In his book Muddling Through, Roger Golde tells a story that might stand as a fable about how this repatterning and sorting can take place in the neutral zone.3 A French army unit was isolated in the Sahara Desert during World War II. Resupplying them was terribly difficult, and they were running out of everything. Their clothes were in particularly awful shape. Somehow a Red Cross clothing shipment reached them, but most of the clothes arrived with size labels that were illegible or missing, and everyone wondered how they could be matched to the people they would most nearly fit.
When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.
RABINDRANATH TAGORE, INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
The commander, obviously an expert on neutral zone strategies, simply lined the troops up and issued each man one shirt, one pair of pants, and two shoes—with no attempt to fit for size or even to match pairs. Then he shouted, “Debrouillez-vous!” which means roughly, “Sort them out.” There was a terrific scurrying and thrashing about while the men switched and swapped until they had clothes that more or less fit them. The result was a very adequate solution to an impossible problem—except for one unlucky soldier who ended up with two left shoes.
This story is a reminder that people can work out much of the necessary business of the neutral zone if you protect them, encourage them, and give them the structures and opportunities they need to do it.
Let’s call that the neutral zone password: Debrouillez-vous!
FINAL QUESTIONS
What actions can you take to help people deal more successfully with the neutral zone in which your organization currently finds itself? What can you do today to get started on this aspect of transition management? (Write yourself a memo in the space below.)
1. The term comes from Arnold van Gennep’s seminal study Rites of Passage, translated by Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Chaffee (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1960). He applies it to the second (or middle) phase of tribal passage rites—those rites that help people to “cross over” one of life’s natural dividing points. The crossover points that come at the end of childhood, when coming-of-age rituals are held, are the best known to modern, Western people. The same three-phase process of transformation is the basis for tribal rituals that take place at many other life-transition points. The parallel between tribal rituals and the three-phase transition process discussed here is more than simply an analogy, for one of the most useful ways of understanding what people experience when their organization changes (and they themselves are plunged into transition) is to say that they experience an unritualized time of passage—a time that was once ritualized but in our day has lost its ritual nature.
2. Cited in John Gardner and Francesca Gardner Reese, eds., Quotations of Wit and Wisdom (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).
3. Roger A. Golde, Muddling Through: The Art of Properly Unbusiness Like Management (New York: AMACOM Books, 1979).
CHAPTER
5
The only joy in the world is to begin.
—CESARE PAVESE, ITALIAN WRITER
The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences. . . . The world doesn’t fear a new idea. It can pigeon-hole any idea. But it can’t pigeon-hole a real new experience.
—D. H. LAWRENCE, BRITISH NOVELIST
Launching a New Beginning
Beginnings are psychological phenomena. They are marked by a release of new energy in a new direction—they are the expression of a new identity. They are much more than the practical and situational “new circumstances” that we might call starts. On a situational level, things can be changed quickly:
The old computers are carted away, the new ones are installed, and everyone starts to get along without the old machines—though it takes quite a while before people are actually comfortable with the new ones.
The budget is cut and people start immediately working under new financial constraints, but they struggle for a good while to make them work—and keep complaining and talking about when they had the money to get things done right.
The day they announce the reorganization, people know what their new roles are, who their new boss is, and who is on their team. In terms of the situational change, a new start is made on that very first day, but for weeks the old teams have a sort of shadow existence: people get together with old coworkers over coffee and go to their old bosses when they need advice about something.
In each of these cases, people haven’t yet made a new beginning. They have just started something. Even though there is a new situation in place and they have started to grapple with it, people are still in the neutral zone, feeling lost, confused, and uncertain. The beginning will take place only after they have come through the wilderness and are ready to make the emotional commitment to do things the new way and see themselves as new people. Starts involve new situations. Beginnings involve new understandings, new values, new attitudes, and—most of all—new identities.
Beginnings are always messy.
JOHN GALSWORTHY, BRITISH NOVELIST
A start can and should be carefully designed, like an object. A beginning can and should be nurtured, like a plant. Starts take place on a schedule, as a result of decisions. They are signaled by announcements: “On March 25, the 24 district branches will be consolidated into 6 regional offices.” Beginnings, on the other hand, are the final phase of this organic process that we call “transition,” and their timing is not set by the dates written on an implementation schedule. Beginnings follow the timing of the mind and heart.
The change management plan will spell out the details of the start, but if it considers beginnings at all, it probably assumes that they happen automatically when people “get started doing the new things.” Bosses always seem to assume the same thing, as they demonstrate when they say impatiently, “You guys have had two weeks to get the new computer system [or the new self-managed teams, etc.] up and going! Your people don’t seem to be with it. What’s the problem?”
