Tuesday, November 18, 2008

BIG Change is Hard...Bite Size Decisions Is Easy

In the past 24 hours I have had to be part of 2 significant changes, with both playing an emotional factor on me.

(1) Move to San Diego?
Mr Bearded Lady got a great job offer, but it's in San Diego. Do we take it or not? What do we do about the house? My job? Our lives?
So instead of all these big scary "what ifs" that we have been thinking in our head - we had dinner and broke it down into bite-size decisions.
Example: Our Home. Is it "the" house for life? Do we keep as investment? Do we sell? Could we sell?
Decisions: Not our dream home, start to detach from "home" and make decisions, actions to investigate possible sale with criteria on selling price. If over X then sell, if under X then rent for 6 months and revisit.
...cont...

Breaking it down and making the bite-size decisions got rid of the big scary "what ifs" and lifted a weight off of both shoulders.

(2) Organizational Decisions
Leading some big hairy scary change in a large organization. We know what we have now is ok, but inadequate for the future. So we gotta change...and to something VERY different.
That is super scary....but mostly because we need to stop looking at it from the BIG change and break it into the decisions.
- Outsource or not? Geography of people? How fast do we want to get there? ...

Today was the moment of truth that we are going to take our top leaders through this - "s**t or get off the pot" as one stated - and then make it less scary by breaking into bite-size chunks.
It feels different to the personal decision as so many more people involved and impacted by the decisions...today I just feel very sad and a little sick to the stomach.

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