This is an excellent book that has the feel of a classic, partly because most of the examples about transitions had to do with stories about manufacturing plants closing or being downsized. And I think we're past the heyday of all that...
Bridges starts with a great story about being a young professor at a university. They still have early morning classes on Saturdays, and the students hate it, and he as a young professor hates it, and students frequently skip the classes anyway, so the goals of learning and shaping young minds are not being met by these Saturday classes. Plus, they cost more money because of an additional day of keeping the buildings lit and heated, which means the dean would also like to get rid of them.
But when the faculty as a whole sits down to make a decision, all those older professors are less than convinced. This is how they've always done it, this is the world they've known, and if they changed the schedule, one professor remarks, it would mean having to rewrite all his class notes for his T-Th-Sa classes. The measure is promptly voted down. Bridges is stunned, and it kicks off a career in studying change and transition. Those professors, he realizes, weren't just avoiding logic for no reason, they were doing what we all do, which is protect our worlds as we know them. Change may mean good things, but it also means losing other good things. Like a career's worth of carefully crafted lecture notes, for example.
Here are my favorite takeaways from the book:
1. Transition is the experience people go through to adjust to change. If there's a major change, but the people don't transition to adjust to it, then the changes will only be on the surface, if they happen at all. For example, there might be a new org chart, but people will still go to their old bosses for advice and assistance.
2. Transition comes in 3 stages:
First: Letting Go
Second: Neutral zone/murky middle/chaos/the swamp
Third: New Beginning
These stages come one after the other in a healthy process, but they also overlap, so one day you may have someone overwhelmed thinking of all the things they've let go of, but then the next day experimenting with something new that has been freed up by the loosening of rules and regulations in the neutral zone.
3. It's important to mark these stages of transition ceremonially and symbolically. Symbolic language matters: a company needed to close a plant in 8 months, but needed to maintain production until then. When language about the plant changed from "sinking ship" to "last voyage" people were able to stay in the game and also prepare for the ending of production. In fact, production went up in the last push! (Until management tried to sneakily stretch it out - that didn't fly)
4. Build trust by trusting and by being honest and trustworthy. Trust comes slowly.
5. The neutral zone is a time of both danger and possibility. Productivity slows, people don't know what is going to work and what isn't, and there's just a lot of uncertainty. BUT it's also a time when great creativity and innovation are possible - all bets are off. Now is especially a time to reward intelligent failures.
6. If people aren't convinced of a problem they won't be willing to go through stage 1 - letting go of the old way of doing things. Which means the true shift to a new way of doing things won't happen. It's important to:
Sell the problems - put people in direct contact with the people who are having the problem. For example, if the problem is poor customer service, find ways to put unhappy customers in touch with the people who need to improve the service. People need to come face to face with the reality.
Listen carefully for losses and compensate for them - when big changes happen, some people will lose out. Can you find ways to compensate them for what they're losing? With status, education, gratitude?
7. Different people need different things in the neutral zone. Try to be clear about: a purpose (blue/idea) a picture, (yellow/intuitive) a plan,(green/details) and a part for everyone to play (red/relationships).
No comments:
Post a Comment