What is Change? How to Cope With Change Management

What is change? How do we cope with it and the management of change? Is it a fact of life to be welcomed - or something that occurs from time to time and disturbs our equanimity and is to be resisted?

Let's just try and get a quick handle of the "change" aspect of this. When we regard life as fixed and static - we tend to think of it in terms of MY life, MY job, MY business, and all nicely packaged up with clear boundaries defining my own personal inner "map of reality" i.e. the process of cognition by which we record, categorise and interpret our life experience.

In this perspective things are seen as separate and in stasis, time proceeds in a linear manner from past to future, and the human experience from this perspective is one of duality and separation.

In other words, there is "me here" and the world "out there". So the question "what is change?" is answered and illustrated by events like recessions - things that I don't like and that happen to me.

Morpheus and Neo - hardwired settings

In case you're beginning to think that this is starting to sound like a conversation between Morpheus and Neo in "The Matrix" - it does matter because this is how we as human beings are hardwired to behave.

This is the "default setting" - and much of what we do is motivated by this inbuilt need to keep things as they are - to preserve the boundaries around "my life" - to preserve my survival and my safety and my comfort.

This also matters because it goes straight to the root of all resistance to or acceptance of change - WIFM - "what's in it for me?".

Change as something to be avoided is also the default setting for most businesses

In other words - establish a business model that works and perpetuate it for as long as possible - with the same organisational motivations of survival, safety and comfort.

But the trouble with this business philosophy is that in the current climate, organisational processes, behaviours and cultures evolved for a fixed and static environment have a very limited effectiveness in the fluid reality that we are currently experiencing.

So, for business leaders and managers, what is the appropriate response to change?

Historically in times of recession it has been "slash and burn" on costs and to focus on and streamline business processes to squeeze out ever greater efficiencies.

Last time round the focus was all about achieving those efficiencies by creating and putting in place processes that would deliver those efficiencies regardless of the human cost.

Do you recall the period after the last recession when Business Process Re-engineering was very popular? And the focus was always on the process and not the people - and getting "buy-in" was once described by a change agent friend of mine as "like trying to get a bunch of turkeys voting in favour of Christmas"!

But when you think about it, process is just people "doing stuff". So it really all comes down to people as well as process - and that means processes that work for people.

So the question of: "what is change" evolves into: "what is change management and how can we succeed with it?".

And to successfully cope with change management we need the leadership insights and management processes to avoid the catastrophic failure rate of ALL business change initiatives.