They’re confusing starts with beginnings.
AMBIVALENCE TOWARD BEGINNINGS
Beginnings are strange things. People want them to happen but fear them at the same time. After long and seemingly pointless wanderings through the neutral zone, most people are greatly relieved to arrive at whatever Promised Land they’ve been moving toward. Yet beginnings are also scary, for they require a new commitment. They require, in some sense, that people become the new kind of person that the new situation demands. There are a number of reasons people resist new beginnings, even though they may be attracted by the idea of making them.
1.Beginnings reactivate some of the old anxieties that were originally triggered by the ending. Beginnings establish once and for all that an ending was real. I may, for example, be “absolutely sure” that my old relationship is finished—until I start having second thoughts after beginning a new one. There is always something provisional about a decision to stop doing something until you have actually replaced it with something else. A new beginning “ratifies” the ending. (That finality is paradoxically also the source of excitement, for it signals that you’ve made a clean break and have the chance to begin again from scratch.)
2.The new way of doing things represents a gamble: there is always the possibility it won’t work. The very idea of doing something the new way may be crazy, or it may be unrealistic to think that an individual or a group can carry it off. They (or worse yet, you) may even make a shameful mess of the effort.
3.The prospect of a risky new beginning will probably resonate with the past. On a personal level, it may trigger old memories of failures that destroyed your self-esteem. Organizationally, it may resonate with a history in which failures have been punished or with a specific incident in which a new beginning was aborted in some traumatic fashion.
4.Finally, for some people new beginnings destroy what was a plea
sant experience in the neutral zone. Most people don’t like the wilderness, but a few find the ambiguity “interesting” and the slower pace of work rather pleasant. Or else the confusion gives them a cover under which to conceal their own lack of interest in the tasks at hand, and the absence of a clear agenda gives them an excuse for their inactivity. For such people, the new beginning is an end to a pleasant holiday from accountability and pressure.
THE TIMING OF NEW BEGINNINGS
Like any organic process, beginnings cannot be made to happen by a word or act. They happen when the timing of the transition process allows them to happen, just as flowers and fruit appear on a schedule that is natural and not subject to anyone’s will. That is why it is so important to understand the transition process and where people are in it.
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
WALTER BAGEHOT, BRITISH POLITICAL SCIENTIST
Only when you get into people’s shoes and feel what they are feeling can you help them to manage their transition. More beginnings abort because they were not preceded by well-managed endings and neutral zones.
But if beginnings cannot be forced according to your personal wishes, they can be encouraged, supported, and reinforced. You can’t turn a key or flip a switch, but you can cultivate the ground and provide the nourishment. What you can do falls under four headings: Purpose, Picture, Plan, and Part.
Purpose
You can explain the basic purpose behind the outcome you seek. People have to understand the logic of it before they will turn their minds to work on it.
Picture
You can paint a picture of how the outcome will look and feel. People need to experience it imaginatively before they can give their hearts to it.
Plan
You can lay out a step-by-step plan for phasing in the outcome. People need a clear idea of how they can get where they need to go.
There go my people. I must find out where they are going so that I can lead them.
ALEXANDRE LEDRU-ROLLIN, FRENCH POLITICIAN
Part
You can give each person a part to play in both the plan and the outcome. People need a tangible way to contribute and participate.
To make a new beginning, in other words, people need the Four P’s: the purpose, a picture, the plan, and a part to play. For any particular individual, one or sometimes two of these P’s will predominate. Your own path into the future probably emphasizes one of these Four P’s—and minimizes or even omits others. As a result, you will tend to stress your own preference(s) when you communicate with others. You may naturally assume that others approach beginnings the way you do, but that isn’t necessarily so. People are really different—they aren’t just “defective” versions of yourself. So it is important to remember to cover all four of these bases—purpose, picture, plan, and part—when you talk about the new beginning you’re trying to help people make.
Do unto others as they would be done unto.
“THE GOLDEN RULE,” MODIFIED
CLARIFY AND COMMUNICATE THE PURPOSE
What is the idea behind what you’re doing? The idea behind Moses’ journey through the wilderness was that God had promised his people, who had been persecuted in their adopted home of Egypt, a land of their own; that promise was something everyone could understand. This promise was a solution to problems they had experienced and an answer to the question: “Why are we doing this?” It represented a clear purpose for their journey.
If you cry, “Forward,” you must make clear the direction in which to go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely the opposite directions?
