Needless to say, renewal puts any organization into a far-reaching state of transition. People who have grown used to the practices and culture of an Institution will have to let go of expectations and assumptions that have been rewarded for some time—expectations and assumptions, remember, that were natural to that phase and instrumental in getting the results that phase was designed to generate. These people are not flakes and slackers. Until things took an unexpected turn just recently, they were the organization’s brightest and best.
That is why transition is so difficult, and why it represents a crisis in an organization’s life. It is a sudden and complete reversal in the trajectory that the organization has been following ever since its founding. That reversal is, to be sure, necessary if the organization is to turn away from the path into terminal decline, but that fact does not make the necessary endings any easier for most people. It is important for leaders to comprehend the implications of what they are trying to achieve and not to let their understanding that renewal is essential blind them to the painful transitions that will be necessary to make things turn out as intended. It is also important for the HR and OD specialists who advise the leaders to recognize that transition management must be built into the very fabric of organizational renewal efforts.
Nothing is so dear as what you’re about to leave.
JESSAMYN WEST, AMERICAN WRITER
And it is also important for these advisers to make sure their advice grows out of a real “developmental” context and represents a way to help the organization move along the natural path of its life cycle—or, if it is time, to reverse that direction and go back to make a fresh beginning with a formal renewal initiative. An organization may be going through a phase, for each of the developmental phases presents employees and leaders with predictable challenges. And the transitions between the phases present people with all of the difficulties that attend letting go, getting through the neutral zone, and making a new beginning.
CHOOSING THE PATH OF RENEWAL
The natural cycle of organizational development, like other organic life cycles, carries a company or an institution through a sequence of stages that “unfold”—which is what “development” originally meant—out of an initial seed-dream as surely as an oak unfolds out of an acorn.
The first four stages represent “growth” in the positive meaning of that term. An organization that tries to skip one of them is headed for trouble, as is an organization that refuses to move on from one stage into the next one. But the fifth stage—Becoming an Institution—is different. It feels like a step forward to most people, although some may complain that the customer is starting to get overlooked and decisions are starting to take too long. But in time the downside of the institutional phase begins to cause more serious problems. It is then that farsighted leaders, with an instinctive sense of where things are headed, start to think about what it would take to revitalize the organization.
These leaders should start by asking themselves these three transition-based questions:
1.What is it time for us to let go of? No renewal can take place, as long as people are holding on to the old ways of doing things and the old attitudes on which those ways are based. It’s easier to identify what it’s time for others to let go of; it’s always harder to discern what it is time for you to let go of. Wise leaders, understanding that example is the most powerful tool they can employ, start with themselves: “What part of my identity—of the way I come across, and even the way I experience myself—do I need to let go of if we are going to enter the Path of Renewal?” Failing to ask (and of course answer) that question will result in one of those “this organization has to change!” initiatives that lead to so much chaos without actually changing anything inside the organization.
2.How will we spend our time in the neutral zone? The impatient leader is likely to want to Redream the Dream and Recapture the Venture Spirit and get the renewal-generating organizational infrastructure in place and working tomorrow! (Why wait when so much is riding on the outcome?) But you can’t skip this “time in the wilderness.” That neutral zone wilderness was where Moses’ people discovered their renewal, remember? It’s fine to get started with changes right away, but from the start you need to think of this as a long, complex process you are tackling. The transition is going to take months, at the least, and if the renewal involves a large, complex organization, it’ll take years before it’s complete. And most of the time will be spent in the neutral zone, so get comfortable there. How can you make others more comfortable there? What are the temporary rules and structures and resources that will make people’s time in the neutral zone less anxiety-producing and more productive? At the very least, people are going to have to understand why they are in this crazy place and how they can get through it. (Remember the Four Ps? See pages 68–69.)
3.What is this new beginning going to require of us and of others in the organization? The sooner you start embodying the behaviors and attitudes that fit the new beginning, the sooner others in the organization will have the leader they need. But remember: in your communications you need to speak to wherever people are now, not to where you want them to go, and they need your help, not in getting to the destination you want them ultimately to reach, but in taking the next step in the transition they find themselves in because of your big change. What kind of reinforcements will really help people develop the new attitudes and behaviors that will be necessary if the beginning is to work?
