Introduction

This monograph arises from a research project which sought to identify

individuals expenences of organizational change attempts. The stimulus for
the research derived from the qualitatively as well as quantitatively different
order of change currently being attempted in many UK organizations compared
with ten or so years ago.
At one time, management development specialists involved in change in
organizations were largely in the learning business, helping individuals,
groups and organizations to do more and better. Many of the changes attempted
were in response to internal and external turbulence low-level noise or
hiccups where the goal was a speedy return to normal. Beyond that,
organizations were also looking to anticipate and accommodate variance or
incremental change in recognition of the fact that the status quo was gradually
changing predictably but irreversibly. It was comparatively unusual for
organizations to be faced with discontinuous change, that is, sudden and
fundamental shifts where continuity was broken and reliable assumptions
decimated.
More recently, this picture has altered dramatically. Turbulence and variance
remain, but now and on an almost continuous basis there is rapid, major and
often unpredictable change. Discontinuities are becoming the norm and are
often of a magnitude deserving of the term breakpoint changes[1], which
guarantee that tomorrow will be nothing like today. Further, competition in
most industries is rife and escalating to the point where the survival of an
organization cannot be guaranteed, let alone its growth.
In the face of these developments, organizational change has become a
different ball game. More and better is no longer adequate. Organizations are
attempting to do things differently and radical shifts are being attempted to the
values, structures, systems, styles, staffing, work roles and skill bases in
organizations. Accordingly, many management development specialists are
being asked not only to facilitate learning, but also, and more fundamentally,
the processes of unlearning and relearning which are required by movement
out of the old and into the new. Delaney[2] has argued for the growing
importance of relearning as the fourth R in a new and expanded literacy.
Handy[3] argues along similar lines in recognizing the new demands of what he
has called the age of unreason.
There would appear to be growing agreement as to the implications of this
new order of change in terms of what is demanded of an organizations
members if the organization is to attain and remain successful. However, my
own observations and experience (in both the worlds of academia and industry)
leave me unconvinced that the agreed conclusions and exhortations are
grounded in a recognition of what organizational change actually means for
individuals operating in the real world of what is rather than the idealized

Introduction

Personnel Review, Vol. 24 No. 2,

1995, pp. 3-88. MCB
University Press, 0048-3486

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world of what ought to be. Just how are individuals experiencing their current
world of organizational change? This is a crucial question for all those charged
with identifying, leading, designing, managing, implementing and facilitating
necessary, radical, far-reaching, and continuing change in organizations.
The aim of the research reported in this monograph was to describe, and to
develop a better and deeper understanding of individual managers experiences
of meeting the demands for change that are being placed on them and which
they in turn are demanding of others. The research was strongly biased
towards looking at organizational change attempts which, on the surface at
least, appear to be of a sufficient order of magnitude as to create a need not just
for individual learning, but also for unlearning and relearning. As well as
revealing individual experiences, it was intended that the research would open
up and highlight key issues and processes invoked; would enable a picture to be
formed of the outcomes of these processes; and, looking to the future, would
identify possible helping strategies for managers and management developers
remitted to lead, design, and assist in organizational change.
The first chapter provides a brief survey of the relevant literature and sets
out the content, intentions, spirit and methodology of the research. Beyond that,
it presents the organizations change objectives and how they were perceived by
individual managers. These triggers to change provide the starting point for
the individuals journeys through change. The second chapter is concerned
with the individual paths and processes followed, while the third focuses on the
reported outcomes of these journeys, and helping and hindering factors.
Roger Stuart

1. The research context and

change triggers
Literature pertinent to the research
It is, of course, standard practice in initiating a research project, to search the
literature for previous publications that may inform the topic in hand. This
project was no exception, though the nature of the search and its output can
best be described as a personal journey of revelation for the principal researcher
and author of these articles. I am a management learning and development
specialist of 19 years standing and, as a result of my work, was already quite
well acquainted with the literature on personal, manager, management and
organization development, as well as humanistic, educational, social and
organization psychology. However, I deliberately took my background reading
beyond, for me, these familiar frames of reference, and into a wide variety of
other disciplines and specialisms which were revealing of individuals change
processes. Thus, I enquired into works on loss, including articles and books on
redundancy, retirement, divorce, broken relationships, rehousing and loss of
limbs. Additionally, the literature search included works on bereavement,
terminal illness, abuse (especially within the family), trauma (including
veterans experiences of Vietnam), man-made catastrophe (for example,
Hungerford and Zeebrugge) and stress.
Taken together, my readings enabled me to assemble a very broad, if
disjointed, perspective on individuals experiences of significant change. The
following presents a flavour and a sample of the frameworks which contributed
to this perspective (reserving their further amplification and integration until
subsequent articles).
Cycles of experiencing and learning
Gestalt psychologists, such as Nevis[4], describe how day-to-day moments and
incidents are experienced as they move into the foreground of an individuals
awareness, are acted on, and resolution is achieved. This cycle of experiencing
moves through a sequence, starting with sensation and awareness, continuing
to energy mobilization, contact and resolution, and reaching completion with
closure and withdrawal of attention. The Gestalt literature also describes how
this cycle is often interrupted at different points in ways which are
characteristic of particular individuals. For example, the case of a go go,
action-oriented manager who bypasses later stages of the cycle.
Kolb[5], in what is now a widely known work, has highlighted the importance
of day-to-day experiencing as a source of individual learning. Kolb developed a
cyclic model of learning comprising a four-step process of concrete experience,
reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation.
This process serves to transform experience into concepts which are in turn
used to guide further experiencing. Kolb goes on to describe how individuals
come to develop learning styles, that is, favoured ways of progressing around
the learning cycle, in which some parts of the cycle are emphasized to the

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detriment of others. Stuart[6] has explored the nature of individuals blocks to

learning which influence the development and enaction of these learning styles.
Works such as these describe processes and patterns of experiencing and
learning which potentially will be important ingredients of managers
experiences in both natural and designed situations of change.

