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Scott and Jaffe: The Change Grid and How we Respond to Change

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.

Last week’s Pocket Correspondence Course module was about the three phases of creating change – or ‘transitions’, in Bridges’ language. This week, we need to address the question of how people respond to organisational change.

Have you ever noticed how people’s response to organisational change is sometimes out of proportion to the objective scale of the change itself? Organisational changes are hardly a matter of life and death, yet people often get scared, angry, upset or frustrated. These are powerful emotions that managers rarely feel ready to deal with.

While many managers see organisational change as someone else’s specialism – the HR team, or the consultants, for example – it is your team. A general overview will help you understand some of the dynamics you encounter. One of the most useful and compelling models is that developed by Cynthia Scott & Dennis Jaffe.

Grief: The work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

The Scott-Jaffe model owes much to the work of Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She researched the way people deal with tragedy, bereavement and grief, that led her to the development of a widely used description of grief as following five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – often remembered with the acronym DABDA.

Kubler-Ross Grief Model

The responses that Dr Kübler-Ross described served your ancient ancestors well. They did not emerge in an environment of shifting organisational structures and operational processes: the changes they encountered were often life threatening.

In modern times, we must use the same underlying physiology and brain chemistry to cope with both emotional trauma and an office move. It seems unsurprising, therefore, that when Scott and Jaffe researched responses to organisational change, they found a similar pattern.

Scott and Jaffe’s Four Stage Response to Change

Scott & Jaffe Change Grid

Scott and Jaffe’s model suggests that we move through four stages as we respond to organisational change. Clearly, if we quickly perceive the change as beneficial, we will jump from the first to the fourth.

Denial

Initially, the meaning of the change fails to sink in: we are happy enough (or at least comfortable) with the status quo, so our minds reject the reality of change. We act as if nothing has happened and Scott and Jaffe called this stage Denial.

Resistance

Once we start to recognise the reality of change, we start to Resist it. This arises from our aversion to loss – we focus on the elements of the status quo we will need to give up and our brains assign that a far greater weight of attention and value than any potential gains.

We do this first at the emotional level, showing anger, anxiety, bitterness or fear, for example, and later by opposing the change actively, engaging our critical faculties to find reasons to resist. Organisations see increases in absence, complaints and losses, and drops in efficiency, morale and quality.

Exploration

When managers like you face up to the resistance and engage with it in a respectful and positive way, people can start to focus on the future again. They will Explore the implications of the change for them and for their part in your organisation. They will look for ways to move forward. This can be a chaotic time, but also an exhilarating one – particularly when the benefits of the change are significant.

Commitment

Eventually people start to turn their attention outward as they Commit to the new future.

Other Models of Change

Scott and Jaffe are not the only researchers to articulate a model of organisational change. There are other, similar, models. Perhaps the best known of the three-phase models is Kurt Lewin’s ‘Freeze Phases that we covered in the previous Management Pocketblog: Unfreezing – Changing – Refreezing. We also saw William Bridges’ three-phase ‘Transitions’ model: Letting go – Neutral zone – New beginnings.

These are all powerful as predictive models of change and, like all models, none is true. Yet each offers up valuable insights which can help you predict, understand and mange change.

Further Reading

  1. The Managing Change Pocketbook
  2. The Handling Resistance Pocketbook
  3. Survive and Thrive in Times of Change,
    Training and Development Journal, April 1988,
    Dr Cynthia D Scott and Dr Dennis T Jaffe
    This article is not available freely on the web.
  4. On Death and Dying,
    Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, 1969
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Lewin, Bridges and the Phases of Change

The Management Pocketbooks Pocket Correspondence Course

Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.


Change is a never-ending part of organisational life, and managing it effectively is one of the principal challenges for managers. So you need to understand the process, so that you can support effective change in the people who make up your organisation.

This was a topic addressed by one of the twentieth century’s leading thinkers in workplace psychology (and a regular feature of the Management Pocketblog – see below); Kurt Lewin. Among his many contributions to our understanding of organisational life is a three-part model of change.

Forces for Change

Lewin regarded us as subject to a range of forces within our environment, which he divided into:

  • Driving Forces, which promote change, and
  • Restraining Forces, which hinder it, consisting of our inner resistance to change and our desire to conform to what we perceive to be the established social norms.

