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Website: http://www.syre.com
Blog : http://johngaynardcreativity.blogspot.com
Twitter account: http://twitter.com/jfitzgaynard
I will begin with a piece of personal history. I used to work at the World
Bank, in the European Office Headquarters in Paris. In 1988 I had been at the Bank
for four years and I worked in the recruitment department. A new President was
appointed. He was a former U.S. Congressman and his job was to make the Bank
more effective and more efficient. After his nomination, he immediately started
talking about the major change effort he would launch to make the Bank more
responsive to its clients. My manager at that time was a person who was nearing
retirement. He was one of the best managers I ever had. One morning he came to me
and he said, “John, recruitment has been frozen. With all this talk of change, there
will be absolutely nothing to do for the next 10 to 12 months, so decide which of your
skills you want to upgrade. Then every morning, come into the office and work on
that skill. In every other department, work will also come to a standstill. People will
be worried; they will be talking in the corridors all day long. Hard information will
be impossible to come by, so rumours will occupy the minds of most people. If you
don’t want to be caught up in the stress and if you don’t want to waste the next year of
your life, fix yourself a personal objective and work on it.”
At first, I didn’t believe him. How could the whole World Bank, with more
than 10.000 staff members, come to a halt? But, he was right. With regard to
organizational effectiveness or respecting its mandate in the developing world it did
come to a halt. None of the economists that year travelled to evaluate new loan
projects in the developing world. They stayed in Washington or Europe because they
were frightened that if they left the office even for one day they would lose their job.
That is when I first learned that during major changes, if the change is not
communicated effectively from a human point of view performance levels can drop to
only 15% of organizational potential. The World Bank is in the Public Sector. It
prides itself on being more effective than other United Nations Organizations. The
United Nations Organizations are continually implementing change initiatives which
never seem to succeed. These organisations can survive because, ultimately, they are
financed by their member countries who keep them alive for political reasons. But
companies in the private sector who manage change as badly as international
organizations usually go bankrupt very quickly.
Survivor Guilt
I was promoted during that 1988 change and that promotion taught me about
survivor guilt. A promotion did not give me as much pleasure as I had expected. In
fact it pained me because at the same time some of my best colleagues had lost their
jobs in very emotional circumstances. Survivor guilt also reduces personal and
organizational effectiveness, but it is rarely taken into account in change programmes.
John Gaynard, Senior Partner, Syre Consulting, http://www.syre.com
Page 2
At that time, for personal reasons, I could not leave the World Bank. But I
realised much later that the 1988 change was the event that triggered my decision not
to stay with the organization for the rest of my career. When I finally did leave, 10
years later, after another two badly-managed changes and another two promotions
which came at very high human cost, I said to myself that there must be some better
way to manage change. I set out to find it and that is how I came across the work of
William Bridges.
One of my first activities after leaving the World Bank was go to Canada and
study the work of William Bridges with an associate of his, Chris Edgelow. I had
come across Bridges’ name in a Fortune Magazine article about best change
management consultants in the United States. In a few minutes, I will be going into
more detail about the methods developed by Bridges after he himself had gone
through a difficult change. His ideas initially came from reading the French 19th
century anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. Van Gennep had found that in traditional
societies, every time there was an important change the person involved in the change
had to go through a rite of passage. This rite of passage was nearly always made up
of three stages:
The first major assignment I did in France was with an American computer
company where communication had totally broken down between the majority of the
staff, the unions and the Human Resources department. In fact, because of the level
of stress most of the Human Resource professionals were on sick leave for a large part
of the time I worked with the company. The change had begun badly, and then got
worse, because of bad communication. I would like to share with you the principles I
have learned about communicating change, both from my professional experience and
from working with Bill Bridges and Chris Edgelow (a Canadian consultant).
1. The change should never be communicated unless it has been well thought out.
The strategic analysis must have been done and the strategic choice must have
been made. The date for the change to begin must be fixed in advance and must
never be delayed. It is usually on the day the change is announced that staff
recognise the implications for themselves and their own transitions.
