People don't mind change - they mind being 'changed.'

You know how when we go into Comet and we just love buying things, but when the salesperson comes over to speak to us we go rigid and walk out? That’s because we love buying but we can’t stand being sold to. This principle is the same with change, we love it if it’s something we do but hate it when it is done to us.

I had the senior team from a Swedish-based organisation gathered to look at the future shape of the business. They weren’t too pleased. Their collective view was that they were masters of change, they lived out change every day and they needed no-one to help them ‘manage change’. So it was difficult. I couldn’t get them to even admit that they themselves might have to change, so I gave each of them an envelope with their name on it. They were really suspicious and opened them carefully and inside were their redundancy notices.

Well that livened the party up! They got really irate, and then a few of the more astute ones noticed that it was dated December 2005, two years’ hence. So, I said to go away and look back on that session with the psychologist in January 2003 and tell me why you were made redundant, what didn’t you do which you should’ve, what did you do which you shouldn’t have, etc. This is easy stuff, creating a safe environment for individuals and teams to determine what they should be doing differently.

Whilst they were out of the room, I re-arranged the tables, which were in a half circle, to be more ‘cabaret’ style, just because that’s how I prefer it, no ulterior motive. Well when the team came back they were totally disoriented. Of the 17 executives form one of the world’s biggest companies, none knew where to sit, there was total confusion, and they all looked to me for the lead.

And the moral of this tale? We like change when it is something we do, but not when it is something which is done to us. As an aside the team thought I was very clever, ‘orchestrating’ this activity, but of course I hadn’t, I simply moved a few chairs around. But it brought the message home to them!

This is why I worry over ‘change management’ programmes, which now constitute the largest bank of ‘management training’ courses. It is not possible to ‘manage’ change. All too often events happen over which we have no control. The key is to learn to manage our responses to change, and the responses of those we lead.

Building flexible, nimble organisations, ballet dancers rather than rugby players, will help. Too often the very structure of our organisations mitigate against change. Whenever we speak with executives about restructuring their organisations they reach at once for the laptop and PowerPoint, ready to create more boxes.