Three Phases of Change

Kurt Lewin - Freeze Phases

1. Unfreezing

Lewin identified the first phase of change as unfreezing established patterns of behaviour and group structures. We do this by challenging existing attitudes, beliefs and values, and then offering alternatives. This allows people to start to relax from their restraining forces; preparing them for change.

2. Changing

The second phase is changing, in which we lead people through the transition to a new state. This is a time of uncertainty and confusion, as people struggle to build a clear understanding of the new thinking and practices that will replace the old. The range of different responses you will encounter means that good leadership is essential. Without it, people will follow whatever weak leadership they can find. A great danger is people’s susceptibility to gossip and rumour during times of change.

3. Freezing

Eventually, a new understanding emerges. Lewin’s third phase is freezing (sometimes refreezing) these new ways of being into place, to establish a new prevailing mind-set. During this phase, people adapt to the changed reality and look for ways to capitalise on the new opportunities it offers. Alternatively, they might instead make a decision to opt-out from the change and move on.

Subsequent Interpretations

When Lewin described this model, he was clear that the phases represent parts of a continuous journey; not discrete processes. However, not everyone understood this – or even took the time to read Lewin’s own writing. The model became neglected largely because his use of the term ‘phases’ led to false interpretations that he was referring to static stages.

However, we might equally argue that his thinking is in rude health. In his excellent 1980 book, ‘Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change’, William Bridges put forward a similar three stage model of changes, or transitions:

  1. Letting go
  2. Neutral zone
  3. New beginning

Bridges’ books are best sellers that give readers much practical advice on how to support people through each of the three stages of their transition.

Whether in the original form proposed by Lewin, or in the more modern form presented by Bridges, the three phases model is immensely valuable. It focuses us on how to move people through change. As both the first systematic work on organisational change and as a starting point for designing a change process, an understanding of this model is vital for any manager who is working in the arena of change.


Next week, we will look at a complementary model of how people respond to imposed change, developed by Cynthia Scott and Dennis Jaffe.

Further Reading

  1. The Managing Change Pocketbook
  2. The Handling Resistance Pocketbook
  3. Frontiers in group dynamics: Concept, method and reality in social science; social equilibria and social change, Kurt Lewin, in Human Relations (1947).
  4. Managing Transitions,
    William Bridges, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, Rev Ed 2003

Three Management Pocketblogs about Kurt Lewin

  1. The World belongs to Unreasonable People
    The CECA Loop
  2. Elastic Management
    Kurt Lewin’s Force-field Analysis
  3. Predicting Behaviour
    Lewin’s equation for predicting behaviour
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Multiple Intelligences

Multiple Intelligences
Multiple Intelligences
Multiple Intelligences

The idea of Multiple Intelligences is the brainchild of Harvard Professor, Howard Gardner. As big ideas go, they don’t get bigger and simpler than this one.

Big, because the idea of Multiple Intelligences addresses something fundamental in all of us. It’s about our different capacities to excel in the full variety of human endeavours. It has a lot to say about how we should value the people around us, and the best way to educate our children.

Yet it is also disarmingly simple. There’s no single measure of intelligence. And neither should we reserve the label ‘intelligent’ for a narrow band of people who are simply intelligent in one of a small number of ways. Human potential expresses itself in a vast variety of forms. And so does our intelligence.

Continue reading Multiple Intelligences

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Chris Argyris: Organisational Learning

In last week’s Pocketblog, we met a thinker, Roselinde Torres, who compels leaders to ask difficult questions of themselves. Chris Argyris was another thinker – an academic this time – who demands we ask difficult questions.

Chris Argyris

 

Brief Biography

Argyris’ early academic career brought him into contact with the great psychologist, Kurt Lewin, and culminated in academic posts, first at Yale (1951-1971) and then at Harvard.  He was a behavioural scientist who devoted much of his research  to understanding organisational behaviour and learning, noting that:

‘individual learning is a necessary but insufficient condition for organisational learning’

His Ideas

His early work focused on the practice and development of T Groups; a form of training (the T of T Group) in which managers are able to learn through social interaction. These were popular in the 1960s and 70s for the success they had in shifting interpersonal behaviours of participants. However, Argyris and others became disenchanted as evidence grew that the impact of these interventions was not sustained back in the workplace.

This led Argyris to theorise that the way we behave within organisations is different from the ideas we claim to profess. He labelled the two sides of this distinction: ‘theories in use’ for what we do, and ‘espoused theories’ for what we say. Our behaviours – theories in use – are driven only partially by espoused theories, and to a greater extent by fears, pride, entrenched patterns and the need to conform. Indeed, he suggested that we don’t just behave as we do, rather than as we profess; but we are often unaware of the gap.

