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Good Morning Thinkers!
Archive: May 29, 2000

Change Resources

Thanks to John Trebes for this quote which seems particularly appropriate:

"The law of nature is change
(chaos), while the dream of man is order."
-- Henry Adams

Finally, we have summarized the great sharing of resources related to the psychology of change. There was so much interest in this subject, we've decided to offer it to the entire list. Not only did we get over 200 specific resource recommendations, we got some very interesting advice. We've decided to share the advice this week and post the resource listings on the website.

We'll provide the address for the listings with next week's message.

Psychology of Change Response Summary:

"Transition - The Personal Path Through Change" William Bridges, Ph.D.

Comes with a Facilitators Guide 105 pages and a Participants Guide 70 pages

Bridges latest works which is a personalized learning guide designed around Bridges' 3-phase transition model of Endings, The Neutral Zone, and New Beginnings.

It provides people with a road map for moving from resistance to acceptance to action. It incorporates the option of incorporating Focus Point a personalized self-assessment. Bridges states that "Transition is a gradual, psychological reorientation process that happens inside of us as we adapt to the external change."

Applications of facilitated process:
Mergers and acquisitions
Developing new teams
Implementing new processes
Relocation
New competitive challenges
Changes in management
Installation of new technologies
Budget cuts
Changes in business strategies
Changes in company policies

This is not available in regular book stores so please have people contact me direct for information.

Jan Canton, jbcanton@flash.net
972-355-3389 (home office)
972-380-4402 (Entrenet Office)
****

To really understand individual and organizational change requires an extended course of study that isn't readily available in one book or web-site. Any resource should have a healthy dose of systems thinking and
an understanding of how living systems work. The best foundational book is Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline." I particularly like the self-organizing systems theories expressed by Margaret Wheatley in her book, "Leadership and the New Science." Marvin Weisbord's books about organizational change are easy to read and very informative, "Productive Workplaces" and "Discovering Common Ground." William Bridges wrote a book called "Transitions," about individuals going through change that he has leveraged into a very successful practice and career. A number of big name OD consultants are likely resources: Senge, Wheatley, Weisbord, Roger Harrision, Peter Block, and Jerry Porras at the Stanford Business School.
-- Clemens Laufenberg, Oregon Natural Step Network,
ClemLauf@aol.com

From: Jay Arthur, lifestar@rmi.net
Consider the NLP Personal Profile (Engel and Arthur 1999).
NLP identified three key change profiles:
Sameness people initiate major changes ever 15-25 years.
Progress people initiate change every 5-7 years and can tolerate one every year.
Difference people initiate change ever 1-2 years.
Unions are typically sameness and away from loss of benefits.
Management are typically Difference.
TQM/Six Sigma people are Progress.
Reengineering people are Difference.
Each has their own language: same, improved, new!
Readers can test drive portions of the NLP Personal Profile at:
<http://www.quantum-i.com/profile.cgi>
Also consider Words That Change Minds, Shelle Rose Charvet.

From: Debra Amidon, entovation@mediaone.net
A focus on 'change' should be a focus on 'innovation.' However, most people consider that innovation = creativity. This is simply not the case as evidenced by a variety of definitions of innovation available on our
website - http://www.entovation.com/innovation/10definitions.htm.

Innovation includes three knowledge phases - Creation Conversion and Commercialization. I agree with Drucker, that it is the only competence needed for the future - the ability to innovate and measure the performance thereof. My own research and practice is that change initiatives are sub-optimal. However, when the same intent and activity is placed under the rubric of innovation strategy such is summarized in the article - http://www.entovation.com/whatsnew/atlas1.htm, it is inspiring and motivational.

From: Stephen Wehrenberg, wstephen@erols.com
As luck would have it, I'm a psychologist who enables organizational change. I recommend two resources right off the top of my head ... well, three, counting me as a resource ... an irresistible book entitled Making Change Irresistible by Ken Hultman, and an old HBR chestnut by John Kotter, Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail (Harvard Business Review, March-April 1995). The former is relatively new and a readable but insightful treatment, and the latter is something I keep coming back to ... a touchstone for change agents.

From: Dale M. Parish, IE_DMP@HAL.LAMAR.EDU
I think the very best place to start is Alvin Toffler's _Future Shock_ for human reactions to change, and why we tent to manage personal change by identification with groups, how and why we resist change, and how we can take advantage of those natural tendencies.

The next thing I'd recommend they consider is enrolling in a Future Studies program. UofHouston/CL has one; I understand there is another up north. The fundamentals on which these programs are based help to predict *possible* future changes. Very interesting curriculum.

From: Xin Chong, xinchong@krdl.org.sg
To understand the "Change", the best resource is the ancient Chinese classical book: "I Ching" or "The Book of Change". In this rapid changing world, the only thing unchanged is change. Change is the natural law of this universe. There is no progress, there is only change. So, we must accommodate change and seize the opportunity in this chaos world. I Ching could find the surprisingly accurate answer to your question. Whether you believe it or not, Chinese has been consulting I Ching for 5000 years!

Please check I Ching resource site to find more:
http://www.geocities.com/ichingcenter/.

