#002 Dr. Ryk Croukamp | Logotherapy and self-awareness in change

Ryk Croukamp, guest · [01:59]I guess there comes a point in time in everybody's life when a reinvention of a career becomes an appropriate thing to do. I've actually worked in, sales and marketing for quite a few years and in supply chain in the chemical industry. I actually did some work in the gold mining industry as well, but we did more on the, on the, on the metallurgy side. And, at some point in time, one asks questions around, this is what it looks like in the front side of business, doing selling, you know, selling and, and marketing, and also in supply chain work, so you have a lot of engagement with external people, and you get to a point where you say, I need to do something different. I need to do something more meaningful and something that more, let, let's say, speaks, speaks a bit more to your essence. so that's where I started with change management. It kind of happened by, by default because there was an opportunity, but the real, the real focus of moving into real change management the way I see it, actually started with, mountaineering expedition. And it, and it was born from dealing with things in my own personal life, so personal change and how to deal with that for me was almost the trigger for me to, to do this. So my approach to change also is very much people-focused and not so much about processes and technology and tools and templates. And, in case you were wondering about things like Indigo Skye, it was actually born on the Himalayas. I did a, I did a three-day expedition climbing on the backside of Mount Everest, where it connects with Mount Lhotse. Did a summit there in 2013, and it was actually my own personal transformation journey that got me to that. And so the name Indigo Skye also comes from the color of the sky when you stand on the summit at that altitude. So that's where the name comes from. That's always a very special place for me because mountains are for me special places. They represent for me personal transformation because of what I've done there and the reasons why I actually went there in the first place. So that, that shaped the way I do change.

Ryk Croukamp, guest · [06:27]I first look at the landscape for, for change, which really is about the culture and the climate of the organization. Very often there we find things like change saturation, climates that are not conducive for change, overload, imbalance between work re- you know, job resources and job demand. So I, I prefer to do things like climate studies and culture studies before a change even starts and almost prepare the landscape for that to happen. Then what we often forget is, people change does not just happen in organizations. There's a lot more personal change that goes on for people outside of the organization, and that requires what I would term emotional and, and motivational and, and energetic wellness, because you require energy to actually get through a change. And very often, many of these changes are, are undealt with. and we, we neglect them and organize. It's actually inconvenient because for organizations, because there's a project plan, and the project plan requires certain milestones and certain timelines, and it forces the people learning journey into the same timelines. It doesn't work. Purely, it simply doesn't work. And that's probably one of the reasons why whenever you pull up reports on perceived or so-called, failed change efforts, and when I say fail, I mean really twelve percent of initiatives brings full, brings full benefit to realization, about fifty, sixty percent, you know, there are various stats around that, that delivers half of the, of the value, and there are the forty percent that completely dismally fails, which are really just like, you know, water under the bridge, and it, it just doesn't work at all. So preparing people and actually letting them understand how they personally deal with change by giving them skills to do so are, are not really change management methods, but it, it's about helping them understand How does change affect them personally, of, of whatever kind, where maybe it was just an unresolved thing like, a divorce or the loss of a parent or a diagnosis of an illness or a rebellious child or whatever it is, and, and, and let them experience how to resolve that properly, because those are changes at the very personal level. So we use the change cycle to actually take them through a two-day workshop and prepare them for that.

Ryk Croukamp, guest · [14:16]The work was born from Viktor Frankl himself, who was a Holocaust survivor, and his philosophy on logotherapy was born in, well, let's call it inside the pit of hell, because he found himself in, in Auschwitz and those places. And, and he realized there that, you know, you can take anything from any person, but not his choice, which really was the ultimate freedom. And so when we talk about responsibility, the way he defines it, it's about the ability to respond daily, hourly, to put choices to our conscience and make decisions about what's the right thing to do here. And, so he was not, he was not, not into the positive psychology of Finding happiness per se. for him, happiness was an end result of living a meaningful and a purposeful life. And every day when we find challenges in our lives, whether they're to organizational change or losing a friend or going through an illness or something, we always have a choice to make. sometimes it's, something that, which is a fate that's just dealt you, like somebody loses their life. There's nothing you can do about that. All that remains for you is your attitude towards the situation. But he also speaks of things like creative values and, and, and experiential values. And creative values really is the way we do work, and he, and his view was that regardless of the content of the work we do, the choice we make on how we do that always remains a choice, and we can either try and find meaning in what we do, or we can become victims and complain about it. He, at the root of it sits the idea of accountability, and to sum this up, he actually wrote a letter to Franklin Roosevelt at the time, of the Second World War, and he said, You have the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast, I recommend you put up a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. so that gives us an idea of, you know, we, we, we can make choices and good choices, by putting life's demands to our conscience and, and asking ourselves not so much what we want from life, but what is life demanding of me right now? And that really becomes the essence of existential questions about purpose and meaning, and that's what logotherapy is all about.