2. So that staff can recognise the implications for themselves the change should be
communicated only when the Four P’s are in place. The Four P’s are : Purpose,
Picture, Path and Part.
2.1. The Purpose should describe why this change is the right one. WHY does
the company need to change? Why does it need to change now? What would
happen to the company if this change were not undertaken? The mistake that
is often made during times of change is to focus on the solutions (this is what
is going to happen), but before staff accept what is going to happen they need
to agree with the WHY of the change.
As I learned after I left the World Bank, Bill Bridges had developed an
effective way to keep the disruptive effects of change to a minimum: the Management
of Organizational Transition.
It takes some time for the practitioner to understand why Bridges' methods
work. Using them with clients and seeing the results at first brought me pleasurable
amazement, but not complete understanding. I began to understand why these
methods were so successful when I began to read Karl E. Weick, who has spent most
of his career trying to understand how people make sense of their world. The
methods work because Bridges is addressing not only the educated minds of the
participants, but also the human need to make sense out of what is going on, and that
is a need that goes back to the foundations of our world. If man did not have the
need to make sense out of his surroundings, and to improve them, would civilization
exist as it does today? In many change situations, people are not given the right
information or enough time to understand what is happening. If they are not allowed
to understand they cannot perform one of the basic human functions.
The purpose of this lecture is to focus on how managers and team leaders at all
levels of the company can minimize the effects of non-stop change on your
organization and its people. This is done through the effective management of
individual and group transitions by encouraging individual sensemaking. This
The first question you need to ask about managing change is : "What do I really need
to manage? Do I need to manage a change or do I need to manage a transition?" If a
change was announced a few months ago and it is not going well, you are most
probably in a situation where you need to manage the transitions which have been
triggered by the change.
♦ Change begins with an outcome. It is the external situation that changes: the new
manager, for example, or the new team, or the new ERP system.
♦ Transition is the internal, psychological process people go through to come to
terms with the new situation.
♦ Change is external, transition is internal.
♦ Change starts with a beginning, transition starts with an ending.
♦ Managing change is to manage a process in time, with a date for the change to
begin and an end date, when the new situation should be in place.
♦ Managing transition is to accompany the psychological process that most people
have to go through when they are confronted by change. This process is made up
of three stages :
♦ Managing Endings
♦ Managing the Neutral Zone
♦ Managing the New Beginnings
♦ To manage endings successfully is to communicate exactly what existing
behaviours, attitudes and competencies must stop and what must start.
♦ To manage the neutral zone successfully is to put in place the right training
programmes to bring the new competencies, behaviours and attitudes into the
organisation
♦ If Endings and the Neutral Zone are managed successfully, the New Beginnings
come naturally. But during the New Beginnings the arguments for the change
need to be reinforced and all positive news about the changes, whether quick wins
or long-term gains must continue to be communicated systematically.
♦ Making change happen successfully requires an acknowledgement of the losses
that can come with endings.
One of the impacts of that announced, but not formally announced, change at
the World Bank was ten months of rumour and worry while every job was analysed
by the Human Resources Department. Eventually either the job was going to be
abolished or it would be redesigned and a new list of competencies would be
established. I can remember one Human Resources Manager from Central America
who was hired just before the Bank announced the freeze on recruitment. He left his
Finally, the announcement came. Every World Bank Staff member was fired,
all ten thousand of them. Either they could decide to take voluntary redundancy or
they would have a period of three days to write a new CV and reapply for their own
job or for somebody else’s job. Can you imagine the sort of friendly atmosphere that
created? I can remember people calling each other “Judas!” in the corridors. Other
staff members, especially among the ones who had been there for many years became
severely depressed. It took the people who were kept on many months before they
became fully effective again.
My job in the recruitment department was abolished during that 1988 change.