Different forms and levels of learning

Burgoyne and Stuart[7] have summarized six different schools of thought on
learning, and allied them to the learning and development of managers in
organizations. Thus, they distinguish habit formation through conditioning;
increased facts and knowledge by information transfer; acquisition of
procedures and techniques by cybernetic processes; enhanced understanding
through cognitive approaches; development of self and what-like
understanding through experiential learning modes; and the emergence of
socially defined norms and identities through social influence. All six forms
of learning are likely to be represented among the processes of individuals in
change.
Newstrom[8] discriminates between learning and unlearning, the latter being
described as the process of reducing or eliminating pre-existing knowledge or
habits that would otherwise present formidable barriers to new learning. The
more significant the change, the more unlearning as well as learning processes
will be evident.
Learning not only takes a number of forms, but can be thought of as
occurring at a number of levels. Thus, Bateson[9] distinguishes four levels of
learning. Level zero includes instinctive, habitual and routine behaviours. Level
one learning includes corrective changes and improvements within a set of
alternatives (what Argyris and Schon[10] have called single loop learning).
Batesons[9] level two learning involves changing familiar patterns and
developing additional sets of alternatives (what Argyris and Schon[10] include
in double loop learning). Level three learning incorporates changes in the
systems of sets of alternatives from which choices are made and is close to what
both Koestler[11] and Watzlawick[12] describe as frame breaking. Juch[13]
makes similar distinctions in the levels of learning, culminating in an increasing
holistic consciousness of self in and with ones environment and what
Hawkins[14] referred to as the spiritual dimension of learning. Just as the
introduction to this article referred to different levels of change (including
turbulence, variance, and discontinuity) so, then, there are different levels of
individual learning which can be anticipated in different circumstances of
change.
Stages of change in organizations
Researching into organizational change, Williams et al.[15] after Lewin[16]
identify three stages of change: those of unfreezing, changing and refreezing.
Hughes[17] describes these same stages as exit (departing from an existing
state), transit (crossing unknown territory) and entry (attaining a new
equilibrium). Similarly, Tannenbaum and Hanna[18] describe a process of
change in which movement is from homeostasis and holding on, through

dying and letting go to rebirth and moving on. Such researchers and these
are a few among many depict organizational change as a movement from one
state to another, with an accompanying shift in time orientation away from the
past, into the present, and towards the future. Such a process, if exhibited,
would run contrary to a natural desire by change initiators for the future to
have been implemented yesterday!
Discontinuity and individual transition
There has been a deal of work over recent years, largely stemming from the
work of Bridges[19] and Adams et al.[20], and recently updated[21,22] which
has focused on what Bridges[19] has called individuals passages of
adjustment from one situation to another, or transitions. At a general level,
such work duplicates the findings of studies on organizational change
described in the previous section. Thus, Bridges[21] refers to endings,
neutral zones and new beginnings as the phases of individuals transitions.
Spencer and Adams[22] describe a seven-stage sequence of reactions which
they suggest are generalizable across a very wide range of life changes
including, for example, leaving home, marriage, birth of a child, starting a new
business, job change, change of career, divorce and illness or accidents. The
authors note that whether changes are positive and chosen, or negative and
imposed, individuals respond out of a similar sequence of events, that is, loss
of focus, minimization of impact, descending into the pit, letting go of the past,
testing the limits, searching for meaning, integration and moving on. Spencer
and Adams locate these seven stages of transition on a mood curve, which
commences with the onset of change, moves through what they term the
emotional hiccups, towards full adaptation to the change. They also report
the possibility of temporary euphoria as an additional early reaction to
change.
Parker and Lewis[23], building on the earlier work of Adams et al.[20] focused
specifically on the career transition of promotion. Parker and Lewis were rather
more discriminating in their use of the term transition, which they defined as
a discontinuity in a persons life space. They further argued that for the
change to be experienced as a transition, there should be a personal awareness
of this discontinuity in ones life space and of the new behavioural responses
required, because the situation is new, novel, or both. Parker and Lewiss work
largely replicated Adams et al.s[20] findings, though their own results were
plotted on a curve of competence, rather than a mood curve, and they described
the first four of the seven stages of the transitions process as immobilization,
denial, incompetence, and acceptance of reality. The subsequent stages were
labelled the same as by Adams et al. Once again, the seven stages identified
were constituents of a larger process of holding on, letting go, and moving
on[23]. Similar labels were used by Osherson and Mandell[24] who
investigated men and mid-life career change.
Given that the focus of the research to be reported in this series of articles
was on individuals responses to changes which were of an order of magnitude
meriting the label discontinuity, it was viewed as more than likely that elements
of the seven-stage model of the transition process would be evidenced.

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Catastrophe and survival

Over the years, increasing attention has been paid to man-made catastrophies.
The media have been drawn to reporting, for example, events at Hungerford,
Zeebrugge, Bradford, Hillsborough, and Kings Cross. On each such occasion, a
range of excellent and professional services (fire, police, ambulance and so on)
have been called to the scene of the catastrophe. Equally, a deal of immediate,
willing and able help has been volunteered and made available to the victims
and the close relatives of victims of the incidents. However, it is only quite
recently that attention has been broadened beyond the victims to the direct
survivors of catastrophe. A new discipline of crisis psychology is emerging,
and research workers findings are fuelling the work of groups of helpers whose
focus is on the short- and longer-term aftermath of catastrophe and is directed
towards survivors. A recent book by Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] summarizes
these developments.
As experience is gained in this work, frameworks are emerging which depict
the experiences and patterns of response by survivors of catastrophe.
Capewell[26] presented a sequence of typical survivor responses, commencing
with a feeling of being betrayed by life, moving on to feelings of loss, emptiness,
anger and fear, then to what she calls the sterile choices of revenge, cynicism,
denial, self-betrayal and paranoia or the fruitful choices of acceptance and
forgiveness, towards creating new opportunities and eventual re-framing.
Contrasted with some of the other frameworks referenced in earlier sections of
this chapter, Capewells description emphasizes the intense emotionality of
experiencing catastrophe, which is of a rather greater order than emotional
hiccups.
Lifton[27] explored a major aspect of survivors processes, that is, their
search to understand what has happened to them. In what he calls a hierarchy
of formulation, Lifton identifies a number of levels of search questions which
follow a chronological sequence through why did it happen?, how did I
escape?, why did I escape?, why do I feel like this?, what does the way I
feel now mean about me as a person? and what does all that I have been
through mean about the way I understand life?.
Beyond the deep emotionality described by Capewell[26], further work on
catastrophe[25,27] also reveals survivors deep questioning of self and of life
itself. The terms catastrophe and survival are dramatic ones, but are surely
justified in terms of the survivor processes which ensue. A research project on
significant change in organizations could, then, reveal similarly dramatic
experiences provided that the order of experienced change is of the magnitude
of a man-made catastrophe.
Trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders
Among the findings of researchers on catastrophe[25] is further evidence for the
existence of what remains a contentious phenomenon, that of post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD). Experiencing man-made catastrophe is but one
example of a broader group of incidents called traumas, which refer to events
that are outside the range of usual human experience and which would be
markedly distressing to anyone. Traumatic incidents give rise to stress