ANTON CHEKHOV, RUSSIAN WRITER
You need to explain the purpose behind the new beginning clearly. You may discover that people have trouble understanding the purpose because they do not have a realistic idea of where the organization really stands and what its problems are. In that case, you need to “sell the problems” before you try to sell a solution to those problems. If that wasn’t done during the ending phase—when it should have been done—now is the time to provide answers to these questions:
What is the problem? What is the situation that requires this change to solve it?
Who says so, and on what evidence?
What would occur if no one acted to solve this problem? And what would happen to us if that occurred?
There is almost always some purpose behind a change, though sometimes you need to adapt that purpose to the interests and understandings of your audience. An increase in shareholder value is not an idea that means much to most employees unless it is presented in terms of its effect on their security, pay, or working conditions. The same is true for such important ideas as quality improvement, customer satisfaction, and increased profitability.
Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.
WASHINGTON IRVING, AMERICAN WRITER
One of the terrible obstacles to many beginnings is that there is no discernible purpose behind the proposed changes. There are different reasons for an apparent lack of purpose, and each of them calls for a different action from you.
The purpose is not discernible because it has not yet been clearly explained in terms that mean something to you. That may be because the purpose was not effectively communicated or because people did not understand the explanation. In either case, provide (or ask for) more explanation, making it clear that you are not questioning the intent but that you need more help in communicating it to your people. This problem may also arise because the question of purpose has not been thought through clearly enough to be effectively communicated. You should still ask for more explanation, though the answer may be trickier because the leaders may have to face the fact that they aren’t yet clear themselves.
The purpose is not discernible because it has not been communicated at all. There are three main reasons this happens:
1.There may be no purpose, at least none that will stand up to open scrutiny. The change may have been someone’s whim. It may have been an attempt to show that the leadership is not passive. It may have been initiated because the organization next door did it. It may have been the result of drawing straws in the boardroom. If you decide there isn’t a valid purpose behind the change, it is going to be very hard to bring people out of the neutral zone. Circle the wagons and figure out how best to use your time until the decision-making process gets back on track.
“Company policy” means there’s no understandable reason for this action.
HERBERT V. PROCHNOW, AMERICAN WRITER
2.There is an idea, but the leadership isn’t talking because they don’t think that people need to understand . . . or that they don’t need to know now. Sooner or later most leaders who take this approach lose their followers. If you’re lucky, it will be sooner rather than later because then something will have to happen. But in the meantime, if feedback to your superiors has no effect, follow the advice given in the foregoing paragraph.
3.There is a purpose—at least you strongly suspect there is—but the “official reason” is a smoke screen to cover what cannot publicly be said. This can be seen as deception, and its long-term effects on people are very damaging. They lose trust in their leaders, they withdraw their loyalty, they grow resentful, the best of them leave, and the weaker ones sit around imagining ways to pay the organization back for its dishonesty. At best, such an effort simply fails. What can you do in such cases? Often, not much. But sometimes you can get your company’s executives to see that the truth is not as terrifying as they imagine. Sometimes you can help them figure out how to tell the truth without wrecking everything. Failing that, you can try to disengage yourself from the situation.
Sometimes you may find yourself falling back on the age-old explanation, “The boss wants us to do it” or “If we don’t do it, we’re all fired.” Few organizations run for long on such purposes, but those sentiments can be strong motivators f
or short bursts of activity.
Perhaps the situation is not so dark as in these scenarios. Let’s assume, for example, that you’re involved in the decision-making and so have some influence in setting and defining the purpose behind the action. Bear these things in mind:
The purpose must be real, not make-believe. When budget cuts—necessitating a draconian downsizing—are described as a way to “improve operations” (as they were in an organization where our firm recently worked), you’re simply sowing mistrust and cynicism at a time when you’re going to need all the commitment and energy you can muster.
The purpose needs to grow out of the actual situation faced by the organization and the organization’s nature and resources. Today many different purposive ideas are fashionable:
•“We’re going for excellence.”
•“We’re going to be a leading-edge company.”
•“We’re going to be number one in the industry.”
•“We’re going to be the low-cost producer (or the value-added leader).”
These are clichés. The words mean something, but the speakers who use them usually do not. If they did, they would say what they mean and not what everyone else is saying. When Southwest Airlines said that customer service was the key, when Ford said that quality was the key—when any organization has said what its own leadership really believed—everyone listened. But when organizations simply repeat some widely touted purposive idea of the day, all the employees hear is, “Us too.”
The kind of purpose that you will need in order to launch a new beginning must come from within the organization—from its will, abilities, resources, and character. To be more specific, it must arise from the way in which these inherent qualities interact with the situation in which the organization finds itself. It is that interaction that spells opportunity in a changing world. If your purpose is simply copied from another organization, or if it belies the real situation in which the organization finds itself, it won’t do its job.
Managing Transitions Page 8