From: Michael Bown, mbown@flash.net
As a Senior Performance Consultant at an international consortium, I am constantly looking for the best and latest change technologies. Interestingly, when I interview people about positive transitions in their lives that stuck with them for years, they rarely even use the word "change." Instead, you hear transition, shift of paradigm, performance improvement and even transformation. Change seems to carry a resistance valence, probably because it is so often thrust upon us by external forces outside our control. Two of my favorite places to learn of positive transitions that work are Robert Dilt's fine site, www.nlpu.com, and David Gordon and Graham Dawes excellent modeling site, www.experiential-dynamics.org.

From: Michael Robinson, mrob@zip.com.au
This is a topic of interest to my organisation which is involved in health care. We are currently undertaking a number of improvement projects that specifically involve organisational change and the psycology of moving individuals and groups (or teams) from where they are currently to a new level of function. We are currently planning a number of organisational inteventions (based on the psycology of change) and have funding to trial and evaluate these in practice over a 2 year period. From a number of specific literature searches there appear to be significant differences between the way that doctors respond as compared to the way that nurses will respond to these organisational change initiatives.

If others are interested in these references (which are very specif to health care) I would be happy to collate them and send them on.

From: Thomas Norrby, Thomas.Norrby@kontakt.slu.se
A major resource in the "psychology of change" are, apart from listening to the stones, the trees and the birds and reading Milne, the following ten commandments for "Change agents/Creators of the Future":
Thou shall not:
1. Begin outside of thyself
2. Stand with a long nose
3. Be unattentive to your friends
4. Frown at technology
5. Blame the circumstances
6. Frown at visions
7. Satisfy at second best
8. Despise your mistakes
9. Spread misbelief
10. Loose your Pilgrim soul
(from Karios Future, http://www.kairos.se)

From: vasp, burkhard@vasp.ch
My message when I start my Cellular phone is "CHANGE IS GOOD". This tiny msg was changing a lot in my life.

From: Anne Andersen, ortved73@hotmail.com
I think it is a combination, I have two good friends who have read a lot books about the subject, but I think the biggest effect is our discussions about it. In discussions you reflect on the books and are pushed to think more yourself, and maybe combine several theories and in the sum off all that find your own way.

Personally was I in the beginning against the books, I thought the change should come from inside, but now, after several discussions I can see books might help in a way, but are definitely not enough.

From: "LANG,THOMAS-F (A-Germany,ex1)", thomas-f_lang@agilent.com
Not exactly a resource - however, what worked well in workshops I facilitated:

Ask the individuals to think and draw up a 'positive' change that they actually had been involved in. Thus, within 30min you get a collection of change cases (often negative cases are not needed).

Then reflect with all attendees each case - one by one- regarding timing, communication, energy put in by whom, resistance, personal role(s) and role changes over time. Regarding the roles: clearly differentiate between target, sponsor and change agent. Check for role diffusions and overlaps.

Doing a workshop like this, patterns will become visible and the 'psychology of change' will get a bit clearer for everyone involved.

From: "Oneal, April", april.oneal@owenscorning.com
I have read some really great books on the subject and attended some great seminars on change, but I think the only way that become an expert is through lots of personal experience. You need to continually take yourself out of your comfort zone and emerse yourself in the chaos of change. It never becomes totally comfortable but you do get more comfortable with being uncomfortable -- which can be sort of fun and exhilarating.

From: "Greenspoon, Heather L (Heather)", hg1@lucent.com
There's an individual in I've worked with in Canada by the name of Beverly Davids who has done a ton of work on change, and in particular with GE and their Change Acceleration Model, which is a great one. She is extremely well versed in all components of managing the people and process sides of change, and also has a strong global network (she has done extensive work in the U.S., Europe and the Asia Pacific region), so could point to other resources and people as appropriate.

She is definitely worth contacting, and can be reached at consult@grnwch.com or 416 488-2800.

From: "Yee, Julie", jyee@gongshee.com
Joyce, it sounds weird but last week at Mass the homily was rooted in the concept of a speck of grain and that the grain must change to become something bigger "it must cease existence". The homily sent messages centered around the notion of:
- If the grain does not change, it will die
- Hulls of comfort (the safe feeling zone) must shed before the wisp of life can take shape...there are a lot of metaphors
here in that you have to break out of sense of protection to full live to your potential
It was the April 9 Lenten Mass. If you reference a missalet from any Catholic Church, you can find the passages. Father Pat at Immaculate Conception in Chicago on Northpark Ave. gave the service. He is awesome and totally relates to young people and the changes times and challenges. If you want to talk to him, pls use my name as a lead in.

From: Ann Marshall, marshalla@mail.aces.uiuc.edu
>From Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin
"Any real change implies the break up of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one identity, the end of safety. And at such a moment, unable to see and not daring to imagine what the future will now bring forth, one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew: to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed. Yet it is only when man is able, without bitterness or self pity, to surrender a dream he has long cherished, or a privilege he has long possessed, that his is set free--that he has set himself free--for higher dreams, for greater privileges."

From: John M. Trebes, affable@airmail.net
The Education of Henry Adams, by Henry Adams, 1918. Here, from the Introduction by D.W. Brogan . . ."It is indeed, on the surface, the story of one who failed because, trained to be at home in (Ben) Franklin's world, he had to live in a world transformed by the new science and the new technology." Adams makes the lament that: "The law of nature is change (chaos), while the dream of man is order." Adams was educated to live and thrive in the Agricultural Age yet he lived in the beginning of the Technological Age. He visited the Paris Exposition of 1900 and realized that his education provided him no preparation for the new age he was to live in.