reactions which are the reactions of normal human beings to sudden,

unexpected and often terrifying events in their lives. Hodgkinson and
Stewart[25] describe how people are left feeling uncertain about a world that
has now become unpredictable, and in which the fabric of every day existence
has been torn away to reveal hazard, danger and risk.
PTSD is essentially an anxiety disorder, and what distinguishes it is that the
event provoking the trauma was of monumental significance and struck at the
very heart of an individuals assumptions of, and faith in, his or her own safety
in the world. The American Psychiatric Association[28] identifies three main
groups of symptoms of PTSD, those of: re-experiencing phenomena; avoidance
or numbing reactions; symptoms of increased arousal.
As with survivor responses to catastrophy, work on PSTD could inform the
world of organizational change if the events are viewed as traumatic by its
onlookers and recipients in the organizations.
Managerial stress reactions
That stress is rife in organizations is already well documented (see, for
example, Hogg[29]). Further, it is hardly breaking new ground to suggest that
much of individuals stress is the result of change in their lives. Indeed, stress
inventories have been developed[30] which are based on the frequency and
severity of a range of life changes, including financial status; relationships with
spouse, family, boss, working conditions, etc. The symptoms and effects of
stress are similarly well documented, and seemingly endless. I once culled from
the literature a list of 84 symptoms and effects of stress!
In two recent papers[31,32], the author has developed a categorization of
reactions to stressors which built on and expanded the famed fight or flight
response. This categorization identified nine so-called startle reactions: those
of straightening, bracing, puffing up, compacting, submitting, disorganizing,
freezing, defeat and splitting. The descriptions of these reactions highlighted
changes in individuals bodies, thoughts, feelings and behaviours. Though
these nine startle reactions were posited as being reactions which could be
displayed by any individual in stress, the author also demonstrated that
different individuals were inclined to respond to stress from a more limited
number of these reactions. Proclivities towards some reactions rather than
others were rooted in past experiences of stressful events, the nature of those
events and the nature of the individual responses. With repetition, and
particularly when these experiences took place early in life, stress
characters[32] emerged, whereby individuals were typically triggered by some
events (e.g. being abandoned) rather than others (e.g. lack of order) and where
their reactions were typically of one kind (e.g. puffing up) rather than another
(e.g. submitting).
On the basis of such work, it is to be anticipated that research into
experiences of organizational change even when these changes do not
warrant the labels of trauma, catastrophe, or transition will be revealing of
individuals in stress. Further, it is likely that different individuals will be
stressed by different circumstances and will react differently, dependent in part
on their prior experiences of stress.

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Loss and change

In a far-reaching and penetrating book[33], Marris addressed the subject of loss
and change, examining a very wide range of situations of loss. Marris[33] noted
that many changes represent loss to the individuals concerned and, in
particular, he emphasized the loss which arises either actually or
prospectively from the death or discrediting of familiar assumptions. Cited
examples of violated assumptions include: I am invulnerable, it cant happen to
me, the world is safe, orderly and predictable, I am a good person, and bad
things happen to bad people, good things to good people. Such assumptions
are often deep seated, and hence the true level at which loss is experienced is
not always transparent. Thus, Marris argues that the fundamental crisis of
bereavement arises not from loss of others, but from a loss of self a
disintegration of the structure of meaning of self, which is centred on that
which is lost. More obviously, and writing in the context of organizational
change, Manz et al.[34], identify that the essential challenge for managers facing
a move to self-managing work teams is a perceived threat to loss of power,
influence and importance.
Times of loss are times of potential crisis and as such may be viewed as times
of stress[35], when stress symptoms and reactions will emerge. Times of loss
may also be represented as discontinuities. Thus, Cotgrove et al.[36]
investigated broken relationships and pointed to three recognizable phases in
an individuals response to loss of a love, those of shock and denial, anger
and depression, and understanding and acceptance. These phases parallel
those found in the studies of transitions already referred to, with the phase of
anger and depression corresponding to and illuminating what Spencer and
Adams[22] referred to as the pit. Similar to Cotgrove et al., Bowlby[37] has
described the protest and despair phases in relation to the breaking of
affectional bonds. As an alternative to emotional hiccups, Cotgrove et al.
emphasize the deeper experience of emotional wounding[36].
Organizational change, then, may lead to its members experiencing and
reacting to loss. The loss may be obvious and comparatively superficial, or it
may be at a level where fundamental beliefs and assumptions are challenged to
a point where even the individuals sense of self is in transition.
Death and dying
In 1973, Kubler-Ross[38] produced a book which had a great impact on the
thinking of the medical profession, and a profound effect in terms of its
influence on the practice of caring for the dying and their kin. Her research was
directed towards uncovering individuals responses to impending death. The
study illuminated not just dying itself, but the different stages that people go
through when faced with tragic news[38]. These stages represent mechanisms
for coping and dealing with such news, and include shock (numbness), denial
(this cant be happening to me), isolation (leave me alone), anger (why
me?), bargaining or an attempt to postpone the inevitable (one more time),
hope (temporary but needed denial), depression, both depression about what
has already been lost (what individuals are no longer able to do) and
preparatory depression (for loss to come), and acceptance a time of quiet
expectation and peacefulness (the struggle is over).

