One of my favourite truisms is that change is always a threat when done to me, but an opportunity when done by me.
Many people hate change because it is inflicted on them – someone else is making them do it – or because circumstances are out of their control. As a bumper sticker says: "One nuclear war could ruin a whole career."
On the other hand, people change all the time and love it, because they go after something they want – a new venture, a new book, a new spouse, a new baby, a new home, a new career step. In fact, when change is someone’s chance to act on personal goals, it is not even called change. It is just "my project".
Tough times shift the done-by-me/done-to-me ratio to the threatening side of loss of control, even beyond struggling industries such as cars or newspapers. Threats
arouse defences that can be paralysing, just when action is needed. The external forces are too powerful, and the mess made by those already in place is too big for people to regain a feeling of control or find the silver linings of opportunity.
A counter-intuitive tip for mastering change is to start by wallowing in the feelings of dread it arouses. The sheer nail-biting horror of it all. Get in touch with every negative
aspect, all the things that could go wrong. Then figure out a way to get that negative force on your side. In short, "dream your worst nightmare and invest in it".
That nightmare-to-investment point comes from John Taysom, a serial entrepreneur in London who, for a glorious time in the first internet boom, saved Reuters from being replaced by new technology. While others were whining or denying that rapid advance in internet technologies would displace Reuters’ business model, Taysom
looked the beast in the face and analysed it. He found that the worse nightmares lay in search, for one thing, as well as networking technologies, and that most of the deniers
were wrong to say new companies could never provide the security of data Reuters offered.
He asked, in short, what will disrupt us? Who is starting to eat away at our proposition? What is emerging to replace us? And how can I make those companies and
technologies our partners, befriending and joining the enemies before they destroy us?
Reuters had always commissioned small technology projects from external companies to augment internal research and development. But Taysom recognised that the contracting process, with its requests for proposal, was likely to get the developers’ last ideas rather than their next ideas, and he wanted to go with them toward the next phase.
He wanted Reuters to learn from them and make money off them as they developed, while influencing change within Reuters. Taysom moved from London to Silicon Valley.
Despite being nearly fired by Reuters for radical thinking, he invested in a range of promising startups, getting board
or observer seats and offering new-tech ventures not only cash but a Reuters customer. He led one of the first investments in Yahoo! when its founders were still living in the Stanford University dorms.
The greenhouse fund Taysom started not only made a lot of money for Reuters, it brought rapid learning and partnerships that converted the nightmare into productive changes.
Taysom’s nightmare and subsequent decision to befriend the potential destroyers of his company helped push transformation. Since then,
Taysom moved on, and so did Reuters, which is now part of Thomson Reuters.
This nightmare-first theory is not a pessimistic outlook on life. I examined the research on optimism and pessimism for my book Confidence. It appears that optimists are less
afraid of their nightmares than pessimists. Pessimists are more likely to deny or avoid negative information. Optimists are more likely to look at the dark side, because they have the confidence to feel they can do something about it.
So let me wish you pleasant dreams. And also productive nightmares.
This comment originally appeared on hbr.org and the original can be found at blogs.hbr.org/kanter/2009/08/to-master- change-first-dread-i.html