7 ways to improve your business without changing anything

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.
Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (1951)

---

Previously at the Volcano Base I was connecting AI to actual business data. Since then, honestly, I’ve struggled to stay motivated. I blame climate change. And right-wing populists.

---

Mission Briefing: 7 ways to improve your business without changing anything

Systems design has a Rule Zero. Nobody puts it on a plaque, because plaques are meant to be inspiring and this one just states the obvious with unnecessary confidence:

Nothing will be different unless something changes

Not busier. Not louder. Not run past more people in a bigger room. Different requires different, which is an insultingly simple idea that entire departments exist to avoid confronting. Apart from the Change Department - it gets wild in there.

There’s a version of progress that requires nothing to actually move anyway. It’s wildly popular. Here are seven certified methods, each guaranteed to generate the sensation of forward motion while the underlying machinery stays exactly where you left it.

1. Add a Slack/Teams channel

A new channel implies a new problem is finally being taken seriously. What it actually does is relocate the conversation that wasn’t happening from one place to a slightly newer place, where it also won’t happen, but with more emoji.

2. Hire a coordinator

Someone whose entire job is making sure the other jobs talk to each other. This is a bit like hiring a translator for two people who both speak English but have stopped listening. The coordinator will, in time, need a coordinator.

3. Create a dashboard

Numbers, now in colour. The dashboard will tell you, with tremendous visual confidence, that the thing you already suspected was true is true. Nobody has ever fixed a broken process by looking at it more attractively.

4. Schedule more meetings

The logic here is almost touching: if the system won’t talk to itself, perhaps the humans can talk on its behalf, twice a week, for forty-five minutes, forever. The meeting becomes the work. The work becomes a rumour.

5. Invent a new job title

Nobody’s actual responsibilities change, but now they’re the Head of Something, which feels like reorganisation and costs about the same as a loft extension. The org chart gets a box extension.

6. Hold an offsite

Everyone leaves the building, has a genuinely useful conversation over coffee, agrees something must change, writes it on a flip chart, and returns to the building. The flip chart does not return with them.

7. Write a strategy document

Forty pages, an executive summary, a slide version of the executive summary, and maybe, if you’re an agency, a video with lots of motion graphics and a Fatboy Slim soundtrack. It gets approved, filed, and referenced exactly once, by whomever’s writing next year’s strategy document.

8. Run it through Strategenie first

This one’s different, because it happens before the other seven, not instead of them, which is precisely the problem for the other seven. Strategenie doesn’t add a channel or a coordinator or a title. It just simulates what actually happens if the system underneath stays the same shape while you throw people, money, and enthusiasm at it. The uncomfortable thing it tends to reveal is that none of the above were ever going to work, and everyone kind of already knew that, and did it anyway, because doing something feels so much better than admitting the something on offer wasn’t a change at all.

Rule Zero doesn’t care how sincere the effort was. It only checks whether anything underneath actually moved.

---

Volcano Base is sponsored by StasisQuo

Comprehensive protection against the risk of things actually being different next year.

At StasisQuo, we understand that change is uncertain, expensive, and frankly a bit much. That’s why we offer full-spectrum Change Insurance, underwriting your organisation against the possibility that any of your initiatives succeed in altering anything.

Our actuaries have modelled thousands of transformation programmes and found the safest possible outcome: nothing. Premiums scale with ambition, so the more transformative your strategy sounds, the more we’ll cover you.

No claim has ever been paid out. None has ever needed to be.

StasisQuo. Change happens to other companies.