Conservatism is the worship of dead revolutions.
CLINTON ROSSITER, AMERICAN HISTORIAN
A corollary to this idea is that the past, which people are likely to idealize during an ending, was itself a time—and even the product—of change. When people start talking about “the early days,” it’s easy to imagine that they are describing a peaceful time of stability. But that is selective memory. There were changes then too. Whenever something that is viewed as a break with the past turns out successfully, people forget the loss they felt when the change happened and begin to celebrate it as a “tradition.” But the status quo is just an innovation brought about by a transition that people have forgotten.
In taking possession of a state, the conqueror should well reflect as to the harsh measures that may be necessary, and then execute them at a single blow.. . . Cruelties should be committed all at once.
NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI, ITALIAN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHER
Yesterday’s ending launched today’s success, and today will have to end if tomorrow’s changes are to take place. Endings are not comfortable for any of us. But they are also neither unprecedented breaks with the past nor attempts by those in power to make people’s lives miserable.
A FINAL THOUGHT
With all of the foregoing emphasis on foreseeing and softening the painful effects of loss on employees, the reader might assume that we are urging you to slowly take things away a piece at a time. That would be a misreading of our advice, for the last thing an organization needs is too small an ending or an incomplete ending that requires a whole new round of losses to finish the job before the wounds from the old ones have healed. Whatever must end must end. Don’t drag it out. Plan it carefully, and once it is done, allow time for healing. But the action itself should be sufficiently large to get the job done.
It doesn’t work to leap a 20-foot chasm in two 10-foot jumps.
AMERICAN PROVERB
CONCLUSION
The single biggest reason organizational changes fail is because no one has thought about endings or planned to manage their impact on people. Naturally concerned about the future, planners and implementers all too often forget that people have to let go of the present first. They forget that while the first task of change management is to understand the desired outcome and how to get there, the first task of transition management is to convince people to leave home. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief if you remember that.
FINAL QUESTIONS
What actions can you take to help people deal more successfully with the endings that are taking place in your organization? What can you do today to get started on this aspect of transition management? (Write yourself a memo in the space below.)
1. The stages of the grieving process were first described by Elisabeth Kübler Ross, M.D., in her classic book On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969).
2. “In Leading Organization Transition, Albertsons Finds Preparedness and Retention.” 2009. Linkage. Retrieved from http://www.linkageinc.com/info/case-study-albertsons.cfm.
CHAPTER
4
It’s not so much that we’re afraid of change or so in love with the old ways, but it’s that place in between that we fear. . . . It’s like being between trapezes. It’s Linus when his blanket is in the dryer. There’s nothing to hold on to.
—MARILYN FERGUSON, AMERICAN FUTURIST
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.
—ANDRÉ GIDE, FRENCH NOVELIST
Leading People through the Neutral Zone
Just when you decide that the hardest part of managing transition is getting people to let go of the old ways, you enter a state of affairs in which neither the old ways nor the new ways work satisfactorily. People are caught between the demands of conflicting systems and end up immobilized, like Hamlet, trying to decide whether “to be or not to be.” Or all systems break down, and everyone enters what a client called a time of “radio silence.”
If this phase lasted only a short time, you could just wait for it to pass. But when the change is deep and far-reaching, this time between the old identity and the new can stretch out for months, even years. And as Marilyn Ferguson so aptly put it, during this period after you’ve let go of the old trapeze, you feel as though you have nothing to hold on to while waiting for a new one to appear.
A VERY DIFFICULT TIME . . .
To make matters worse, your boss is probably getting impatient. “How long is it going to take you to implement those changes?” she asks, and you can tell from the tone in her voice that she thinks it has already taken too long. You wish you could say something positive, but you realize you have to be careful about making promises. Frustration and tension are increasing, everyone seems to be moving at half speed, and you hear that some of the best people in the group have sent out their résumés.
Welcome to the middle phase of the transition process. This is a time most languages don’t even have a name for. I call it the neutral zone because it is a nowhere between two somewheres, and because while you are in it, forward motion seems to stop while you hang suspended between what was and will be.1 Neutral zones occur not only in organizations but also in individual lives and in the history of whole societies.
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
ANTONIO GRAMSCI, ITALIAN POLITICAL ACTIVIST
What the neutral zone is and why it exists can be seen in figure 4.1. It is a time when all the old clarities break down and everything is in flux. Things are up in the air. Nothing is a given anymore, and anything could happen. No one knows the answers: one person says one thing and someone else says something completely different.
