Evolution enablement
The capacity to change what you do without losing who you are
Most organizations are designed to resist change, and they are very good at it. HR, finance and legal exist to remove uncertainty and keep things consistent, which is exactly what you want from them most days and exactly what gets in the way on the days that matter. Evolution enablement is the habit of changing anyway.
Evolution enablement is not a growth program. Growth is doing more of what already works. Evolution is being able to stop doing it and do something else, while customers, employees and partners still recognize who you are. Something has to stay the same for the change to hold. The trick is choosing what.
This is the hardest of the six habits to train. The feedback is slow, often years, and mixed up with luck. The thing that needs changing is usually the thing that is working, which is when the case for change looks weakest and costs the most. It also needs two kinds of seeing at once. Daniel Kahneman spent a career showing how little we can see of our own thinking, so introspection on its own tends to become rationalization. Outside critique on its own tends to become compliance. You need both, and each keeps the other honest.
How it shows up.
Microsoft under Satya Nadella rewrote its mission and its culture, stopped defending Windows long enough to build on other people's platforms, and still reads as Microsoft. Platforms, developers, the enterprise. Nadella called his book Hit Refresh, and the choice of words is precise. Refresh, not reinstall.
Some years ago I interviewed the top 30 people at Novo Nordisk. They had remarkable freedom to run their organizations however they saw fit, as long as they delivered results. Alongside them sat a small group of former senior executives, retained as "facilitators," whose job was to keep the culture intact. Strict about results and values, loose about methods. Most companies manage the reverse, with considerable effort.
Intel in 1985 was losing the memory business it had been built on. Andy Grove asked Gordon Moore what a new CEO would do if the board threw them out. Get out of memories, Moore said. Grove suggested they walk out the door, come back in, and do it themselves. They did.
Tools.
The new-CEO question. Once a year, ask what a new leader brought in by the board would change first. Then ask why you haven't. Andy Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive (1996).
Preserve the core, stimulate progress. Separate what must stay recognizable, usually purpose and values, from everything else, which is fair game. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last (1994). The book is better than most of the ways it has been used. Collins's follow-up, How the Mighty Fall (2009), is the warning label. The first stage of decline is "hubris born of success."
Culture custodians. Give named people the job of keeping the core recognizable, so everyone else is free to change how they work. Novo Nordisk's facilitators are the model.
Resist proxies. Watch for processes that have quietly become the goal instead of the means. A ritual that once built a muscle can keep running long after it stopped doing anything. Jeff Bezos, 2016 letter to Amazon shareholders.
Flip your orthodoxies. Covered under Your constraints. It is the same muscle, worked from the assumptions side.
More drills are on the Evolution enablement page.
For individuals.
People changing careers rarely think their way into a new identity. Herminia Ibarra, in Working Identity (2003), found that they act their way into it, trying new activities and relationships and letting the new self emerge from the experience. Introspection matters, but it often comes after the first step rather than before it. The fast-twitch habits generate the experience. Evolution reads the result.