Transformation, then, happens less by grand design or careful strategy than by the small wins that result from ongoing practices that enhance our capacity to change.
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We like to think that we can leap directly from a desire for change to a single insight or decision that will complete our reinvention. As a result, we remain naive about the long, essential testing period when our actions transform (or fail to transform) fuzzy, undefined possibilities into concrete choices we can evaluate.
What is important is not changing the work or organizational context but reworking outdated basic premises and decision rules that are still governing our professional lives.
Seemingly small steps, changing one project at a time, create momentum. Social scientists have argued that a strategy of “small wins”—making quick, opportunistic, tangible gambits only modestly related to a desired outcome—is in many instances the most effective way of tackling big problems. Part of the reason small wins can produce much bigger results than a grand strategy is psychological: Defining a problem as “big and serious” can make us feel frustrated and helpless and therefore can elicit a less creative (or more habitual) response. We become paralyzed. We make the wrong move just to change. When we see change as requiring “big, bold strokes,” we amplify our fear of it; we overcome this fear by putting one foot in front of the other, in a series of safer steps.
Small wins are also great ways to learn and to enlist supporters. Negotiating both a good fee and mostly remote work on her first consulting contract, for example, helped Susan discard barriers and discover resources that were invisible to her before. One small win in itself may not seem like much; a series of them increases the likelihood of serious change by setting in motion a dynamic that favors a next step and makes the next solvable problem more visible.
Experience reveals barriers to change that we can rarely identify at the outset of a career transition, no matter how much self-reflection we do. What we see as feasible and appealing is always constrained by the limitations of our experience.
Our ability to take advantage of what psychologists call “habit discontinuity” depends on what we do in the narrow window of opportunity that opens up after routine-busting changes.