The transitions that mark the beginnings and endings of the stages of organizational life are not limited to corporations and institutions. They also govern the lives and developmental pathways of component units within organizations. A new regional office in a geographical area where there are emerging business opportunities begins as someone’s Dream. A new project to develop a breakthrough product also begins as a Dream, as does a joint venture with a former competitor, a new cultural initiative, or a new governance structure. The organizational life cycle, with the seven phases we have described and the critical transition points between them, characterizes every one of these undertakings. They are different kinds of organizational undertakings, but they begin and develop in exactly the same way. Leaders need to understand that, and “leading” needs to be reconceived as the process by which a person helps some part of an organization—or the whole organization in the case of those at the top—to evolve along its developmental path by moving through a predictable sequence of organizational phases.
In life it is more necessary to lose than to gain. A seed will only germinate if it dies.
BORIS PASTERNAK, RUSSIAN WRITER
CONCLUSION
Transition is more than just the human side of change, the psychological process through which people go when a change occurs, or the way people reorient themselves to do things a new way. It is also the experience people have when an organization is moving from one stage of its development to the next. Often at such times no specific change has occurred to connect the transition to. All people know is that things “feel different” around the organization. As with the coming of a new season, the weather of everyday activity may slip back and forth for a while, and you may be unsure whether the new season is really at hand. But in a little while the early signals turn into unmistakable signs, and everyone can recognize that a significant change is at hand.
Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH, AMERICAN WRITER
So it is with the end of one of the stages of the organizational life cycle. There’s seldom any big, publicly visible change-event to serve as a marker—just a gradual end to “the way we used to do things.” Under the pressure of new demands, things simply start to take on a new shape. Looking back, you will probably be able to say just when and how things changed. With the help of the material in this chapter, you’ll also be able to say why change occurred. Time makes many things clear. Executive teams we have worked w
ith can often, in hindsight, lay out a clear chronology of the stages of their organization’s development and the events that triggered the transition from one stage to the next. But in the moment these same people found it very difficult to describe exactly what was happening.
The same ambiguity is usually present in the case of renewal. “Do we need it now? Have we reached the point where we are really ‘closing in’?” That is why leaders need to learn all that they can about organizational development. It is their task to answer those questions—and to do so in the absence of definitive evidence. It is their task to make calls on developmental issues—and almost always, to do so on the basis of incomplete data. Unfortunately, there is no litmus test for whether an organization needs to be renewed, but it does help a great deal to know at what stage in the organizational life cycle a renewal is most likely to be needed and easiest to carry off. It helps to know the hallmarks of that developmental stage and to know that the transition that occurs at that point is disturbing to people. And it helps enormously to know how to manage the transition in a way that will help people move through the three phases of transition without undue distress. Then they will understand why they feel uncomfortable and won’t take their frustrations out on the “stupid change” that is happening at the company.
1. Adizes’s article, which deserves to be better known, appeared originally in Organizational Dynamics (Summer 1979), 3–25.
2. These “ages” draw on Adizes’s writing, but they have been reshaped by two decades of my own work.
3. At one making-it organization where I was working with the executive team, I said, “At this point, the organization might decide it needs a bigger, more impressive boardroom—with a fine, big table!” Everyone began to laugh, and the CEO turned red. He had just had such a table installed.
4. Looking at the epigraph to this chapter, you will see that Adizes sees the importance of understanding the “different roles . . . [and] different organizational behavior” that will be required by the new phase in the organizational life cycle. He is talking about the situational changes that the organization is going to make, not the transitions that it is going to have to get its people through. That is very important, of course, but our concern here is different.
5. This story is recounted in Elting Morison, “Gunfire at Sea: Conflict over a New Technology,” Engineering and Science (April 1950).
6. Ibid.
PART THREE
Dealing with Nonstop Change in the Organization and in Your Life
CHAPTER
7
There is one fault that I must find With the twentieth century, And I’ll put it in a couple of words: Too adventury. What I’d like would be some nice dull monotony, If anyone’s gotony.
—OGDEN NASH, AMERICAN POET
It must be admitted that there is a degree of instability which is inconsistent with civilization. But on the whole the great ages have been unstable ages.
—ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD, BRITISH PHILOSOPHER
How to Deal with Nonstop Change
It has become a truism that the only constant today is change. (Ironically, the Greek philosopher Heracleitus said the very same thing—2,500 years ago!) Yet we all feel that change is different today: it’s continuous, nonstop, and increasingly complex. Our department is reorganized, and that’s hardly finished when a new director arrives and decides to integrate us into another global team. Or just as everyone is recovering from the introduction of new database software, they announce that the whole distribution process is being outsourced. We talk not of a single change but of change as an ongoing phenomenon. It is a collage, not a simple image: one change overlaps with another, and it’s all change as far as the eye can see.