The dangers presented by the neutral zone take several forms:
1.People’s anxiety rises and their motivation falls. They feel disoriented and self-doubting. They are resentful and self-protective. Energy is drained away from work into coping tactics. In one recent merger, managers in several key departments of the smaller company estimated that people’s effectiveness had fallen 50 percent.
2.People in the neutral zone miss more work than at other times. At best, productivity suffers, and at worst, there is a sharp rise in medical and disability claims. Absenteeism tripled at one bank that was cutting back its workforce. Our firm had a terrible time scheduling transition management training there because some of the key managers were on medical leave.
3.Old weaknesses, previously patched over or compensated for, reemerge in full flower. If customer service has always been weak, it gets even worse in the neutral zone. The old resentments over the generous executive severance packages boils over, just when everyone’s trust in the organization’s leaders has been slipping anyway. And that problem with the communications or public relations that you thought was getting better suddenly gets very serious.
Figure 4.1 Transition: A square morphs into a circle.
Illness strikes men when they are exposed to change.
HERODOTUS, GREEK HISTORIAN
1.In the neutral zone, people are overloaded, they frequently get mixed signals, and systems are in flux and more unreliable. It is only natural that priorities get confused, information is miscommunicated, and important tasks go undone. It is also natural that with so much uncertainty and frustration, people lose confidence in the organization’s future and turnover begins to rise.
2.Given the ambiguities of the neutral zone, it is easy for people to become polarized: some want to rush forward and others want to go back to the old ways. Under the pressure of that polarization, consensus easily breaks down and the level of discord rises. Teamwork is undermined, as is loyalty to the organization itself. Managed properly, this is only a temporary situation. But left unmanaged, polarization can lead to terminal chaos. For this reason, some organizations never emerge from the neutral zone.
3.Finally, as Hero
dotus, the historian of a warlike age, would have pointed out, organizations are vulnerable to attack from outside. Disorganized and tired, people respond slowly and randomly to competitive threats. If they are resentful and looking for ways to pay the organization back, they may even undermine the organization’s ability to respond to the outside attacks.
There is no squabbling so violent as that between people who accepted an idea yesterday and those who will accept the same idea tomorrow.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY, AMERICAN WRITER
It is for these reasons that managing the neutral zone is so essential during a period of enormous change. Neutral zone management isn’t just something that would be nice if you had more time. It’s the only way to ensure that the organization comes through the change intact and that the necessary changes actually work the way that they are supposed to. The argument that there isn’t time for such efforts is based on a serious misunderstanding of the situation: neutral zone management actually saves time because you don’t have to launch the change a second time . . . after the first time didn’t work. And it’s neutral zone management that prevents the organization from coming apart as it crosses the gap between the old way and the new.
. . . BUT ALSO A CREATIVE TIME
When everything is going smoothly, it’s often hard to change things. “If it ain’t broke,” they say, “it don’t need fixing.” People who are sure they have the answers stop asking questions. And people who stop asking questions never challenge the status quo. Without such challenges, an organization can drift slowly into deep trouble before it gets a clear signal that something is wrong.
The “silly question” is the first intimation of some totally new development.
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, BRITISH PHILOSOPHER
People from troubled organizations or outsiders who do not know much about the subject are often the ones who come up with the breakthrough answers. Such was the case with Henry Bessemer, the British inventor who perfected the process of making steel by decarbonizing iron with heated air. He knew very little about steelmaking, so (in his words) “I had an immense advantage over many others dealing with the problem. I had no fixed ideas derived from long-established practice to bias my mind and did not suffer from the general belief that whatever is, is right.”2
Lacking clear systems and signals, the neutral zone is a chaotic time, but this lack is also the reason the neutral zone is more hospitable to new ideas than settled times. Because the neutral zone automatically puts people into Bessemer’s situation, it is a time that is ripe with creative opportunity.
Chaos often breeds life, while order breeds habit.
HENRY ADAMS, AMERICAN HISTORIAN
The task before you is therefore twofold: first, to get your people through this phase of transition in one piece; and second, to capitalize on all the confusion by encouraging them to be innovative. The road through the neutral zone is indeed rough going, but it is passable if you’re prepared for it. Here’s what to do to help people make the journey.
“NORMALIZE” THE NEUTRAL ZONE
One of the most difficult aspects of the neutral zone is that most people don’t understand it. They expect to be able to move straight from the old to the new. But this isn’t a trip from one side of the street to the other. It’s a journey from one identity to another, and that kind of journey takes time.
So when a good idea comes, part of my job is to move it around, just see what different people think, get people talking about it, argue with people about it . . . and just explore things.