But because of the advice I got from my manager, and from the personal work I did
during that year, eight hours a day, instead of listening to all the gossip, I discovered
that I had the right competencies to apply for many of the new jobs. So, as I
mentioned previously, I came out of that change with a promotion, as a manager
responsible for implementing a part of the World Bank’s new voice and data
telecommunications network.
That is when I learned that during times of change, to maintain our own
personal effectiveness, we as individuals are responsible for looking after our own
DATA. This is another Bill Bridges concept and Human Resource professionals can
use this concept in two ways: for themselves and when they need to coach people
during times of great change.
What were the first stages of that Change Management programme I learned?
I was told that all good change management starts with Strategic Analysis? Why does
the company want to change? Is it because the competition has become too
Once the Strategic Analysis has been done, a strategic choice has to be made.
Either the company moves into new markets or new products or puts in place the right
competencies to better sell and support its products or its services in its present
markets.
Implementation can then begin, using the model developed by Kurt Lewin.
The first part of the change implementation, according to Lewin, was to unfreeze the
minds of the people who are going to be affected by the change. It was nearly always
taken for granted that people would be resistant to the change and I have heard
companies even describe their own staff during times of change as “Neanderthals” or
“Dinosaurs”. Once these pre-historic creatures are satisfactorily warmed up, then the
change can begin. When, a year or two later, the results expected from the change
have been achieved, ideally you then refreeze people at the point where they have
learned the right competencies and have adopted the right behaviours for the effective
management of the new organisational structure.
I have since learned that people do not resist change. They know that change
is inevitable. But what they do resist are the personal transitions which they know
will be triggered by the change.
The problem with the refreezing part is that the managers usually get it wrong.
Refreezing is difficult. I find that many good staff members in companies which are
affected by change do not know what competencies they have to phase out, because
they are not told which competencies were perfectly satisfactory for the old job but
which are no longer satisfactory for the new job. They are rarely told what
competencies they need to acquire or on what competencies they are going to be
evaluated in the new organisational structure. This leaves them in a no-man’s-land.
When the new competencies are specified to staff the most effective training
programme must be put in place to help them acquire the necessary skills. If adequate
training is not given, staff who were initially enthusiastic about the change can
become very disillusioned and even bitter if they see that their goodwill has not been
effectively recognised and rewarded by the company.
One of the scientists said to me, “Even in the domain that I know, in which I
am considered a world specialist, I have had to work 80 hours a week to keep up to
date over the past 20 years. I had to spend 20 hours on basic administrative tasks, 20
hours on research projects inside the company, 20 hours a week reading journals to
The scientist left the company. His career anchor was the knowledge he had
built up over 20 years so he joined another company that could use that knowledge.
The research centre was finally closed down in France and all its work was moved to
England. The lesson from this is that you have to be realistic about what you expect
from a change programme.
Other staff may put in place the right competencies immediately, but because
nobody evaluates or measures those competencies in relation to the change objectives
those staff members do not realise they are getting it right. So, in the absence of good
feedback and evaluation, they just keep on changing, hoping that one day somebody
will tell them to refreeze.
The sad aspect of this is that when a company which has been producing a
successful product or service loses its way it finds it very hard to get back on track.
Thereafter many excuses, such as the increasing speed of change or the toughness of
the markets, are presented to explain away bad change management or just plain
arrogance.
One of the first activities I undertake when I start work with such a company is
to get the staff, in a workshop, to list all the changes they are supposed to have
implemented over the past three years. Sometimes the staff list as many as 40
changes. When I later show this list of changes to the senior management they say
“This is crazy.” They point to 20 of the changes and they say, “These changes are
over, finished. Why are people still doing this?” And I reply, “Because nobody ever
told them that the change was over. And by the way, how are you doing with the
other 20 changes which you consider are not yet over but in my opinion are totally
bogged down?”
I then work with the company to communicate which changes are finished
(that is to say there is a successful new beginning or the change has been written off
as a failure), which changes are still in the neutral zone and which are still in the stage
where people are having to manage endings. Once this work has been completed, the
staff of the company can get out of their minds all the changes they felt guilty about
not managing. This gives them the time to concentrate on the priority changes, to
handle their transitions and to become more effective.