His most famous single contribution, articulated in his book, co-written with Donald Schön, called ‘Organisational Learning‘, was the idea of  ‘double loop learning’.

Argyris argued that reasoning needs to take pride of place as the basis for decision-making. However, the prevailing model of learning that he and Schön defined as ‘single loop learning’ is an impoverished approach.

In Single Loop learning, we look at the results of our actions and re-think the strategies we chose.

Single-loop learning

 

The flaw in this, they argued, is that our chosen approach comes from a deep seated set of interpretations, assumptions, values and models. What we should be prepared to do is to challenge those and search for better, more reliable assumptions and models. This is Double-Loop learning.

Double-loop learning

 

Argyris further pointed out that learning comes from either a match or a mis-match.  If our actions produce the desired result, then we can learn from the well-selected behaviours. If they do not, then we can learn from the mis-match either by correcting our actions (single-loop learning) or by revising the governing variables (assumptions) that led to our choice of actions (double-loop learning).

You can learn more about Argyris and Double Loop Learning on the excellent infed website.

You may also be interested in the following pocketbooks:

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12 Blogs for Christmas

Holly&Ivy

This has been a great year for the Pocketblog, seeing reading figures rise substantially and reaching the milestone of our 100th blog posting.

So, with Christmas coming at the end of the week, let’s do a round-up of some personal favourites from among this year’s Pocketblogs.

Here is something for each of the twelve days.  Enjoy!

1. Start as you mean to go on: Happiness

After some New Year’s Resolutions to start the year off, we dived into the subject of Happiness, with ‘Happiness – as simple as ABC?’ about Albert Ellis’s Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy – the fore-runner of CBT.

2. … and Start Topical

We then moved into a subject that was much in the news in February; and still is.  With ‘Bankers’ Bonuses and Brain Biology’, we looked at recent neuroscience and how that relates to Adams’ Equity Theory.

3. Generations

In February too, I wrote two blogs about sociological ‘Generations X, Y & Z’ and ‘Generation Y at work’.  I followed this up by another about what comes ‘After Generation Y?’.

4. The Gemba

In May, inspiration waned for a week, so where did I go to find it?  ‘The Gemba’.  I got it back, and later that month, got idealistic in ‘Reciprocity and Expectation’ looking at the Pay it Forward ideal and the realities of Game Theory.

5. Why do we do what we do?

In the first of two blogs on how to predict human behaviour, I looked at ‘How to Understand your Toddler’ (mine actually) and Icek Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour.  Later in the year, in ‘Predicting Behaviour’, I looked at whether a simple equation (hypothesised by Kurt Lewin) could predict all behaviour.

6. One of the Best Business Books of the Year

… according to the Journal Strategy & Business is Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters.  In ‘What Makes a Good Business Strategy’ we looked at some of his ideas.

7. The Apprentice

This year, I have been a big fan of both series and have written my own episode by episode analysis of both The Apprentice and Young Apprentice.  I also did one blog on each for Pocketblog: ‘The Apprentice and Five Levels of Leadership’ and, for Young Apprentice, ‘Decision Failure’.

8. Drucker Triptych

Has any one individual been as influential in establishing management as a pragmatic academic discipline as Peter Drucker?  To recognise his various achievements, I wrote a triptych of blogs over the summer:

  1. The Man who Invented Management
  2. Management by Objectives
  3. R.I.P. Corporate Clone: Arise Insightful Executive

And one of Drucker’s direct contemporaries was W Edwards Deming, so I also took a look at ‘Demings’ System of Profound Knowledge’.

9. Crazy Times

Will history look on Tom Peters with the respect that it holds for Drucker and Deming?  Who knows?  But without a doubt, Peters has been influential, insightful and provocative for thirty years or more, and I am sure many of his ideas will survive.  In ‘Crazy Times Again’, I drew a line from FW Taylor (father of ‘Scientific Management’) to Peters.

10. The Circle Chart

In ‘Going Round in Circles’ I returned to management models and one of my all time favourites: Fisher and Ury’s Circle Chart. I applied it to problem solving rather than, as they did, to negotiation.

Fisher and Ury are experts on conflict resolution, as is Morton Deutsch. In ‘Conflict: As simple as AEIOU’, I looked at a fabulously simple conflict resolution model that originated in Deutsch’s International Centre for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution.

