The Ball Is Round

The World Cup matches are gripping everyone's attention nowadays. Some results in the early stages of the competition have been somewhat surprising. Switzerland defeated Spain, Serbia beat Germany, and France lost to Mexico. New Zealand achieved a draw with Italy while Uruguay did the same with France.

Obviously, some people have made quite a bit of money given these results. But the spotlight for some of the unexpected performance had fallen on the object that 22 men jostle over during a 90-minute game: the ball.

The Jabulani (meaning "to celebrate" or "to rejoice" in the Zulu language) ball is the official match ball for the 2010 FIFA World Cup. However, not everyone is rejoicing. The ball's performance has met with pre-tournament criticism and the complaints have continued ever since the World Cup started. Some players have blamed the characteristics and performance of the ball for their poor showing. On 16 June 2010, The Guardian newspaper even suggested that the Jabulani ball could have been responsible for the goal drought in the first few days of the competition (though Portugal's 7-0 victory over North Korea earlier today should have settled that).

I don't agree.

However one looks at the issue, the point is that both teams are playing with the same ball. If it penalises one side, it penalises both. In life, we just have to deal with the circumstances that we are in. There is no point blaming a thousand other things for why things go wrong. Just like there is little point blaming the ball, the pitch, the altitude or the annoying sounds of the vuvuzelas. The teams will just have to deal with it.

Like everything else in life, anything is possible on the pitch. The game is what the players make of it. Why? Because at the end of the day, the ball is still round.

Riding A Bicycle

I remembered how I learnt to ride a bicycle. My dad spent many afternoons teaching my brother and me. I was probably about 4 or 5 years old. As with many others, my experience was filled with many scrapes, falls, bruises and cuts. But I soon got the hang of it and took off the training wheels shortly after.

The key advice that my Dad gave me then was to keep pedalling and to keep going. If you slow down, you will start to wobble and that's when you will fall down. This advice was echoed many years later, in a different context, by my Politics tutor, Prof David Goldey. He said to some of us that constitutional engineering and political arrangements are like riding bicycle - you either keep moving forward, or you fall down. This idea - that you have to keep moving forward or you fall - has stuck with me ever since.

Organisations, too, have to consistently evolve. They have to innovate, reorganise, rejuvenate and stay relevant. If they don't, they fail. Prof Clayton Christensen, in The Innovator's Dilemma, explained this with many convincing examples. Outside the business world, there are also examples of organisations that didn't stay relevant and failed catastrophically - consider the French military at the start of World War II. There is resonance at the personal level too. Life is like a bicycle in some ways too. The only way to avoid falling down is to keep pedalling forward - to learn, to change, to adapt, to grow.

Painting on a Filled Canvas

We often associate big change management efforts and organisational change with innovation, "creative destruction", or radical change. It is almost as if we want to create an altogether different or new organisation. However, when we talk about organisational transformation, we focus so much on the transformation that we sometimes forget about the organisation that is to be transformed.

There is alread an established reality - the existing organisation. Also, it is likely to have been the product of many years of innovation, "creative destruction" and radical change. As with all things, there will be inertia and resistance to change. Respecting and understanding the current reality is an important part of changing that reality.

Despite our best laid plans for a transformed organisation, the final outcome might not be exactly what we envision it to be. Understanding, therefore, that we are frequently painting on a filled canvas will provide us not only with a reality check of what we can change, but also the realisation that outcomes are seldom masterpieces created from scratch.