Managing the Organization - Companies are often at their most successful just
before major problems appear (recent examples are Marks & Spencer in the U.K. or
Xerox or Cisco in the U.S.) The opinion of many staff members is "We are
successful so why should we change?" To unfreeze this "steady state" and the
mindsets it has encouraged, the effective change manager must have the analytical
skills to see clearly that success will be short-lived. He or she must understand why,
how and when the company has drifted away from a successful pattern and the
direction it needs to take to get back on track. The leader must then be able to
demonstrate considerable linguistic and presentation skills (metaphor, use of stories
and examples) to communicate the long-term implications if action is not taken to
address the underlying problems. The leader must explain why strategic thrust
change must now replace the strategic drift that has emerged. The leader must create
a clear and compelling direction for the company's managers and employees, without
going into all the details, many of which must be worked out by operational managers
( Good examples of this are Jeffrey Immelt at General Electric, Larry Bossidy at
Allied Signal.)
Managing Individual Dynamics - Once the individual employee has understood that
change is necessary for the organization, the immediate reaction will be "OK, I now
understand what the company needs to do to be successful long-term, but what about
me as a person in the short-term?" If the individual sees the change as positive, he or
she will react positively. If the change is seen as negative for him or her, the reaction
will, understandably, be negative.
Managing the Organization - Both the leaders of the organization and the managers
must resist the temptation to fix the symptoms instead of the cause. They must
continually use language skilfully to reinterpret and relabel what is going on so that
team members can understand the perils of the old way of doing things and the
benefits that will come from the new way. Therefore managers must understand
Managing Individual Dynamics - One day the team-member will feel elated,
because he or she thinks that they are finally beginning to see the new way of doing
things. The next day, the same employee may be once again grappling with
disenchantment. The employees will be tempted to say that the new way is not
working. They will want to go back to the old ways of doing things. The manager
must understand that the priority is now to take care of both him or herself and the
team members through the wilderness. He or she needs to understand how team
members respond best to internal and external motivation. The manager needs to
continue to explain, hour after hour, day after day, why the old way of doing things
had to be dropped and what successes can be expected when the new way of doing
things is finally in place. Creativity sessions should be put in place so that team
members can participate in the co-creation of the new way.
Managing the Organization - Important learning must be kept from previous phase
(knowledge management of what worked and what did not work). New processes and
routines are now proving their effectiveness. Individual staff members have stopped
talking about the past and are enthusiastic about the new ways of doing things. The
die-hard resisters will be gone, the people who are in love with continual change will
complain because they are finding things have slowed down too much for their liking.
Managers must be ready for the next surprise from the market or the competitive
landscape. Action-learning and education should continue to be encouraged, because
history will repeat itself. But now, the organization has been through one successful
change, with all the transitions that entailed, and it will be ready for the next change--
as long as the lessons are not allowed to be forgotten.
Managing Individual Dynamics - The individual will now regret all that time that
was wasted during the neutral zone phase. Why didn't he or she accept all those
courses that were offered? Now the old enthusiasm is back, the energy has returned,
but events seem to be unfolding too quickly, there is no time for training, no time to
think about the patterns and the processes behind what must be going on. During the
successful change and transition, the individual has developed inner resources that
will stand him or her in good stead for the next change. However, both manager and
team member will need to continue to talk, to use the analytic and linguistic skills
which will allow them to understand what is going on before history again repeats
itself.
What This Means For Individuals - Working for a successful organization means
continually saying goodbye to old competencies and old ways that are no
longer needed for the job (managing endings), updating core skills for the job
(managing the neutral zone), and consolidating new skills and competencies
(managing new beginnings). Organizational success depends on individual
success. Individual team members need to understand the importance of this
process, which explains why change is necessary and transition takes time and
which will give the justification needed in the competition for resources
needed in the personal updating process.
References