I’ve just started studying for the ILM level 5 in Leadership and Management, which is likely to take up a fair bit of my time over the next six months. One of the things I’ve been asked to submit is a learning log, which details everything I’ve learned (and want to learn) and how it feeds into the work I’m doing. I also have to write reflections on each module in the program; starting with the Change & Innovation module I studied in December.
Innovation is a straightforward one for me. It’s my natural way of thinking, I value innovative ideas, and I tend not to discount ideas just because they don’t fit into the established order. It probably helps that I’m not the greatest fan of blindly accepting the status quo, and am always looking for ways to be more efficient, more effective, and just better at things. Based on this I suppose it could be surmised that I’m also good at dealing with change. For after all, isn’t change is just the end product of innovation; the idea given form and unleashed into the world?
The fact is I’m a lot less comfortable with change than I am with innovation. I like my changes to be incremental and subtle, and while I’m quite happy to find myself doing almost wholly different work five years after starting my current job, the thought of changing everything that I do in one fell swoop scares me (and would have scared me even more five years ago). Yes, it’s exciting, but it also means devising new routines, new patterns of activity, and new workarounds for things that I find sufficiently uncomfortable that they affect my productivity and general happiness if I’m forced to do them too often.
2016 is going to be a year of change, and I’m going to be documenting as much of it as I can. I actually think it’s going to help the change process, as well as forming part of what I’m being assessed on.