Riding the Wave of Change

18 May 2026 · 1 min

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1:11

In this monologue, the speaker (addressing a colleague named James) frames change management as a wave to be surfed rather than fought, arguing that embracing change is essential for improvement. He outlines a five‑stage team development model—forming, storming, norming, performing, and a fifth stage he calls “transform”—and stresses that a strong toolset and cohesive team enable rapid progress. Using examples from the Department of Defense, he describes intensive Kaizen events where a deep‑dive analysis conducted within days reduces a hundred symptom‑driven projects to three strategic initiatives, illustrating how focused, fast‑paced problem‑solving can yield high‑impact results.

Chapters

And when you think about change and it makes no sense to not change and a lot of sense to make change, to make things better, you ride the wave of change rather than fight it. And so that's my whole job, James, and I know it's been your job over the years, is let's figure out ways to use the power of change. I think of it like a wave. Let's learn how to surf the wave, not try to fight our way through it. Which is exhausting. And if you have a good toolset to do that, and you got a team that comes together. And you mentioned, you know, the form, storm, norm, perform. I had a 5th, which I call transform. Because if we form a team, and I have people on Mondays of Kaizen events going, I don't know how we're going to make changes by Friday. I mean, this is— I'm talking about rocket scientists in the military, in the Department of Defense, and people, very smart people telling me, Murphy, you're out of your mind. And then by Wednesday, we've done the deep dive analysis. And instead of trying to solve 100 different symptoms with 100 different projects, we've identified a way to solve 100 different symptoms with 3 projects.