|
“I thought we’d agreed this 6 months ago – why hasn’t it happened?” A quote from a – very frustrated – senior manager in one of my client organisations in a conversation earlier this week. The realisation that an apparently agreed change hadn’t been implemented was causing considerable consternation – particularly as the people in the department concerned were very committed and hard working. Here’s a stunning statistic from one research study: the most mentioned problem with change projects (76% of respondents) was that they had ‘taken longer than anticipated’. So why do so many of us underestimate how long change will take? Despite planning ‘best practice’ approaches, and investing time and energy in communicating through the organisation, we continually find that the processes of change take far longer than the timetable we’d confidently predicted to the Board! To answer this, we need to understand the way each of us deals with change. Fortunately, people are great at adapting (otherwise we’d never survive!) – but that doesn’t mean to say that we don’t need to go through quite a process – as individuals – before we decide how to respond. And this process can be quite an emotional journey. First, there can be shock, anger and denial – the framework of meaning that we had created for ourselves about our work and how we fitted into it has been threatened by something that is out of our control. We resent being thrust into a less certain environment, and perhaps fight back or even try to sabotage what is being imposed on us. We struggle to understand, to make sense of our changing environment – and look for signals as to how others are behaving to help us assess what’s really happening. But we then need to come to terms with a changed reality. We have to come to accept that things will be different – whilst still perhaps grieving the loss of what had created meaning for us. We can become resentful, sceptical – “it can never be as good as what we had before”, “they” don’t know what they’re doing”. But we realise we must decide what to do next – to adjust, or to withdraw. If we decide to adjust, then we want to re-engage, and to learn how we can contribute to making this new situation a success. And ironically we can then become frustrated by how slow the organisation is in completing this change successfully - we want to make great things happen, but can’t understand why others are still resisting! Understanding this process is key to appreciating how change actually happens in organisations. Every person goes through some sort of process like this – trying to come to terms with the loss of a situation they thought they’d understood, trying to make sense of a new emerging reality, and deciding how to respond to this. Multiply this by the number of people in the organisation, each dealing with this at different times and paces, and no wonder organisational change takes so long! And there’s another important dimension to this. As well as going through their own individual process of dealing with a change initiative, middle managers have to work out what the change means in practice for their departments. Their response, what views they express, how they behave, are all signals to the people in their teams that influence how they in turn will react. The manager has to make sense of the change according to her or his own interpretation of the situation, and work out how to apply this in the local context of their part of the organisation. Such interpretations are vital to what actually happens, and often to making the intended changes work practically. This can be quite different from what was envisaged originally – but listening and learning about these adaptations is invaluable in making change truly effective in an organisation. In the drive to make change happen, understanding the importance of these two processes – how each person comes to terms with a changed situation, and how managers endeavour to make sense of changes for their own local contexts – will help us all not only to appreciate the time that organisational change really takes, but also in making such change more effective. |
