”Simple” Changes May Be the Most Difficult

Posted on | March 17, 2010 | No Comments

I spent a constructive day at the Swedish Energy Agency’s annual conference. A lot of activity, energy and enthusiasm!

I’m sensing some confusion, and chaos!

I reflected on how people sometimes talk about changes that are almost impossible to manage, as if they were the simplest thing in the world.

And here’s a sentence you didn’t think you’d hear today: “We could easily change our tax system so that we tax the use of natural resources instead of income.”

Change a tax system? Really? From all of the politicians reading this, I think I just felt a collective shudder all the way over here in Sweden (and we’re no strangers to shuddering). Business leader? Your first inclination to have me carted off for a mental evaluation is a natural one. I’m sensing confusion. No, chaos!

Change isn’t easy, and it has to begin somewhere. The sooner we realize much of what we’re doing, and not doing, isn’t working to the degree necessary, the easier the end result will be. In retrospect, it may be much more difficult to achieve this type of change than to manage a large-scale transformation program involving the development and implementation of many different new technologies. That’s interesting, because the former is a component of the latter.

In order to change the tax system, we need to educate a majority of the voters about the advantages of such a new system. We would also have to work out in detail how it should work – and why. With this type of change, we may never achieve the necessary political majority in favour of the change. Also, we may not be able to manage the change process. Instead, we may spend ten or fifteen years trying to realize a change that most voters may not find attractive. I understand this. I am also not afraid of such challenges if they contribute to the common good. Even more so if the alternatives are irreversible energy depletions through mismanagement (even benign neglect).

Technology development and transformation could be managed. We can calculate how long it will take to develop and implement new technologies under different sets of conditions. We can calculate the risk, the investments, and we can organize such a project through, in part, identifying all the players that need to be involved.

A tax change can never be managed against a time plan. We don’t know if we can ever get the majority of voters to accept it. But it is these voters and citizens we are considering. Add on top of this seemingly impossible task the track record of all of the tax mismanagement decisions that have been made.

Who wouldn’t be reticent to even open this Pandora’s box of managed change. But we must. If mankind has proven anything in its rapid and remarkable existence, it’s that everything we need to survive has been placed on this earth for us. We sometimes just have to move them around a bit. This is that.

It is the mission of Global Energy Transformation Institute to inform about the advantages of transforming energy related systems on a large scale using change management as the primary tool. Managed change programs have been used many times before by companies and in society at large to achieve ambitious transformation goals. It can be used again to run Global Energy Transformation. The sooner one signs on, the sooner we get to work on the details.

http://www.sverigesenergiting.se/

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