Dear John...

Change is matter of action, not words.

In my game, I see a lot of analyses, review many reports, hear frequent recommendations. And I'm sure they are useful, but at the back of my mind, I know...

Analysing what's wrong is easy.

Reporting our findings is easy.

Making recommendations is easy.

They are, all of them, easy. If it wasn't, why would we keep doing these things at home, with our friends, our families?

It's acting on these recommendations, making the necessary change, that is more challenging.

If you don't believe me, cast your mind back to the last time you had a relationship with a 'significant other' - and it had gone wrong. (If you can't remember such a time, either you are too young to be surfing the internet or I would like a glass of whatever you were drinking at the time...)

Remember? Talking about it with your friends and forcing them to listen until they ran out of patience (three weeks for women, three hours for men) and gave you the recommendation you knew was right: 'Dump him / her'.

This is a change that is easy to say - but, for most of us, very hard to do.

And all the nonsense about 'Management of Change' doesn't help. The important thing is not 'change' - it's about making things better: more efficient, more effective, less painful. Change is not something abstract to be taught on a workshop, it's specific, it's personal and it takes time.

And, like breaking up, it's better done cleanly, with good manners and by taking into account the feelings of the other person (people?) involved. And sometime down the line, after the pain is gone (but it never really goes away, does it?) it might be possible to see that yes, things are better; yes, it was the right thing to do.

But no matter how it comes out, we shouldn't be surprised that making change happen is hard, because it's always personal.

- Mike