Chicken Soup and Change Management

The impact of change on the people in an organization is like turning on the burner under a pot of uncooked chicken soup.

As the water around the components - the chicken parts, the vegetables and the spices - heats up and begins to boil, detritus floats to the top, foamy, fatty and dirty, which should be skimmed off several times during the cooking process to optimize the chicken soup product.

In other words, the heat makes the crap float to the top.

Every time you make chicken soup, it's the same reliable routine.

The female relative who taught me to make chicken soup strains everything out of the soup once it's cooked.  She saves the boiled chicken and serves it for dinner, and throws away all the vegetables.  The remaining broth is populated with bland thin noodles.  "Why don't you keep the vegetables and the chicken in the soup?" I once asked.  "Because my mother taught me how to make soup that way," was the answer.

With the availability of fresh chicken broth in local grocery stores, these bland machinations have made less sense over the years.

When I'm at the stove, I leave the vegetables in the soup, add a bit more onion and get daring with garlic, and cut up the chicken in the soup.  Tastes better and it's great when you have a cold; I've never received a complaint.

Now, we've all heard the change metaphor about the frog in the pot.  As you gradually turn up the heat on the pot, the frog gets so used to the heat that it cooks rather than jumps.  Yuck.

I relate more to chicken soup as a change metaphor, for several reasons:

• Without heat (change), you get a cold, inedible and dangerous pot of potentially salmonella-tainted raw chicken and vegetable slop;
• If you do heat up and cook the pot of chicken soup but you don't skim off the crap that initially and subsequently floats to the top, it's still edible but you can't tell from the looks of it, so you probably won't eat it, wasting the effort and negating its impact;
• Chicken soup can be processed antiseptically, or with love; you can tell the difference in the quality and the taste;
• Chicken soup is the cultural manna of my tribe; 
• Cooking a live frog is disgusting and will invariably piss PETA off.

I recently worked with a client, the President of a growing company going through tremendous change.  He hired me to develop and implement the change management plan, which involved among other activities, organizing an event to interview a large group of candidates for potential new jobs.

Everything went well and as planned, actually better than I expected.  As I multi-tasked between interviewing, candidate coordination and paper-shuffling, I went out to the lobby to fetch the next scheduled candidate.  I discovered the President sitting with the group of remaining candidates, shooting the breeze with the group as if they were gathered after work to watch the game.  They were all laughing and having a good time.  That wasn't in the project plan.

"Sorry to interrupt," I interjected, pleased but not surprised, knowing the President.  "I need Jack for his interview."  Jack rose and shook the President's hand.  "Nice to spend time with you," Jack said to the President.  "Good luck, Jack!" the President responded.  Jack walked down the hall to the interview room with me, still smiling.  "What a great guy," he said.  "I wasn't expecting him to sit down and talk to us."

Or help cook and serve the chicken soup, clearly made with (organizational) love.