When Change Is Hard: I

When change is hard, we sometimes blame "resistors" — people who refuse to change. We say that they don't "get it" or that they're defending their current advantageous positions, or that they're fearful, or that a few troublemakers misled them. If we don't blame the resistors, we blame the planners of the change. They failed to account for various difficulties, or their plan was defective, or they had a good plan, but they failed to execute it.

Sometimes we blame both the planners and the resistors.

Certainly there are defective plans for change. Certainly there are people who are reluctant to change. But both of these analyses overlook three central features of change:

• People have human needs and human desires, and we must deal with people as people.
• Systems are complex. Our understanding of how they work and how their parts interrelate is probably imperfect.
• Changing systems sometimes requires following indirect paths. The shortest path isn't always effective.

Here are two examples of the application of these principles.

We might be unaware of external constraints

Difficulties can sometimes arise from external factors not directly related to the change itself. These factors can seem remote at first, until we actually experience them.

For instance, trying to change a process the mastery of which is viewed as essential to high performance can create motivational problems, because people see their expertise as being questioned.

The plan to change the process is effective from a process design point of view. And the people who were affected weren't resisting change — they're just applying their own understanding of what the organization values. Unless we deal with external constraints like these, change is hard.

The desire for change has emotional foundations

When we plan change, People have human needs and
human desires, and we must
deal with people as peoplewe tend to make plans that follow direct paths in process transformation space. But the space in which change actually takes place includes the feelings, knowledge, and attitudes of the people who must adapt. Direct orders to "adapt or else" do not work well at all.

People need more than orders to adapt. This is especially true of those whose work depends on knowledge, skill, and relationships. Understanding why we're making a particular change does help, but it isn't enough either. Desire to change — positive desire to adapt — comes about only when people identify with their work and with the organization.

A plan to communicate to people what the new regime will be, without seeking their support, isn't defective in itself. As a communication plan, it might be perfectly valid. And the people who choose not to support the changes aren't actually resisting it — they simply don't identify with it. When active support for change is missing, change is hard.

We'll continue next time with a focus on the unexpected events associated with organizational change.   Next issue in this series   Top    Next Issue

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On Anticipating Consequences

Much of what goes wrong when we change systems to improve them falls into a category we call unanticipated consequences. Even when we lack models that can project these results accurately, morphological analysis can help us avoid much misery.

See also Organizational Change and Organizational Change for more related articles.

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