we created the Still Moving leading change frameworks, drawing on Deborah's experience, her life journey, and our pioneering research in the field, and is richly illustrated with stories of leaders who led change well.
This subsequent Field Guide is about, and for, you. Dip in and out of it where you wish, noticing where your attention is directed to. It contains guidance for personal development and also ideas for how to cultivate greater change capacity in your team and the wider system.
And keep in mind as you do so that we have found that the quality of your inner state, your being, how you “are” as a leader determines the quality of your doing, the actions you take as a leader. The stillness, awareness, and spaciousness of your inner world—your command of your mental and emotional states—really do control how effectively you can create movement in the world around you.
So, as you use this Field Guide, pay attention to your inner state, notice how you respond to what is presented—your degree of openness and curiosity, your feelings and emotions, any tendency to discount or self‐judge. Explore what these observations are telling you, before you leap into taking action!
Enjoy this journey of leadership exploration.
The Still Moving team
March 2020
Reference
1 Rowland, D. A. (2017). Still Moving: How to Lead Mindful Change. Wiley‐Blackwell.
Part 1 Understanding Change Vitality
Grounded in empirical research, Change Vitality is a framework we use to set out the fundamental capacities that are key to the successful leadership of large complex change.
What Is Change Vitality?
Today's world calls for a different way to lead change. Gone are the days when change was an episode, a one‐off event, a “thing to be managed.” Nowadays, we live in a world that swirls in ongoing change. Rapid technology innovation is also causing major disruption and the need to lead from a new, emerging future. We also now live in a more joined‐up and interconnected world, where the pace of change has exponentially increased, and it is harder to control or unilaterally dictate to others what to do.
All of this calls for an approach to the leadership of change that we call creating movement, rather than staying in busy action. Change that is about movement takes you to new, unprecedented places. Change that is about busy action, while creating heat and noise, might just keep you stuck in today's routines. It's paradoxical, as creating true movement might mean slowing down the pace a little and looking to the source of today's routines, how things get done.
So, the core insight underpinning Change Vitality is that successful change demands leaders to not just launch actions and initiatives—getting busy—but instead cultivate deep awareness of, and movement in, their own and hence their organization's routines. We define change as “the disturbance of repeating patterns.” If leaders do not pay attention to a new “how” (way of operating), they will get the same “what” (results)!
What Makes Up Change Vitality?
Change Vitality is therefore a call to a new “how” of leading change. It is made up of four interconnected capacities, or Factors, which in combination lead to movement—that is, tangible change outcomes—and not just busy action, the repetition of past routines.
The four Factors are:
The Inner Capacities—the quality of your inner state as a leader, how people experience your “being”
The External Practices—the effectiveness of your outer behavior, what people can see you “doing”
The Change Approach—how you choose overall to implement change across the system that you lead
The Ordering Forces—the quality of the overall systemic health of your organization that impacts if your change effort will flow with ease or get stuck
We visualize these four Factors as a flow of energy that rises upward through the spinning Change Vitality cone. Sometimes, change can feel a bit like this! A bit wobbly, risky, hard to stay in balance. And, we all know that the essence of a cone's ability to move at pace, yet remain stable, rests on how it pivots on the ground.
That is why we start from the quality of a leader's internal state, their Inner Capacities, and work upward. The entire quality of your ability to lead the swirl of today's change well starts here: in stillness, with your ability to both notice and regulate your inner mental and emotional response to experience. When you can do this, you will perceive and receive the external world more clearly, and therefore take more appropriate action. We call this being before doing.
However, it does not stop at your personal leadership, as we also know that the successful leadership of change requires attending to factors at the whole‐system level. And here we have the final two Change Vitality Factors: your choice of overall Change Approach (top down vs. decentralized, programmatic vs. emergent) and how well you attend to the vital Ordering Forces that govern the flow of relational energy in all human systems. Ignore both of these systemic Factors at your peril.
What Change Vitality Comprises—in More Detail
Each of these four Change Vitality Factors breaks down into individual Elements—as seen in this list. Most of these Elements are promoters of change success: we found them highly correlated with the ability to lead complex change well. Some of them are detractors of change success: we found them to be highly negatively correlated with successful change. In total, there are 19 separate Elements.
| Change Vitality Overall Factor | Change Vitality Individual Elements |
| Inner CapacitiesThe quality of your “being” | Staying Present |
| Curious and Intentional Responding | |
| Tuning into the System | |
| Acknowledging the Whole | |
| Non‐Mindful* | |
| External PracticesThe quality of your “doing” | Attractor |
| Edge and Tension | |
| Container | |
| Transforming Space | |
| Leader‐Centric* | |
| Change ApproachesEffectiveness of your overall choice on how to implement change | Masterful |