The impact of Kubler-Ross[38] work stemmed not just from the development
of a framework which could be used to guide the provision of help in the dying
process but, over and above that, from the deepened understanding that arose
from her capturing and recording the actual experiences of the individuals
concerned. Those individuals were not cases, but real people having real
thoughts and real feelings and behaving out of them.
Is it stretching the imagination too far to suggest that individuals
experiencing significant organizational change might display the responses
revealed in the Kubler-Ross study? That became a matter for the subsequent
research. Nevertheless, the researchers did determine that the research
methodology used would mirror Kubler-Ross approach. First, the researchers
would not adopt a distanced, observational stance from the subjects of the
research. Second, the project would not seek simply to produce aseptic
frameworks abstracted from individuals behaviours in, and as a response to,
change. Rather, the research would seek as far as possible to get close to, open
up, and capture the individuals experiencing of change in his or her own words.
That is, any emerging frameworks would be fleshed out with the felt
emotionality and perceptions of the experiential data collected.
The process of grieving
Grieving is the psychological process of adjusting to loss[33]. According to
Parkes[39], who is a leading authority in the field of bereavement, the term
grief is normally reserved for the loss of a loved person. It refers to what
happens, emotionally and behaviourally, to those who are left after a person
dies. However, both Marris[33] and Parkes[39] agree that the concept of
grieving can be applied to many situations of change which embody a struggle
to recover meaningful patterns.
Grieving constitutes a major period of challenge and transition and, as
viewed by Parkes, its basis lies in a form of resistance to change deriving from
a reluctance to give up possessions, people, status, and expectations[39]. In
essence, grieving describes the mental and emotional work that is required to
make real the fact of the loss a process that Parkes has called realization.
It is important to emphasize that grieving is a process, not a state. Parkes[39]
opines that grief is not a set of symptoms which start after loss and then fade
away. Rather, he sees grief as involving a succession of clinical pictures which
blend into and replace one another. The main pictures or stages of grieving
identified by Parkes are numbness, pining (a desire to search for and recover
what has been lost), disorganization and despair, and recovery. Hodgkinson
and Stewart[25] have expanded on this list of stages and described the main
components of grieving as shock (experienced as momentory or prolonged
disbelief and numbness) and often involving depersonalization (I am not real)
or derealization (the world around me is not real), disorganization
(experienced as confusion, poor concentration and memory lapses), denial,
depression (desolate pining, a sense of yearning and longing, and despair), guilt,
anxiety, aggression (experienced as irritability towards those who cannot
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(towards those who could have done more), resolution and acceptance (taking
leave, life must go on) and reintegration (taking up a new life).
These studies on grieving, emphasizing as they do the difficult processes of
accepting and adjusting to permanent and significant loss, could richly inform
an understanding of individuals experiences of change in organizations. In
essence, as Parkes[39] has pointed out, the study of grieving is the study of
unlearning. In his view, this study is in its infancy and we can no longer
deny that research into the effects of change is an essential area for further
study. There are many forms of loss; there are a range of possible responses to
loss; there are many influences on the course of grieving, and different ways of
helping that process. Is this also so in organizational change?
Taken overall, it can be said that, spread across a number of subject
specialisms, there is much in the literature which seeks to describe the reactions
and responses, the stresses and struggles, the wounding and healing, the
learning, unlearning and relearning, the broken assumptions and reframed
beliefs, the losses and gains, experienced by individuals in change. Further,
various sequences, stages, cycles and processes emerge which put a form on
those experiences. However, only a relatively small part of this literature relates
directly to the experiences of individual managers who are involved in
significant organizational change initiatives.
Given the aforementioned aims of the research described in this monograph,
the challenge was to extend the previous studies described in the literature into
the current world of individual managers at work in organizations. I viewed the
literature as being of help on the following counts.
It provided an overview to inform the design of the research. Thus, looking at
the overall findings emerging from the literature, it can be seen that, as
individuals engage in processes of change, there is a shift in time orientation
from out of the past, into the present, and on to the future. Concomitant with
this shift in time orientation, is another reorientation away from the old and into
the new. These two movements together unfold as a series of emotional, mental
and behavioural states which can be summarily described as holding on,
letting go and moving on. Associated with, and emerging from, these
changing orientations, it may also be anticipated that there will be a phase of
unlearning and a phase of relearning. These different orientations and phases
provided the basic structure informing the research data collection.
Within this overall perspective, the literature identifies a very wide range of
possible constituent experiences. This provided the basis for the second usage
of the literature. As data collection progressed into data analysis, so the
literature was used to help interrogate and make sense of the data.
This interrogation was conducted in an iterative way so that the emerging
research data served equally to test the findings from other studies. More detail
of this methodology will be provided in the next section.
Another way in which the literature served to inform the research project
derived from conclusions already drawn from the consideration of the work of
Kubler-Ross[38]. Thus, it was deemed imperative that the data collection
methodology should be such as to be revealing and capturing of the individuals
experiential account of change. Further, it was deemed equally important that

this experiential data that is, what was going on in the guts, hearts and minds
of the individuals, was not left behind in the data analysis, producing aseptic
frameworks and conclusions. The research sought to go beyond comprehending individuals experiences of change, towards apprehending their experiencing. Albeit vicariously, the intention was to develop a greater internal what like
understanding. Not only was it felt that this approach would lend potentially
greater impact to the research, but that it would also serve to ensure that any
application of the research findings would be grounded in the world of what is
or might be, rather than what is desired or should be.
The research
Intentions of the research
By way of summarizing the aims and objectives of the research into individuals
experiencing of organizational change, it can be said that the intention was that
the research would:
Serve as a vehicle for bringing together the very diverse and largely
separate bodies of knowledge relating to individuals experiencing of
change, and focus them specifically on individual managers working in
organizations which are attempting significant change.
Enable the development of frameworks which describe, illuminate and
enable a better understanding of individual managers experiences of
meeting the demands for organizational change which are being placed
on them and which they in turn are demanding of others.
Ensure that such frameworks emerge from, and hence are grounded in
and fleshed out by, the actual, holistic and in-depth experiencing of
individual managers in situations of change. Hence, the research would
honour what could be called the subjective psycho-logic of individuals
in change, rather than the apparently objective logic of instigators or
observers to the change.
Explore individual managers experiencing of change on a time
dimension, attempting to capture their stories of change and, when
possible and appropriate, to identify the beginning, middle and end of
each story. Thus, the research would investigate the initiators or
triggers to change, the resultant reactions, processes and responses
invoked, as well as emergent outcomes and consequences.
Identify those factors experienced as helpful or hindering to the
individual manager in change, and thereby point up potential openings
for, and means of, facilitating future change attempts in organizations.
Research methodology
The interview approach
Given the objectives for the research and, in particular, the desire to obtain indepth data on managers experience of change, it was decided to collect the data
by interview rather than use questionnaires or survey methodologies.
The logistics and allotted time-span for the research prevented a longitudinal
study, which would have tracked individuals over time by intermittent

