I don’t remember buying this delightful children’s book. I suspect I picked it up one November whilst I was supposedly buying holiday gifts (one for you, I’d say checking a name off my list, and one for me, adding a second copy to my basket). I am such a sucker for a beautiful picture book with a silly story. Hmm… copywrite 2012. Maybe I picked it up on a store visit, a reindeer run, so to speak…

Anyway, this book is about a boy and his moose. The moose just showed up one day and the boy decided it was his and named it and set about trying to change it. The boy imposes a series of mostly arbitrary rules, some of which the moose happens to follow; others the boy cannot delude himself into believing that the moose is following, no matter how hard he tries. When he discovers that the moose has been adopted by – and named by – another human, the boy gets angry, stomps off, and gets trapped in the woods, just as night falls and “the monsters come out.”

Oh, I should say Spoiler Alert here, I suppose.

The moose arrives just in time and incidentally rescues the boy. Who then comes to the conclusion that the moose may not be his moose. And so he declares a compromise: the moose will follow all of his rules, whenever the moose feels like it.

Which is basically what the moose was doing anyway.

I love this story. The boy is ridiculous. The idea of owning a moose, of all things, is fantastical.¹ The moose is oblivious. The scenery is beautiful. The story makes fun of the way humans are, the silly things we do. We imagine relationships where they don’t exist; our heads are full of silly rules that the other person isn’t aware of and generally doesn’t follow; we get mad when we feel rejected by them because they’re just doing what they do.

This, my friends, is a story about human resources.

Just kidding.

My husband and I have this cat². The cat likes to climb up on the kitchen counter. She doesn’t do this discretely: she will jump up on the counter while we are right there. My husband gets very upset with her.

“Why does she do this?!?” He rails over and over again. “She knows it’s wrong.”

“No,” I reply. “She knows that we don’t like it. She doesn’t know that it’s wrong. She’s a cat. Nothing a cat does is wrong to the cat.”

This is the first rule of change management: those people, them, the ones you need to change their behavior – they’re not refusing to change just to spite you. 90% of the time they don’t even realize that you need them to change. Or you haven’t persuaded them that changing would benefit them. Or you haven’t explained exactly how to change. 90% of the time, you are the boy and they are the moose, blithely going about their business of caring for patients, ringing up customers, driving the bus, writing marketing content, or just trying to do their job, while you make up silly rules in your head about the way things are supposed to be, and expecting that they know your rules and getting angry because they don’t even know those rules exist.

The #1 Rule of Change Management: First, change all the managers.

That means you: change you. Change your behavior. Change your approach. Try something else. Suppress all those inner rules, those things you’ve learned about how managers are supposed to act: having all the answers, knowing everything, telling people what to do, telling them that they’ve done it wrong and need to do differently. Treat the people who work with you like adults with agency.

Try listening.

See, it was a book about change management, after all. Fooled you!

---

1. I went to Newfoundland a few years back – mostly before they had a tourism industry – where they have a lot of moose. I started by traveling to Boston to rent a car because I wanted to avoid NY traffic (stop laughing, my Boston friends), and drove to Nova Scotia where I stayed the night at a B&B before taking the overnight ferry to Newfoundland. At the B&B, some locals were shocked that I was driving up the coast of Newfoundland by myself – I think I was 22 at the time – and mentioned moose. I said I was looking forward to seeing a moose, I had actually never seen one and had always wanted to see one. On the ferry, I tried to sleep but they kept playing these pre-recorded PSAs (what felt like) every 15 minutes, about how it was moose-rutting season, and moose are very large and dangerous and encouraging everyone to stop at the visitor’s center for safety information. Which, bleary eyed the next morning upon our arrival, I did. The kind ladies at the visitors center provided me with maps and information, and made me watch a video about moose, and warned me that moose lurk by the side of the two-lane highway at night, their eyes gleaming like cats eyes, and leap out in front of unsuspecting motorists, totaling your car and killing you – if you’re lucky. They made me promise not to drive after dark, a promise I immediately broke because that road is very lonely and there are not a lot of motels along it, and I kept driving hoping to reach one that didn’t look like it catered to moose hunters on the way home after a week in the back woods. Every time I stopped at one of the diner chain that punctuate that road every few hours (Tim Hortons, perhaps?) for a meal, I asked the server, All this stuff they’re saying about moose, is it true? Because I had expected to see moose everywhere and I hadn’t seen a one yet. The servers assured me that, yes, I had to be careful of moose. The radio station played in frequent rotation a song about a group of Newfie guys who go out hunting moose, unsuccessfully. Drowning their sorrows in Labatts, they start driving home and hit a moose, damaging their car and killing the moose, which they then load up and carry home, telling everyone that they had tracked it through the woods and hunted it to death. (I picked up the album on cassette.) When I stopped at a beach, it was deserted, except for a pair of shoes lined neatly up beside the path from the parking lot; in my head, I saw some poor swimmer kidnapped by moose. When I bought my ticket for the boat ride through the fjord – beautiful! – the ranger warned me about moose. When I got to L’Anse aux Meadows – totally worth the drive – I talked with a really sweet ranger for a really long time and he assured me that I needed to be careful of moose. He also recommended his cousin’s B&B, where I stayed the night and she regaled me with historic tales of Newfoundland before the US Air Force established a base there and built what became the two-lane highway I had been driving up the coast – before that, the residents had to take boats to get to other towns. And one year, the water between Newfoundland and Labrador froze over and polar bears walked across and broke into houses to eat people. And she had another writer, an American who had stayed with her a year ago and wrote a book about Newfoundland. (Anne Proux’s The Shipping News.) Oh and had anyone warned me about the moose? Moose haunted my dreams. I exhausted myself, scouring the sides of the road at all hours of the day, keeping a watchful eye out for moose lurking to leap in front of my rental car. I was in Newfoundland for two weeks and never saw a single moose. When I returned to the mainland and turned south, I somehow ended up behind a little brown pinto. With the most enormous dead moose strapped to the top, its head flopping limply off the back of the car, filling the view through my windshield. I turned off the road and took alternate routes, just trying to get away from that car. But every time, when my detour rejoined the main road, there was that darn pinto in front of me again. And that dead moose, mocking me, all the way down through Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Maine. Loved Newfoundland. Totally recommend visiting. The people are awesome. Scenery majestic. Light glorious. And you should totally believe them, if you are visiting in September when the blackfly are gone, that you need to be careful of moose. They are very large and, in September, the males get aggressive. But I have yet to see a live moose IRL, not in a zoo, not in the wild. I want to see a moose. I promise not to name it or make rules for it. I just want to see one. ↩︎
2. She’s my husband’s cat. He adopted her while I was on vacation and, when I came home, the cat decided I was an intruder. It’s been, oh, maybe 10 years, and I am still the interloper who gets between her and her guy. Except when he goes out of town and I’m the only human home. Then she deigns to become my cat until he returns home. Don’t tell me it’s because I’m feeding her while he’s out of town: I feed her most of the time whether he’s home or not and I’m the one who cleans her litter box. Ask me how I end up doing all this when she refuses to behave like my cat, bites me whenever she feels like it, and – worst of all – throws my books on the floor. Go ahead. Make my day. ↩︎