cameron and green making-sense-of-change-management

Individual change• Given this facilitating environment and the correct stance of thechange agent, there will be a movement from rigidity to more fluidityin the client’s approach to thinking and feeling. This allows morecreativity and risk-taking to occur.• Given this facilitating environment and the correct stance of thechange agent, clients will move towards accepting a greater degree ofself-responsibility for their situation, enabling them to have moreoptions from which to choose.Gestalt approach to individual and organizational changeGestalt therapy originated with Fritz Perls, who was interested in the hereand now. Perls believed that a person’s difficulties today arise because ofthe way he or she is acting today, here and now. In Perls’s words:[T]he goal… must be to give him the means with which he can solve hispresent problems and any that may arise tomorrow or next year. The tool isself-support, and this he achieves by dealing with himself and his problemswith all the means presently at his command, right now. If he can be trulyaware at every instant of himself and his actions on whatever level – fantasy,verbal or physical – he can see how he is producing his difficulties, he cansee what his present difficulties are, and he can help himself to solve themin the present, in the here and now.(Perls, 1976)A consultant using a Gestalt approach has the primary aim of showingclients that they interrupt themselves in achieving what they want.Gestalt is experiential, not just based on talking, and there is anemphasis on doing, acting and feeling. Gestaltists use a cycle of experienceto map how individuals and groups enact their desires, but moreoften than not how they block themselves from completing the cycle asshown in Figure 1.11.A favourite saying of Fritz Perls was to ‘get out of your mind and cometo your senses’. Gestalt always begins with what one is experiencing inthe here and now. Experiencing has as its basis what one is sensing.‘Sensing determines the nature of awareness’ (Perls, Hefferline andGoodman, 1951).47