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interviews. Such an approach would have been of considerable advantage,

given the desire to capture individual managers stories through change.
Nevertheless, and by way of compensation, it was decided to focus the work on
individuals who were well into the organizations change attempts usually in
the order of 18 months rather than at the initial stages. Additionally, it was
determined that each interview should be of sufficient length two hours
emerged as the norm to enable the individuals stories of change to unfold.
The determination that the research should, as it were, lift the lid off
managers experiences required that the interviewees were helped to relive and
not just recall their experiences. It also required the interviewees to be trusting
of the interviewers. Care was taken to select interviewers who were experienced
in establishing trusting relationships with others, who were skilled in operating
in the here and now, and who were sensitive to, and comfortable with,
working with both personal issues and emotionality. In short, it was considered
important that the interviewers had counselling skills. Beyond that, it was felt
that the interviewers should be credible enough to be able to discuss, in a
knowing way, the dynamics of organizational life at managerial level (for
example, the importance of a bottom line, politics, the informal organization,
etc.). In the event, a team of interviewers was assembled, reaching a maximum
of five members. The author conducted one-third of the interviews, the
remainder being divided between in-company and outside members of the
research team.
A short series of pilot interviews confirmed the envisaged demands on the
interviewers. Beyond that, the pilot interviews also prompted an important
discussion on the stance of the interviewer. The interviewers task was to obtain
research data. However, the interview process often felt more like personal
counselling. The research interviewers encountered managers who were not
just interested in talking but, in a number of cases, who needed to talk. It was
agreed that the interviewers should hold onto their research stance, but that
they should also retain a sensitivity to the interviewees needs and give time
over to meeting those needs. On occasion, interviewers agreed to do follow-up
visits for a counselling rather than a research purpose. However, care was taken
not to set this up as an expectation. Further, when a choice had to be made as to
whether to pursue an issue for research purposes or to round it off so as not to
leave the interviewee hanging high and dry, the latter option was to be
followed.
The data collection and analysis process
While the objectives of the research demanded that the interviews tapped into
the subjective world of the interviewees experiencing of change, it was
regarded as essential that the data collection process was as objective and
rigorous as possible. In particular, it was important that any contamination of
the data by the researchers own pre-conceived ideas and projections was
minimized. The interviews were structured only so far as to attempt to create a
time dimension to the interviewees stories of change. Essentially, the
interviewees were encouraged to talk through their stories in their own words.
The interviewers helped this process by appropriate and open-ended probing

which was intended to enable the interviewees to expand and deepen the
breadth and level of their revelations.
To enable the interviewers to give their full attention to the interviewees, the
majority of interviews were taped, with the permission of each interviewee. On
most occasions, only minimal note taking took place in the interview. Following
an interview taking place, full transcripts of the tapes were made. A number of
the interviewees requested copies of the tapes or transcripts for their own
subsequent analyses and reflections.
Each interview transcript or set of notes was subjected to an intensive
(approximately two days each) process of data analysis. The research process
had been initiated, as has been described, with a literature search out of which
had emerged a range of frameworks describing individuals experience of
change. The subsequent analysis of the data collected in this study was
conducted out of a form of what Blaikie[40] has described as an abductive social
research strategy (having its own roots in grounded theory[41]). Such a
strategy derives accounts of social phenomena (namely organizational change)
by honouring and drawing on the descriptions and meanings used by the social
actors (namely individual managers). On the whole, therefore, the analysis was
more descriptive than interpretative. However, the data were not left in a purely
raw state. Rather, the data were played across the frameworks from the
literature, which were fleshed out, refined and modified by the data. In parallel,
the developing frameworks were also played across the raw data, enabling the
search for, and highlighting of, key processes and patterns.
Essentially, what was set in train was an iterative process of data generation
by interview, reflection on the transcript data, inductive and deductive
reasoning mediated by frames from the literature research, and deduction and
induction mediated by the data research. Hence, the generation of concepts and
frameworks formed an ongoing part of the data analysis as well as its
conclusion. In this way, the literature was used to inform and clarify the
managers accounts of their experiencing and vice versa. What emerged were
substantive, generalized frameworks and categorizations relating to managers
in change, which were grounded in, and fleshed out, by the individual
managers own descriptions of their experiences.
Beyond retaining the data analysis and interpretation within the team of
researchers, the data analysis was also taken back to a number of interviewees
on a one-to-one basis for comment and discussion. Further, the analysed data
were also presented to gatherings of interviewees and other interested parties.
A feedback process was also used as part of an intervention into a work team,
(this process will be further referred to in the final chapter).
The research sample
The research project was located within two large UK industrial organizations,
both of which are in the throes of attempting radical organizational change. In
both cases, the research was sponsored by senior management within
personnel, and was seen as contributing directly to their strategic management
development objectives.

The research
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In total, 63 managers were interviewed in the main part of the project. The
managers were drawn from a broad spectrum of functions (including
operations, procurement, information services, research, finance, personnel,
and sales), based both in the field and at head office and drawn from the top
through to the bottom of the managerial hierarchies (that is, from a direct report
to the board, to a supervisor of support staff).
The sample was identified by the in-company members of the research team,
and was targeted at particular managers who then opted in on a voluntary
basis. The sample was chosen so as to include those who were apparently
excelling in the changes as well as others who appeared to be experiencing
difficulty and discomfort. It was viewed as imperative that those in the
interview sample were not seen as lame ducks indeed, a good number of the
sample were regarded, either formally or informally, as high fliers by
achievement or in potential. Given that, for the size of the organizations
concerned, this was a small sample of managers, no attempt was made in the
data analysis to distinguish the managers level, function, or location. Simply,
the sample was made up of a number of not atypical managers who were
working in situations of attempted significant organizational change.
In both organizations there has, and continues to be, a significant downsizing
activity. The research sample was drawn from the survivors of this downsizing
managers who were remitted to make the new organizations work.
The research findings
So far, this chapter has set out the context, spirit and methodology of the
research. The next section commences the presentation of the research findings.
It focuses on the organizations change objectives and how they were perceived
by the individual managers. These triggers to change are presented as a series
of categorizations and frameworks which have been drawn from, and fleshed
out by, the interview data collected. The triggers to change provide the starting
point for the individuals journeys through organizational change (see Figure 1).
Subsequent steps on these journeys (that is, individual paths and processes
followed, outcomes, and helping and hindering factors Figure 1) will form the
substance of the following chapters.
Primary organizational triggers
The data collected from interviewees (and largely corroborated by
organizational pronouncements and documentation) on the formal change
objectives for the organization studied are now presented. As with the other
data presented in this and succeeding chapters, the data from the two
organizations have been pooled. In part, this has been done to preserve the
anonymity of the sources of data. Second, it was done because the focus of the
research, and the sampling, was to be on a number of not atypical managers
who were all working in situations of attempted significant organizational
change. This focus and, in organization survey terms, the relatively small
sample size meant that no serious attempt was made to distinguish between the
managers locations nor, indeed, their functions and levels. However,
company-specific reports and presentations were assembled and delivered.