That being so, what I’ve been saying about transition may seem artificial—like some kind of pure substance that can be isolated in the laboratory but never found in nature. In a sense, that’s true. The image of transition I’ve been drawing is an ideal one. It’s like those textbook diagrams of flowers or minerals that are more perfect than anything you’ll ever encounter in the real world.
The clarity of this ideal image of transition, however, is useful. Ironically, one of the reasons organizations have paid so little attention to transition is that they’re overwhelmed by it. Transition is all around them—so close that they can’t see it clearly. It’s not until it’s isolated in its simplest form that it can be seen clearly. Once you understand the pure and simple transitions I have been discussing, you can more easily understand the inner dynamics and outer effects of your own transitions. Fortunately, real transitions (like real daisies and real gold ore) look enough like their diagrammed counterparts to be recognizable. But that said, we now have to leave behind the image of the isolated transition and deal with the facts of a constantly changing environment.
THE THREE PHASES
Overlap
In our conceptual picture of transition there is an ending, then a neutral zone, and only then a new beginning. But those phases are not separate stages with clear boundaries. As the figure suggests, the three phases of transition are more like curving, slanting, overlapping strata than like sequential stages.
Each of these three processes starts before the preceding one is totally finished. That is why you are likely to be in more than one of these phases at the same time and why the movement through transition is marked by a change in the dominance of one phase over the other two rather than an absolute shift from one to another.
Add the Fact of Simultaneous Changes
It gets even more complicated, for changes spin off from changes in a never-ending sequence. In the changeover to a new information management system, for example, you can be almost done (launching a new beginning) at the very same time that you are just entering the transition caused by a recently announced reorganization (letting go of the old structure). To make things harder, you are right in the middle of a neutral zone that opened up after last month’s layoffs.
Figure 7.1 Transition’s three phases (again).
Your experience as a leader or a manager can be compared to that of someone conducting an orchestra: you have to keep track of the many different instruments, each playing different sequences of notes and each starting or stopping on its own terms. While you keep a sense of the whole piece, you have to shift your attention from one section to another. It is important for you to hold in your mind the overall design of the melody and harmonies, for unless you do that, every little change will sound like a new and unrelated melody that just happened to come along, without any relation to the rest of the music.
The first thing you’re going to need in order to handle nonstop organizational change is an overall design within which the various and separate changes are integrated as component elements. In periods of major strategic change, such a design may have been announced to the organization by its leadership. When that happens, you’re fortunate. Even if you don’t entirely agree with the logic of the larger change, you benefit from the coherence it gives to the component changes.
If, on the other hand, no larger strategy exists, you’ll need to analyze the changes and discover—or perhaps even invent—their underlying common purpose. These might include:
•The need to save money
•The need to recapture markets lost to a new competitor
•The need to respond creatively to a new climate of public opinion
•The need to speed up decision-making by decentralizing authority
It may be helpful to think of your organization’s history as a “life history” and to think of the present as the crossover point between one “chapter” and another of the history of that life. Imagine what names you would give those two chapters, and the movement from the first to the second will probably give you a clearer picture of the overarching change that your organization is going through at present.
Omnia uno tempore agenda. (Everything had to be done at once.)
JULIUS CAESAR DESCRIBING HOW HE HANDLED
AN UNEXPECTED, SIMULTANEOUS ATTACK BY THE NERVII AT THREE DIFFERENT POINTS ON HIS FLANKS, WHILE PART OF HIS TROOPS WERE CROSSING A RIVER AND ANOTHER PART WERE SETTING UP CAMP
Whether you do it this way or in some other way, you have to find a few larger patterns that integrate and make sense out of all of the specific changes. (A client, recalling the childhood puzzles she liked, recently called it “connecting the dots and discovering the ‘hidden object.’”) When you’ve done that, you can use it to orchestrate your responses.
THE RISING TIDE OF CHANGE
You have one characteristic of human nature on your side, though it always seems to kick in a little too late to make any particular change easy. That is the human capacity, over time, to adjust to new and higher levels of change. If a group of eighteenth-century Europeans were transplanted to Wall Street or to downtown Tokyo, they would be completely overwhelmed by the number of changes in those places. But modern people are dealing with just such changes successfully every day—changes that only a couple of generations ago would have wiped people out.
The hardest thing to deal with is not the pace of change but changes in the acceleration of that pace. It is the acceleration of the pace of change in the past several decades that we are having trouble assimilating and that throws us into transition. Any change in the acceleration of change—even a deceleration—would do that: if change somehow suddenly ceased today, people would have difficulty because the lack of change would itself be a change and would throw them into transition.
Managing Transitions Page 12