and blame from the recipients of change are not necessarily evidence that change is being managed badly. It is wise not to take such anger and blame too personally!

How individuals and teams can be supported through the change by good leadership, appropriate training and great facilitation. A paper on the change management of IT service management projects (Ferris, 2013) points out that project management as such is not the reason why many such initiatives fail. She writes: ‘There is no consideration given to the need for an organisational change management (OCM) capability on the project that will ensure the changes being brought about through the introduction of new technology become truly embedded into the organisation.’ Ferris says that for these initiatives effective change management delivers improved adoption speed, utilization rate and employee proficiency. She stresses the importance of effective preparation for change, disciplined management, clear reinforcement and careful handover. How deeply an individual is affected by the change. Understanding the change from the perspectives of various stakeholders and stakeholder groups is therefore critical, so that the impact on each can be calibrated.

It is easy for leaders and managers in organizations to assume that change is straight-forward. We are educated and trained to approach problems logically and rationally. We see an opportunity to make an improvement – large or small – and can formulate plans to make that improvement. how strongly I believe that good performance by me will lead to rewarding outcomes (‘instrumentality’) – another personal and subjective judgement. Letting go, repatterning and making a new beginning: together these processes reorient and renew people when things are changing all around them. You need the transition that they add up to for the change to get under the surface of things and affect how people actually work. (Bridges, 2009) Let people know what will not change. For example, a statement that existing workgroups will be kept close together in the new office configuration may make a big difference to the people in those groups. How much control or influence people feel they have over the change. This is why involving people as early as possible, and as deeply as possible, improves the prospects for successful change. Note that this may go a long way towards explaining the relatively small disturbance that follows ‘positive changes’; in many cases these are changes that we have initiated ourselves and feel more in control of.

The second of our two models of individual change was developed in the early 1990s by William Bridges. In his book Managing Transitions Bridges (2009) makes a key distinction between ‘change’ and ‘transition’: Any change initiative run in a way that encourages autonomy, mastery and purpose will be more likely to motivate people and engage their discretionary effort. Achievement ● Recognition ● The work itself (job content) ● Responsibility ● Advancement (promotion) ● Growth (personal/professional development) Change is a necessity for survival. This was brought home to me many years ago as I read Charles Handy’s book The Empty Raincoat: Making sense of the future ( Handy, 1994 ). He describes a pattern, the ‘sigmoid curve’ (shaped somewhat like a Greek letter ‘s’: see Figure 1.1 ). It is a classic life cycle that traces the stumbling start, the rise and success, and the eventual decay of empires, organizations, products, processes and even an individual person or career. Handy points out that the timescale is becoming ever more compressed. ‘New’ products, processes, organizations and initiatives rise and decay at an ever-faster rate. Clearly this way of thinking is associated strongly with the physiological and safety needs. This ‘behaviourist’ approach to reward schedules tended to lead to a simplistic view of how to get people to behave in a particular way: reward it and/or punish the alternatives. Although a 21st-century Western culture rebels at the thought, much of our thinking about motivation is still infl uenced by such models – consider the prevalence of ‘performance-related pay’. However, it remains true that human motivation, while it includes responses to reward and punishment, is much more complex than this model suggests.

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Personal support and empathy remain important. An effective response will include effective line management, sharing concerns in peer groups and opportunities to contribute to planning how changes are implemented. Good active listening can be a powerful tool to help people deal with any unwelcome consequences of change. These choices cannot be made appropriately if considering the change in isolation. The change exists in a particular organizational context, and there are many factors in that wider context that should shape the design choices for a change process. Factors listed by Balogun and Hope Hailey include:

Show respect for all that has gone before. Help people to see how the best aspects of the past – its successes and, most importantly, its values – will be preserved and enhanced by the change. So as we begin our thinking about organizational change, we recognize the necessity of a restless searching for change that will enable the health and success of an organ-ization – and its people – to be continually renewed as it transfers from one sigmoid curve to the next... and the next.

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Starts take place on a schedule as a result of decisions... Beginnings on the other hand are the fi nal phase of this organic process that we call “transition,” and their timing is not set by the dates written on the implementation schedule. Beginnings follow the timing of the mind and heart.’ However good the plans for change, it is important to retain flexibility. Good planning is vital – but mechanistic, rigid planning is dangerous, because the course of change is seldom smooth. The unexpected will occur and the plan must be adapted to accommodate both problems and opportunities that arise. Mastery : people like to do things well, and to get better at doing things they value, so opportunities to grow, develop and excel at their work are intrinsically motivating.