The research
context

Primary organizational trigger(s)

Triggers sensed and perceived

Secondary, personal trigger(s)

17
Helping and
hindering factor

Individual path(s)/processes

Outcome(s) of the journeys

Comparisons of these assemblages of data did reveal some differences,

particularly in the manner that the changes were initially introduced. Such
differences will be reported on later. Overall, however, it was the similarity of
the two assemblages of data which was most striking. Further, the diversity
between individual managers data was of a different order to that observed
between the two organizations involved in the study. A further reason for
pooling the data was that both the organizations sampled were attempting
(along with many others of their ilk) very similar changes. Not only were the
changes qualitatively similar but, in terms of what had gone before and, indeed,
what was still ongoing for both these organizations, they represented, on the
surface at least, significant and large shifts in custom and practice.
Listed below are the main areas of organizational change objectives
(categorized on the McKinsey 7S model[42]). As such, the list catalogues the
primary, sensed and initiating triggers to the managers journeys through
change. Thus, changes were attempted in:
Business strategy: for example, changes towards focusing on core
businesses, changes in targeted markets and major shifts in technology.
Organizational structure: for example, restructuring, reorganization and
relocation at the macro level of structure. At the micro level, there were
changes to the nature, content and responsibilities of jobs.
Organizational systems: including attempts to dismantle and reduce
bureaucracy, and major information technology initiatives.
Staffing within the organizations: hard changes were largely focused
on headcount (so called rightsizing which almost always meant, and
eventually was called, downsizing). Soft changes were widespread
and included, for example, individual and group redundancies, changes
to job occupants, career paths and working relationships.

Figure 1.
Journeys through
organizational change

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Skills requirements: comprising changes in the nature of skills

demanded, standards of performance and performance criteria.

Managerial style: including quite specific demands on how managers

approach their work and how they relate to and behave with their
subordinates, peers and superiors.

Shared values: requiring shifts in orientation, values, beliefs and basic

assumptions what the organizations, in common with Schein[43], call
organization culture.
Some examples quoted from interviewees of each category of organizational
change objective are detailed below. These descriptors or definitions of the
primary organizational triggers are, hopefully, self-explanatory. The primary
organizational trigger descriptions are as follows:

Strategic changes
Focus on core business, contracting out, internal competition, a new strategy for the
division, a major shift in technology.

Structural changes
Macro:
Major restructuring, company divided up, new company established, relocation,
management tier removed, departmental merger, reorganization of department,
devolvement of function to the line.

Micro:
Devolvement Im now financially self-sufficient. I have my own staff on procurement
contracts, and soon, personnel, new job, part of my job has gone, a bigger job, a
more varied, broader work base, higher profile with more client contact, new things
to do.

Systems changes
Computerization, removing bureaucracy.

Staffing changes
Hard:
Rightsizing, downsizing, large numbers made redundant, numbers reduction
exercise, halve the number in two years, from 600 to 95, managerial responsibility
for downsizing my own department, a freeze on my resources.

Soft:
Spectre of redundancy, prospect of redundancy, threatened job loss, given notice
that I was to leave, responsibility for deciding who stays and who goes, boss is
leaving, team is being split up, all to go, new boss, new relationships with former
colleagues, dislodged by a successor, effectively demoted, no organizational
mechanism to get me out of a location, told you have sole responsibility for your own
career.

The research
context

Skills changes
Nature:
Finance is new to me, stepping back, working with contractors, business
management, listening skills, using all our faculties, empowerment.

Standard:
League tables based on cost, criteria changed to commercial ones, Ive now got a
profit and loss bottom line, different performance measures.

19

Style changes
Teamworking, networking, new style of doing things, taking responsibility for what
you do, liberation of talent, accountability, freedom, empowered.

Shared value change

Shift in values, finance dominates the new culture, not enough professionals too many
generalists/good brains, much more client based, shift to internal customer driven,
culture shock, a different culture, a new culture, values to practicalities.

Level of the changes

The primary organizational triggers presented in Table I are representative of
what the interviewed managers identified as being demanded by their
organizations and demanded of them as individuals. Again, it is important to
note that the data have been pooled. Thus, not all of these changes are being
required of all of the individual managers. Indeed, depending on where each
individual was placed within his or her organization, and depending on what
was communicated to, sensed and perceived by the individual, then the level of
the changes sought from each individual could be different. All individuals were
being asked to change and each received more than one change demand from
across the categories of organizational triggers. Nevertheless, and as depicted in
Figure 2, the level of the changes could be viewed as different for different
individuals.
Negatively perceived triggers
Isolation
Inattention
Hopelessness
Abandonment
Wrong-doing
Not right
Unrecognized
Deviousness
Not in control
Heartbreak
Chaos
Trapped
Financial threat
Positively perceived triggers
Buoyancy
Opportunities for:
Accomplishment
Movement

Unsupported
Relationships disrupted
Instability
Betrayal
Unsafe
Unreality

Unreciprocated
Insecurity
Unaccomplishment
Unclear
Disrespect
Distasteful

Freedom

Autonomy

Recognition
Learning

Control
Creativity

Table I.
Secondary, personal
triggers

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Turbulence

Congruence

20

Primary
organizational
triggers

Stress

Variance

Figure 2.
Level of the changes

Discontinuity

The categorization in Figure 2 is based on the researchers interpretations of the

level of the changes faced by individual managers. The managers individual
perceptions voiced in their own words will be reported later. Earlier,
distinctions were made between three different levels of change, those of:
turbulence, variance and discontinuity. All were represented in the sample.
Turbulence
Despite the magnitude of the changes being attempted from an organizational perspective, for particular individuals albeit the minority these changes actually
meant little more than turbulence. Such turbulence either took the indirect form of
noise and ripples from the situation around them or was direct but low-level
agitation in their own circumstances. Essentially, such turbulence demanded
managing, but did not, at the end of the day, require the individual managers to
alter their status quo. Thus, for example, not all work was devolved nor contracted
out of the organizations; not all departments were reorganized or cut in staffing
numbers; nor were all the managers required to develop new skills or new ways of
working. Further, for example, some groups and individuals were already
evidencing the values that were being sought across the whole organization.
Variance
Beyond turbulence, other organizational changes were essentially of a variance
nature. Such changes required alterations, but these were gradual and broadly
consistent with the way that managers were already developing. For example,
some individuals and groups had already absorbed and were starting to enact a
lean and mean philosophy; others were already wrestling with a more teambased way of working, and so on. For such managers, the required
organizational changes did little more than bring ongoing issues more into the
foreground and imbue them with a greater urgency.
Discontinuity
Having identified that for some managers, the nature of some of the changes
were limited to turbulence and variance, it is important to stress that for the