11. Two Notable Events

Two notable events made the autumn memorable for Pocketblog: one sad and one happy.

  1. In ‘A Bigger Bite’ we marked Steve Jobs’ passing
  2. With ‘Three ways to get it wrong’, we marked our hundredth blog, by looking at one of the towering social psychologists of today, Daniel Kahneman

12. And finally, our most popular topic

Tuckman’s model for group formation has proved to be our most popular topic by far this year.  We have returned to it three times, each time looking at a particular facet:

  1. ‘Swift Trust: Why some teams don’t Storm’
  2. ‘Team Performance Beyond Tuckman’
  3. ‘Tuckman Plus’ is the first of two posts.  It is the last topic post of 2011 and its companion (‘Part 2: Transforming’) will be the first of 2012

So here’s the deal

  • Have a very merry and peaceful Christmas.
  • Have a very happy and healthy New Year.
  • Be good, have fun, stay safe, and prosper.

From all at Management Pocketbooks,
our colleagues at Teacher’s Pocketbooks too,
and from me particularly.

Mike

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Predicting Behaviour

Kurt LewinKurt Lewin is a favourite thinker of Pocketblog’s.  He was an audacious theoretician and a pioneering social psychologist.

He generated many original  and important ideas, but none was as ambitious as what has come to be known as Lewin’s Equation.

Lewin’s equation describes behaviour and was seen, when it was published in 1936, as highly controversial.

.

Lewin’s Equation

It is well-known that whenever a writer includes an equation in her or his text, readers melt away, but HOLD ON: this one is easy!

Here it is:

B = f(P,E)

Now, I know that this looks scary to anyone who hated maths at GCSE, CSE or O level.  So let me explain.  In words, what it says is that behaviour is a function of a person and of the environment in which they find themselves.

Of course, the devil in the detail.  Even if the equation is correct, it does not tell us what measure of the person to take, what aspects of the environment are salient, nor how they combine to affect behaviour.

It doesn’t sound that contentious, but what Lewin was saying was revolutionary in its time.  It is why, in 1936, this was not a trite statement of the obvious.  What Lewin said that was new, is that we behave differently according to the environment we find ourselves in.

Before Lewin

Before this, ideas of behaviour assumed that who we are and our formative experiences would inevitably condition our behaviour.  If this were true, then if I can know enough about you – perhaps having seen how you behaved in the past – then I can predict your behaviour.

Now, Lewin has told us that this is, in principle, not possible.  Because every situation is different and the new environment that you find yourself in will change your behaviour.

People are not predictable

Not only that, but the big shift in social science and in economic theory in the last couple of decades has been a steady recognition that neither is our behaviour rational.

Much economic modelling assumes markets are operated by rational agents.  But our behaviour is anything but rational – making our responses to market forces not only unpredictable, but crazy.  Couple that with the speed at which transactions happen, and we have the conditions for rapid and enormous swings in markets.

Environment is everything

Increasingly, the factor that we have greatest control over is not the people, but the environment.  If you want to influence behaviour, rather than try and influence people, change the environment.

It is time for greater emphasis on environmental factors in human performance.  Advertisers, marketers and store designers have known this for years.  They have studied the science of light, colour, smell and sound in a quest to influence our buying behaviours.

Yet the success of a business is linked not just to customers’ behaviours, but to those of staff.

So here is the deal

How much are you doing to influence the behaviour of your team members, by optimising their environment?  I am going to risk compounding my equation  error, by loading one more equation into the Pocketblog environment:

E = g(N,F,A)

In words, the environment is a function of Neutral background factors, plus Frustrating factors that constrain performance, plus Advancing factors that promote performance.  Who knows what the function is, or how much each term contributes to it.  But you can always play around with your environment to find how to adjust the balance of factors.  It’s time to try.

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Elastic Management

SuperLewinKurt Lewin is something of a hero to me, not least as the originator of one of my all time favourite quotes:

‘There is nothing so practical as a good theory’

This appeared in my intro to The Management Models Pocketbook and a blog I posted on my birthday.

So why come back to it now?  I want to look at one of Lewin’s best known models from a slightly unconventional angle, but let’s start with the basics.

Force Field Analysis

Lewin’s language derives from the world of physics; he talks of equilibrium and forces.  His metaphor is not, however, strained and works very well for me.  In his model, we (individuals and groups – even organisations) will be in equilibrium, unless a force acts upon us.