Ryk Croukamp, guest · [16:43]I've actually developed some workshops where people, for instance, we go through a change process. We, we piloted this thing in Ghana as an example. We went through a workforce transition process, and people were gonna lose their jobs. And we, we use some video clips, around Anne Sullivan, who dedicated her life to teaching Helen Keller, as an example, and just show people, you know, the possibilities that exist for them when they try and find purpose in what they do, and that they do have choices to make. So the choice really is about, am I going to become a victim of this thing, or am I going to become a victor of this thing? The choice always remains, and I guess we have to also accept that not all people will do so. we know that we sometimes lose people and change processes, and that's also okay. I guess that's an inevitable thing to do, but we try and land the idea of what does your accountability for your own life look like, because this has happened now. Whether the organization or you benefit from the process is what it is, what are your choice going to be, and, and how are you going to respond to the situation? So we do run workshops to actually support people in terms of exploring meaning and purpose for themselves in the change process, and often, we do things like run these workshops for them to find alternatives for themselves. So let's say, for instance, that it does result in job losses, we would actually run some workshops for them to discover other things they can do, but really it's about shifting them from being a victim to becoming something that, you know, actually making a good choice about that this, this hand has been dealt you, how will you respond to this?

Ryk Croukamp, guest · [36:11]When, when people experience things in their life, from their childhood right through to wherever they find themselves in lives, certain events occur, and they connect the dots. And often we find repeating patterns, where a person experiences, let's say, a sense of failure, maybe he had some difficulty with a subject at school, maybe he was bullied, and so forth. And eventually, when they start connecting these events, they form what we, what we call identity conclusions, and this is where narrative practice comes in. And often those identity conclusions are not really a true reflection of who they are, because there were other events in their lives which we remind them of. So when we take them through workshops on how to work with narrative, we, we help them rediscover those other events. which was a different story to, where they got to now, and, and we, and so we strengthen those stories about where they were successful in their lives, where, so that eventually a different identity conclusion, conclusion can occur, that takes them away from what, what, what we term a stuck story to a new story, a new story of a new human being. And these, these practices are very important because people make different connections in terms of their experiences, and they start focusing on the positive ones and not necessarily the negative ones, which brings them to a different idea of I'm not a failure, I'm actually just somebody who's learned, who's learned some lessons and so forth, and that's very useful for the process.

Petro du Pisani, host · [37:36]Yeah, one of the exercises I like to do with senior leaders specifically is for them to do their own internalization of the change and for them to write down their own unique story. For why this change is important. Why is it important for the company? Why is it important for my department? Why is it important for me? And I get them to write that down. So they write it down and then share it with everybody in the room as well. And I think that's quite a effective way for people to internalize that change. do you do similar stuff as well?

Ryk Croukamp, guest · [38:05]Yeah. Again, from a narrative perspective, we talk about taking for granted beliefs and ideas. People don't, sometimes leaders don't like this because it challenges the status quo, very seriously so. It asks very challenging questions, but, it's important for people to also see where do, where do these things come from? Because we take things for granted. We, we, we approach change in a way that says it must be like this. This is the way things work around here. And the question we should ask is, well, who says so? And by the way, who benefits by perpetuating this story? So if you start chat, and now people don't like that, but it's a very confrontational process, but it's very important in terms of leaders to understand that there are different ways. And this is also where possibility comes in, because there are always a different way. And, and when you climb mountains, you experience that. When you get to a summit after a thirty, thirty-day climb, what you thought you were going to achieve is not what you achieve in the end. It's a different thing altogether.

Ryk Croukamp, guest · [41:47]I guess, I mean, we, we have spoken about narrative practice, and in the narrative practice, we, when we, when we find the alternative story, which is the story we want, not the stuck story that we didn't want initially, there are ways and means for us to actually draw pictures about this thing, write storyboards about it, publish articles about it, and so forth. But I, I, I also think it's important that when we, I mean, maybe I can ask this question to you, how often is it that when we finish projects and another one comes along, maybe it's because it didn't work so well, how often do people say, oh, here we go again? Because we haven't closed it properly, because we haven't actually announced. I mean, sometimes it could be as simple as saying, let us have a closing ceremony. Let's do a lessons learned, let's share the documentation, and actually close this thing and declare it finished. But it should not just be, the project that's finished. It should also be the people that actually agree with it, this being finished. And maybe it's a measurement of a kind where we say, we've measured a, a level of efficiency, we've achieved a certain business case result, and we declare that and we celebrate that and do it properly. Maybe that's a way to do it. I think just generally we are, we are not so good at finishing things before we start the next one.

Petro du Pisani, host · [43:05]That's true. I mean, one of the, the, the last stages of any change project is the reinforcement, and part of the reinforcement stage is to celebrate success, to understand that we've achieved what we set out to achieve, and it would be great to understand how we can do that. You know, how do we cement that change in the end? How do we make sure that people understand that we've, we've achieved what we set out to achieve and, and reinforce that?

Ryk Croukamp, guest · [43:34]It, it may sound funny, but I, I think maybe simple things like producing an artifact, of a kind. Maybe it's a statue, maybe it's a painting of what we've been through, maybe it's a, a storyboard which we, we put up and we, and, and we share that throughout the organization where everybody, you know, puts their signature down or, puts their little color or their little animal into the painting, something like that. Because I do think we underestimate the value of symbolism in actually closing off things because we only look at the technical side of it and we look at the benefits and we think that's it now. So I think there could be quite a creative way for us to actually do that, but, the point is not to underestimate the impact of actual symbolism, to close something off really properly.