greater majority of the managers at least, some and for many managers, most
of the organizational changes required of them fell within the category
identified as Discontinuity. Hence, a good number of the organizational triggers
implied major discontinuities for the managers, requiring significant shifts in
the way things were done and requiring cessation of how things used to be.
Such changes demanded the processes of unlearning and relearning and not
just learning. Thus, for many managers, their assumptions concerning job
security and career progression were broken. Further, a number of managers
were asked to drop their concern with professional performance criteria (now
asserted as leading to gold plating) and to replace these with business and
market-based criteria. Still other managers were asked to make radical changes
to their ways of working, for example, by being required to dispense with the
services of the majority of their subordinates and to act as contract managers of
outside resources. Many other examples of discontinuities will emerge in
subsequent pages. All required the managers to develop new ways of thinking
and behaving.
Congruence
Another category of required change is described by the term congruence. Here,
the organizational changes being sought, while discontinuous, were also
congruent with individual managers often long-held desires. How they wanted
to be and behave as managers, which in the past had largely been suppressed,
was (at long last) being legitimized and sought after by their organizations.
Examples of congruent changes included an affirmation of long-held views as
to the extent of overmanning and unnecessary bureaucracy, a confirmation of
firmly-held beliefs concerning the real potential and ability within the company,
which had, until now, been unacknowledged and untapped in the allocation of
responsibilities, and a now shared view of a long-standing recognition of the
pay-offs from staff working with, rather than for and over, others.
Stress
The final category identified in Figure 2 is that of stress. While strictly
speaking not a level of change in itself, the inclusion of this category does serve
to capture the fact that, whatever the level of change, the sheer number of
change requirements can itself be viewed as almost certainly predicating of
managerial stress. Data presented in the later chapters will substantiate this
view. Into what is admittedly something of a diffuse category are also included
those organizational changes which represented to particular individuals a
recurrence and potential reliving of previously encountered situations of
stressful change. For example, the manager who was faced with prospective
redundancy and unemployment for the second time in her career; the manager
whose previous team had been torn apart only two years earlier; and the
manager who had only just successfully emerged from a previous enforced
career change. In each such case, the proposed organizational changes were not
only potential stressors in their own right, but in addition invoked previous
stress experiences in terms of issues, processes, responses and effects.

The research
context

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Organizational change attempts may require stress management as well as

change management.
Taken overall, the diverse range of changes sought by the organization had
very different implications for individual managers. Some changes required
managing, some coping with stress. Other changes required what Argyris and
Schon[10] termed single- and double-loop learning and, beyond that, still other
changes required what Koestler[11] called reframing, and Bateson[9] level three
learning. Some of the changes necessitated learning, others and the greater
number required unlearning and relearning.
Such diversity is of itself an important observation, indicating that though
significant organizational change attempts often require a similar level of
change in individual managers, this is by no means always the case. The
diversity was even more apparent when the researchers moved on in the
interviews to collect data beyond the initially sensed, primary organizational
triggers to change, to the individual managers perceived, secondary triggers to
change.
Secondary, personal triggers
Individuals do not respond directly to sensed, primary organizational triggers
to change. Rather, they filter, process and personalize such triggers into
perceived implications, that is, into secondary personal triggers to change.
Hence, different individuals within the same work team may perceive the same
change directive in very different ways. For example, the effective dismantling
of a long-established career ladder for promotion might, for one manager,
trigger issues of betrayal, for another insecurity, for another rule breaking, and
for others opportunities for autonomy and self-management. Further, what may
be perceived by some as small changes, may be viewed by others as significant
discontinuities.
Listed in the first part of Table I is a categorization of secondary personal
triggers comprising negatively perceived issues which were raised for individual
managers in the research sample. The positively perceived triggers are presented
in the second part of Table I. The length of the lists provide a crude, but
meaningful picture of the overall perceptions of the personal triggers; that is, they
were more frequently perceived as negative rather than positive.
The following lists present descriptors for each secondary trigger. The
descriptors draw on the interview transcripts and serve to define the meaning
of each trigger.
Negatively perceived triggers
Isolation:
Isolation of work role and discipline, physical separation, no one calling, lack of
team gel cohesiveness communications.

Inattention:
Not being nurtured, not being looked after.

Unsupported:
Loss of someone to rely on, turn to, loss of support, no one to come to my aid.

Unreciprocated:
Unspoken contract breached, what price loyalty now?, my wishes unmet.

The research
context

Hopelessness:
Not a lot that I can do, after all that effort, whats the point, why bother?, I cant do
anything about it.

Abandonment:
Deserted, abandoned, who will replace them in my life?, unwanted, loss of my
boss he was like a father to me, its like a family and someone dying.

Relationships disrupted:
Dramatic relationship changes, relationships disrupted.

Insecurity:
My world is collapsing, senior management needed their comfort factor.

Wrongdoing:
Loss of criteria, criticized for what Ive done, theyre not playing to the rules laid
down.

Not right:
I felt blamed, not pleasing.

Instability:
Changed again!, loss of stability, loss of the old ways.

Unaccomplishment:
The prospect of not being able to meet my objectives, lack of competitive progress,
failure, not racing on, being knocked back.

Unrecognized:
Implied that Im not good enough, not valued around here, I needed to be recognized
for what Id done and be told, loss of sense of OK-ness, not being rewarded as I
deserved.

Deviousness:
Something political is going on, others are not being straight, manoeuvring and
manipulation, lack of openness, deviousness.

Betrayal:
A breach of trust, Ive been let down again, letting people down is painful,
betrayed.

Unclear:
Unclear expectations, lack of clarity, wishy-washy guidelines, In limbo,
ambiguous.

Not in control:
Not being able to steer, not calling the shots little control over, being controlled,
out of the blue caught on the hop.

Heartbreak:
Loss of long-standing friends people I really cared about.

Unsafe:
The future looked risky and no chance to turn a handle on it, alien, I find hire and
fire quite paralysing, fabric is being torn apart its dangerous, the flack the
fury.

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Disrespect:
A statistic not a person, typecast, told as an afterthought, my voice is not being
listened to, dismissive assumptions about me, my stated beliefs were undermined,
my views were not sought.

Chaos:
Unmitigated chaos they keep throwing the balls in the air. Its out of control,
confusion, mixed messages, uncertainty not knowing what to do, where to
contribute, loss of all sense of judgement, going round in circles.

24

Trapped:
Theres no way out, loss of freedom Im no longer independent, the ratchet is
tightening.

