Managing Change and Resistance to Change
What is best change management practise? Are there some models that can prove useful to helping us to manage change in the workplace? What about managing personal change? As a change consulting firm we are often asked questions like these.
Consider the following:
o Only 20-30% of all re-engineering projects succeed
o Only 23% of Mergers & Acquisitions achieve the targeted savings
o 43% of Quality Improvement Programs make satisfactory progress
o 9% of all major software development applications are worth the cost. 31% get cancelled before completion and 53% have cost overruns of 189%
The primary cause of these figures? Resistance from one or more stakeholder groups.
But where does the resistance come from and why does it happen when actually all the evidence is that most of us like change!
The answer lays in understanding the difference between Change and Transition (an issue described brilliantly by William Bridges in his excellent and bestselling book "Managing Transitions" Published by Perseus Books, ISBN 0-201-55073-3)
Consider the following 2 lists:
Rational
Emotional
Both are reasons frequently encountered for resistance to change. The key difference is though, in terms of Change vs. Transition, that we are often very good at dealing with the rational issues - those essentially to do with understanding – but we are often not very good at dealing with the second list - those which are primarily psychological and to do with motivation. That is where we can help.