making-sense-of-change-management

The underpinning theorycomplacency within the firm. Then perhaps one day you wake up andfeel that maybe you might just have a look at that job description for thejob in Operations. You have never worked in that area before and youhave heard a few good things about the woman in charge.You begin to accept the idea of a new role and ‘try it on for size’.Perhaps at first you are just playing along, but soon it becomes moreexperimentation and more of an exploration. As time moves on therestructure is bedded into the organization, roles and responsibilities clarified,new objectives and ways of working specified and results achieved.A new status quo is born. The scars are still there perhaps but they are nothurting so much.Gerald Weinberg (1997), in his masterly book on change, but with a titlethat might not appeal to everyone (Quality Software Management, Volume4: Anticipating Change) draws heavily on the Satir model and maps on toit the critical points that can undermine or support the change process.(See Figure 1.9.) Weinberg shows that if the change is not planned wellenough, or if the receivers of change consciously or unconsciously decideto resist, the change effort will falter.Summary of psychodynamic approachThe psychodynamic approach is useful for managers who want to understandthe reactions of their staff during a change process and deal withthem. These models allow managers to gain an understanding of whypeople react the way they do. It identifies what is going on in the innerworld of their staff when they encounter change.As with all models, the ones we have described simplify what can bequite a complex process. Individuals do not necessarily know that theyare going through different phases. What they may experience is a rangeof different emotions (or lack of emotion), which may cluster togetherinto different groupings which could be labelled one thing or another.Any observer, at the time, might see manifestations of these differentemotions played out in the individual’s behaviour.Research suggests that these different phases may well overlap, with thepredominant emotion of one stage gradually diminishing over time as apredominant emotion of the next stage takes hold. For example, the deepsense of loss and associated despondency, while subsiding over time,might well swell up again and engulf the individual with grief, either for38