We all have a collection of things in our lives that we would like to change. When it comes to change, we often find that it's a lot harder than we expect it to be. Even small things turn out to be much more difficult that we think they should be. The problem comes down to control.

In order to change something to be exactly the way you want it, you need to control it. If you try to change something you have no control over, you will fail. A lot of coaches and consultants will get you to draw diagrams showing the things you control vs the things you don't. The message is that you can change the things you control and can only influence the things you don’t. If you want to change something the way to do that is to expand your sphere of control - try to gain control of the thing you want to change. Unfortunately, 99% of those diagrams are completely wrong. We generally have control over far less than we think we do.

The thing about control is that it is often illusionary. You may think you control something but really you don’t. There are lots of reasons for that. The most common being that it's not really your thing to control. You don't have absolute power over it. There are other people in the system and they have their own wishes and desires. You push one way, they push another. They, just like you, may think they are in control. The truth is that no one is.

Or the thing you are trying to control simply can't really be controlled. Control implies that you understand cause and effect - do this, that happens. But what if you do this but something entirely unexpected happens? When you can't understand the relationship between what you do and the effect it has? That sort of relationship between cause and effect is what you get with complex and chaotic systems. So much of our world these days is complex and complex systems can't be controlled in normal cause and effect ways.

Many wise people over the ages have said variations of the statement that the only thing we can truly control is ourselves. Even there we may not really be in full control. You may think that, as an adult, you are in control of deciding what you wear but then your partner gives you a look that says very clearly "you aren't planning in wearing that horrible old shirt out in public are you?” and you go and change shirts. How much control do you really have there? What about more subtle things? Things we aren't even consciously aware of, like our biases, the unspoken constraints that out culture puts on us? Are we really in control of ourselves? In reality, the only thing we have absolute control over is our own internal state and even that takes a lot of practice.

We are in control over very little. So strategies based on control will fail more often than not. Traditional management relies on an illusion of control to try to manage complex programs of work. Programs which, like all complex systems, are not able to be controlled through traditional cause and effect reasoning. You hear politicians talking about controlling the exchange rate, or doing something to the economy to create jobs, or whatever it is they want to do. Regardless of the fact that the economy is a complex system reliant on a huge number of external inputs and outputs and they have almost no control at all over what the economy does.

So what do we do? Do we give up? Assume that nothing will go the way we want it to? No. If we look at the diagrams that consultants get us to draw, there is usually a second section just outside the stuff you can control - it's the stuff you can influence. That's that actual useful part of those diagrams. In reality, most of the things you put in your control section should really be in your influence section.

You can make changes in things you influence but not by just making a decision and announcing it like you can in your sphere of (illusionary) control. Instead you need to influence things. You may have more or less influence depending on the circumstances. The CEO isn't really in control but has a lot more influence that the intern for example.

For things that can be controlled but contain multiple people, you need to work with those people to come up with a change that everyone (or at least enough people to get it going) supports. That may not be the change you wanted. You may need to put aside your own desires, wholly or partially, and let the group decide. Generally, by doing this, by holding our own ideas and desires lightly and being open to new suggestions, we will get to somewhere that is even better than you could have gotten to on your own. The group will come up with a more optimal solution that one person alone can do. I've talked about this before.

For things that are complex, you influence them by running experiments - try something, see what happens. If it goes in the direction you wanted, do more of that thing. If it goes somewhere undesirable, do less of that thing. You want to influence the inputs and outputs of the system to create the conditions under which the system behaves the way you want. It sounds tricky and it is.

Often the thing you will be trying to control is a combination of both - complex and with multiple people in the system. In that case you need to do both - decide as a group what the desired behaviour of the system should be, then devise experiments and actions to get you there.

Strategies based on control fail most of the time because our control isn't real. It's an illusion of control given to us by culture, hierarchy, or just plain hubris. Trying to push change that way without real control is an exercise in frustration and many of us feel that frustration every day. In order to make change we must let go of the illusion of control and use our influence instead.