in another transition now.

The question is moving from

“Do our managers know about neurodiversity?”

to

“Do our managers know what to do when a neurodivergent employee is struggling?"

That might be a reasonable-adjustment decision, a communication problem, a safeguarding concern, someone’s experience of organisational change or a manager trying to distinguish between performance and a workplace barrier.

Awareness can help someone recognise that difference exists. Capability is knowing what to do with that information.

3. Knowing something isn’t the same as being able to do it

This has been another recurring thought over the last couple of weeks, particularly after taking DECID:R to BSides Bristol.

We can teach people about good communication, psychological safety and decision-making. We can write incident plans and reasonable-adjustment policies. We can explain why diverse thinking makes teams stronger.

Then something complicated happens.

Suddenly there isn’t one obviously correct answer. Information is incomplete, people interpret the situation differently and a decision actually has consequences.

DECID:R gives us a way to put teams into realistic situations and see what happens. We’re using it for team development and crisis simulations, but I’m also interested in its potential for things such as reasonable-adjustment decision-making: giving managers somewhere safe to practise navigating the grey areas before they’re sitting opposite a real employee who needs an answer.

Perhaps that’s the thread connecting quite a lot of my work at the moment.

Transitions need preparation.

September seems like a rather appropriate month to start.