STEVE JOBS, COFOUNDER OF APPLE
The neutral zone is like the wilderness through which Moses led his people. That took forty years, you remember—not because they were lost but because the generation that had known Egypt had to die off before the Israelites could enter the Promised Land. Taken literally, that’s a pretty discouraging idea: that things won’t really change until a whole generation of workers dies. But on a less literal level, the message of Moses’ long journey through the wilderness is both less daunting and more applicable to your situation: the outlook, attitudes, values, self-images, and ways of thinking that were functional in the past have to “die” before people can be ready for life in the present. Moses took care of transition’s ending phase when he led his people out of Egypt, but it was the forty years in the neutral zone wilderness that got Egypt out of his people. It won’t take you forty years, but you aren’t going to be able to do it in a few weeks either.
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs one step at a time.
MARK TWAIN, AMERICAN WRITER
The neutral zone is not the wasted time of meaningless waiting and confusion that it sometimes seems to be. It is a time when reorientation and redefinition must take place, and people need to understand that. It is the winter during which the spring’s new growth is taking shape under the earth.
People need to recognize that it is natural to feel somewhat nervous and confused at such a time. As the old patterns disappear from people’s minds and the new ones begin to replace them, people can be full of self-doubts and misgivings about themselves and their leaders. As their ambivalence increases, so does their longing for answers. That is why people in the neutral zone are so tempted to follow anyone who might seem to know where he or she is going—including, unfortunately, troublemakers and people who are heading toward the exits. No wonder the neutral zone is a time when turnover increases.
Confusion is a word we have invented for an order that is not yet understood.
HENRY MILLER, AMERICAN NOVELIST
REDEFINE THE NEUTRAL ZONE
Sometimes it’s valuable to change the metaphor that people use to describe this uncomfortable time. In a manufacturing plant that was being closed, people were talking about the interim between the announcement and the closure as a time when “the ship was sinking.” Needless to say, that metaphor encouraged them to get off the vessel as fast as they could, and the company—which was counting on the output of the plant until it actually closed—found itself facing the possibility that production at the facility would collapse before the company was ready for it to stop.
They needed a new metaphor that would have fewer disruptive implications for productivity. So they redefined the situation as the “last voyage” of the ship, a metaphor that accounted for the distress people were feeling but that emphasized the positive aspect of the situation. This last voyage was a time from which both the organization and the individuals could benefit. The organization needed the plant’s output, and the individuals could use the time to improve their own marketability through skills enhancement, career-strategies training, and experience-building reassignments.
When, in the new metaphor, the ship “reached port,” everyone could “disembark” in a planned fashion, and they would be better off for having stayed aboard and having the pride of a difficult job well done. As it turned out, the output of the plant recovered from its initial decline, and within four months it was on the rise again. On a per-capita basis, the output almost doubled during the final months of the plant’s operation. The “last voyage” of this group was an inspiring one, although the company mistakenly thought that it could cash in on it by extending the plant’s life for a few more months. At that point, the people—whose earlier esprit de corps had been impressive—felt they were being jerked around, and productivity nosedived. Transition management must be based on win-win arrangements.
This talk about metaphors—about a “sinking ship” versus a “last voyage”—may seem like mere word play. But the words are labels on two completely different ways of looking at a difficult situation. The new metaphor of a last voyage didn’t invalidate the difficulty—that was a given—but it gave purpose to the situation. The old metaphor had left people feeling hopeless. The new metaphor carried the message “Make the most of this situation,” while the old metaphor told people, “Get out of here as fast as you can.”
An advent
ure is only an inconvenience rightly understood. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly understood.
C. K. CHESTERTON
But the leadership of the factory and the corporate division that was depending on its productivity did not merely communicate in a new way. They put together new training programs and reassignment policies that translated the words into actions that people could see and profit from. They offered modest financial incentives for people to stay on board until their efforts were no longer needed, and they negotiated with other corporate units to hold positions open for those transferring until the factory was ready for them to go.
CREATE TEMPORARY SYSTEMS FOR THE NEUTRAL ZONE
What can you do to give structure and strength during a time when people are likely to feel lost and confused?
1.You can try hard to protect people from further changes while they’re trying to regain their balance. You won’t always succeed, of course, because some new government regulation may send everyone back to square one, or some new product introduced by your main competitor may knock your sales for a loop. But many changes can be headed off or at least delayed. And if you cannot do so, you may be able to cluster the new change under a heading that makes it a part of a bigger change that you’re going through. People can deal with a lot of change if it is coherent and part of a larger whole. But adding unrelated and unexpected changes, even small ones, can push people to the breaking point.
Managing Transitions Page 6