Yesterday I tripped over nothing - absolutely nothing - and somehow managed to hurl myself seven feet to faceplant into a wall.

It was quite the dramatic fall, which I’ll feel for weeks.

My nine-year-old, who has a penchant for hurling himself dramatically into things, reminded me that he doesn’t get hurt because he bends. As a former competitive gymnast, I’m still fairly flexible, but things definitely change as we get older.

Change is inevitable. How we handle change is up to us.

While we’re talking about change, I want to let you know that my Reflections will soon change. I'll no longer be sending Friday Reflections via a weekly email. However, for those of you who have enjoyed my musings and responded with your own fabulous stories, please be sure we’re connected on LinkedIn and we’ll continue the conversations there.

We’ll start a new version of the Reflections in a bi-weekly newsletter focused on things that matter to Content, Customer Success, and Customer Experience leaders. And, you can hear more fun stories on my next virtual panel with the upbeat and always insightful CX leader Adrian Brady-Cesana.

I appreciate all of the kind words, and your responses really did brighten my weeks, so please stay tuned as I tweak the delivery.

‍In the meantime, this Reflection is all about change - how leaders get in the way of transformational change, how to effectively manage technology changes, and how even good intentions can lead to silly changes.

‍How Leaders Get in the Way of Organizational Change by Ron Carucci. In this article, Ron describes the three leadership traits causing 70% of transformational changes to fail. When leaders are naive about scope, they assume that many iterative changes will lead to transformation - but many iterative, unconnected changes actually clog the system.  We’ve all experienced leaders who overestimate the capacity of the organization or pull resources off the transformation to the next shiny object (or fire), causing the company to operate like a kids soccer team - the entire team bunched up chasing the ball. When leaders misrepresent the reason for the change or put an unrealistic spin on it, employees see right through it, and the leader loses their trust.

‍Five Steps To Successful Technology Change Management by Yoav Kutner. No matter what level of the organization you are in, you can lead change with proper change management. Yoav identifies five steps to managing change in technology. I especially like that he includes “Build a team” as one of the steps. Why is this important? Because your employees that excel in the status quo might not have the right skills to lead the complexities of change in your organization. He also encourages adding diversity to this change team to capture a variety of approaches to using technology.

‍Southwest Airlines announced a big change that may leave customers speechless by Chris Matyszczyk. We can’t talk about change without an example of a silly one, and the pandemic has created many changes that leave us scratching our heads. In this article, Chris discusses a new policy on Southwest Airlines flights that mandates passengers to pull up the menu on their phones and point to the beverage they want. I was on a Southwest flight a couple weeks ago and this was not the case, so perhaps they reconsidered? Nonetheless, this is a fun article to read if you want some news to poke fun at on your next Zoom call - or, in my case, to sidetrack the chiropractor when he asks what caused the fall that hurt my back.

This article was originally published in Megan Gilhooly’s Friday Reflection, where she shares her unique perspective on recent events and how they pertain to customer experience, content strategy and business leadership. Megan is VP of Customer Experience at Zoomin and previously led global content teams at AWS, Amazon and Ping Identity.