By equilibrium, he means that there will be no change.

Let’s get real!

In the real world, there are always forces acting upon us, so there is always change.  Lewin identifies two fundamental types of force:

Driving forces, which promote change

Restraining forces, which – take a guess – restrain it

ForceField

To understand the nature of change and how it is happening in an individual or a group, we need to inventory all of the driving and restraining forces, understand them, and assess the net direction and strength of the resultant force.

Under Pressure

Many of us in the worlds of business and public service are finding ourselves under a lot of pressure at the moment, and if you manage people, you may be putting them under pressure.  What can Lewin teach us about what is going to happen?

As we apply a driving force to our colleagues in times of pressure, many will respond and you will achieve the changes you need.  People are able to suppress their reaction to unwelcome pressure and hence you may not sense the restraining forces.  But they are there.  When you release the drive, as the pressure reduces, the elasticity of the restraining forces will show itself.

Two Tactics

How can you deal with this elasticity.  If you need to maintain your new productivity levels over a long term, you have only two options:

  1. You can maintain the driving forces
    We see this pretty often in organisations.  ‘Autocratic’ or ‘follow-me-the-superhero’ styles of leadership maintain long term pressure that can turn into stress and burn-out.  If you suspect you are in danger of causing this, you need to deal with it – quickly.
  2. You can release the restraining forces
    This is by far the harder tactic.  You need to understand what the forces are that pull back against your drive and address them one at a time.  So, longer hours may be mostly a problem because of a parent’s evening routine; so can you offer flexible hours to allow them to leave early?  A greater workload may frustrate someone who is angered by the slow running of an aged computer; so can you upgrade their equipment?

Welcome to the club

If you are anticipating 2011 will be a tough year for you, then welcome to a large club.  But don’t just despair or let events drive you.  Analyse and understand your situation, and take active steps to manage it.

This quarter, Pocketblog will be offering a range of solutions from the Management Pocketbooks library, to help you through.

Some Management Pocketbooks you might find helpful

The Managing Change Pocketbook

The Stress Pocketbook

The Motivation Pocketbook

The People Manager’s Pocketbook

The Tackling Difficult Conversations Pocketbook

Under Pressure? – take a break

For Queen fans

For music fans who aren’t so keen on Queen

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The World belongs to Unreasonable People

Kurt_Lewin‘There is nothing so practical as
a good theory’

So said psychologist Kurt Lewin, whose model of change is one of the most valuable resources that managers have [mental note – great blog topic].

But it is foolish to ‘swallow a model whole’, as Peter Honey points out in his foreword to the Management Models Pocketbook.

.

Instead, Dr Honey gives the following prescription:

Take a model

Distil it into techniques you can use

Test the techniques in practice

Review and refine

Keep practicing until you become skilled

That’s a pretty good model (a free extra in a book with an advertised ten models!).  Peter, by the way, has a new website and blog, and his thoughts are always worth reading.

The CECA Loop

The third and fourth steps of what I will now call the The Honey Model-users Model are about validating a model.  This is the purpose of a rather fine tool, developed by defence scientist, David Bryant: the CECA Loop.

image

The CECA Loop starts with two models:

  • A conceptual model of how you want the world to be
  • A situational model of how the world really is

Critique

First, evaluate the extent to which the two models are consistent with one another.  They do not have to be the same – one is clearly the world as you would like it to be.

Explore

Seek out information that will allow you to evaluate your models.

Compare

Now assess the extent to which the two models are the same or different.  When you understand the gaps, you can …

Adapt

Finally you can change your world or change your behaviours or change the way you perceive your world, to move one of your models towards the other.

‘The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.‘
George Bernard Shaw
Irish dramatist & socialist (1856 – 1950)

So here’s the deal

Changing the world: how much more practical can a good theory get?

Some Management Pocketbooks you might Enjoy

The CECA Loop is Bryant’s modernisation of the OODA, which he believes is out-dated.  I believe that the two models can work well together, but let’s remember that both Bryant, and John Boyd, the developer of the OODA Loop, were both interested in the military context.

Their work has wider applications and, like Peter Honey, I believe that, as long as we properly attribute their ideas, we are free to adapt them to our own needs.

The Management Models Pocketbook has a chapter on Boyd’s OODA Loop.

You might also enjoy:

The Managing Change Pocketbook

The Creative Manager’s Pocketbook

The Learner’s Pocketbook

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