I was lunching with a client this week over Thai curry who said to me, “I can’t keep doing my work with the same old tools. It’s like I’m in a pit, and I keep digging faster and faster, but my hands can’t shovel fast enough, and I’m not getting out of the pit and the pile of dirt at the bottom is up around my ankles.”

I probed a little. Why hands? Why not a shovel? Or a paddle? What kind of “new tools”? My client pondered and told me that (among other things) s/he doesn’t really WANT to know how to manage change, and doesn’t “get” how to build the buy-in from others to new ideas.

Then my client admitted that s/he really didn’t want to learn skills in this arena. We talked some about what s/he included in that “list of tools” that were just “uninteresting.” “I’m a great idea person. I’m more of an entrepreneur than a manager.” With that we changed the subject.

It’s a shame, really. No matter where you work, managing change is part of organizational sustainability these days. The world used to move A LOT slower than it does now. So those early managerial tools? They’re like trying to keep up with your hands when you need a shovel.

If you’re lucky, you’ve had at least one manager in the past 10 years that knew how to manage in these rapidly changing times, someone you watched and learned from.

We think you’ll agree (unless you’ve been stuck in a very dark pit for a very long time) that the world desperately needs people who know how to make change happen. And not just little changes to your organizational operating processes. We need to know how to make HUGE, sweeping, global change.

It starts by deciding you are someone that wants to learn the tools. There’s lots of people who don’t have an affinity for this kind of thing. But for those of us that do, we need to find one another and learn together as fast as we can.

Hence, The Canoe Group.