Attention! No time for change?

People are overloaded with information and change. The mailbox is filled with memos about why they need to change. Every white space on the wall is covered with communications about the latest initiatives. Every free hour is claimed for live or video communication on important topics. And all this on top of all the other work and information people receive every day. There is no mental space left for more….

This means that we need to change our approach to change itself, to deal with this limited attention span and help people make change as easy and valuable as possible.

I happened to read this quote from Lao Tzu yesterday:

Time is a created thing. To say ‘I don’t have time’ is like saying ‘I don’t want to’.
Many people who are very busy will absolutely disagree with this, because they say they really don’t have time. That’s possible. But often it is also about lack of priority, or lack of cognitive space and attention. The statement “I don’t have time” is more often a red herring or excuse for not paying attention to something than a real lack of time.

However, it is important in organizational change to dwell on the reality that people often don’t have time or think so. We can say from the sidelines, “make time, set your priorities, reduce the time you spend on useless things. However, that is usually a long-term work for which there is not always the space during an organizational change, or it is the subject of a transformation in itself.