Unreality:
People are not being honest about the reality, theres a discrepancy between words and
actions, it doesnt exist theres no shape, no form, no methodology, no people.

Distasteful:
The normal process of being decent to people has been thrown out of the window,
inhumane, distasteful, disgraceful behaviour, people are getting stitched up,
theyre identifying the weakest members and culling the pack, very transparent
expediency.

Financial threat:
Loss of income stream, a basic animal fear I wont be able to support my family.

Positively perceived triggers

Buoyancy:
Not going down, its a chance to avoid going down into neutrality.

Freedom:
A very high degree of freedom, I can throw off all my baggage and leave virtually
everything behind, an opportunity to be sleek and free-wheeling.

Autonomy:
An opportunity Id been seeking, it meets my parameters, liberation, autonomy.

Opportunity for accomplishment:

Challenge exciting, a chance to do something to achieve, an opportunity to
contribute at a higher level, a chance to take responsibility for getting things done, a
chance to impact.

Opportunity for recognition:

A chance to stand out get recognition, an opportunity to be noticed.

Opportunity for control:

Getting rid of bureaucratic administration, being able to steer exciting, an
opportunity to have a bigger say in running things.

Opportunity for movement:

Out of staleness, out of a pedestrian job, something different.

Opportunity for learning:

An opportunity to learn, I need to learn to get on top of the situation, an
opportunity to broaden my skills.

The research
context

Opportunity for creativity:

A chance to create a new concept, the tremendous work of truly creative and
innovative thinking, an opportunity to break the mould.

Rather than comment on the above in detail the lists are again intended to be
self-explanatory it is perhaps more revealing to reflect on the nature of these
perceived triggers in relation to some of the literature on individual
experiencing of change which was considered earlier. Specifically, it can be seen
that, among the labels and descriptors for the negatively perceived secondary
triggers, there is initial evidence that individual managers are variously
experiencing their situations as:
discontinuous and requiring a transition, as defined by Parker and
Lewis[23] that is, a personal awareness of a discontinuity in ones life
space and of the new behavioural responses required;
traumatic in the sense used by Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] that is,
encountering sudden events that are outside of the managers usual
experience, and which are distressing to the point that people are left
feeling uncertain about a world that has now become unpredictable, and
in which the fabric of everyday existence has been torn away to reveal
hazard, danger and risk;
involving loss, including some of the cited examples of loss studied by
Manz et al.[34] (namely power, influence and importance) and
Marris[33] (namely the discrediting of assumptions such as I am
invulnerable, the world is safe, orderly and predictable, I am a good
person and bad things happen to bad people).
For many of the managers interviewed, then, the changes sought by their
organizations, when filtered and processed through their perceptions, emerge as
personal triggers to change which are likely to induce the kinds of emotionality,
thinking and behaviour which were highlighted earlier in the chapter. Further,
and following Spencer and Adams work[22], this may also prove to be the case
even when the secondary triggers are viewed positively. Data substantiating
and expanding on this theme will be presented in the next chapter.
Conclusion
The latter part of this chapter has served to introduce the research findings on
the organizations formal and communicated change objectives and how these
were perceived by individual managers. A comparison of the findings on the
primary organizational triggers with those for the perceived secondary
personal triggers provides much food for thought. Thus, while organizations
may believe that what they have initiated is a series of defined change
initiatives, in fact, they may have set in train a range of triggers to change,
which may be very different to those intended. At one level, line managers are
indeed seeking to manage towards achieving the recognized objectives of the

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primary organizational triggers. At another level, on the ground as it were,

what managers are actually managing (or not, as the case may be) are the
dynamics and processes provoked by a variety of secondary triggers to change.
Thus, they are working with individual perceptions and experiencing, which,
whether voiced or not, represents the actuality of change situations.
Though, from an organizational standpoint, change management may well
be focused on delayering, devolvement or teamwork (to mention just three
examples from Table I), the reality of such changes is that what is being
managed and facilitated is individuals experiences and responses to issues
such as wrongdoing, disrespect or freedom (to mention just three examples).
The latter is the actuality of the change management task. Further, there is
already evidence in the data presented that terms such as loss, transition, stress
and trauma will not be out of place in describing at least some of that actuality
as will be seen in the next chapter.

2. The constituents and

processes of change journeys

Change
journeys

Introduction
This second chapter bridges the triggers to, and the outcomes of, the
organizational change attempts. It seeks to report and comment on the individual
experiences, processes and responses provoked by the change. As such, it
provides the middle chapters in the managers stories of change. The final
chapters, namely outcomes, are considered in the third chapter. The structure of
this chapter is made up of five elements:
(1) framework or map of the components of change journeys;
(2) tables of descriptors which exemplify and provide a definition of each of
the framework components;
(3) a series of exemplar figures depicting some individuals actual change
journeys with commentaries on those journeys;
(4) sections which link the research findings back to the literature and raise
issues emerging from the data;
(5) some concluding comments as to the nature of individual experiencing of
organizational change.
The map of the components of individuals change journeys provides a frame on
which to hang the experiential data collected in the research. It also serves to
reference other accounts in the literature, and brings together what were
previously identified as the reactions and responses, the stresses and struggles,
the wounding and healing, the learning, unlearning and relearning, the broken
assumptions and reframed beliefs and the losses and gains experienced by
individuals in change. Additionally, the framework enables links to be made
with those parts of the literature on change from which emerge the various
sequences, stages, cycles and processes which put a form on the identified
experiences.
The descriptor tables present data abstracted directly from the research
interview transcripts and, along with the figures of exemplar journeys and
commentaries, ensure that a major aspiration for the research is met. Thus, the
experiential data collected what was going on in the guts, hearts and minds of
the individual managers were not left behind in the data analysis, but retained
so as to ground the emerging frameworks and conclusions in the actuality of
individuals experience of change.

27

The constituents of change journeys

Figure 3 represents a summary of the research findings concerning individual
managers experience of change in their organizations.
The figure may be seen as a map describing the terrain across which
individuals make their change journeys. Overall, and referring to a summary of
the literature presented in the first chapter, the map is constructed on a time
dimension, representing shifts in orientation from out of the past, in the present

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Worry work

Sensing

Sensing
Minimizing
Yearning

Positioning

Mitigation

Influence

Protest

Evading

Disorganization
Despair
Hoping
Maintaining
Shock

Awaiting

Holding on
Minimizing
Maintaining
Yearning
Hoping

Mitigation
Protest
Disorganization
Despair

Sharing

Letting go
Realization
Acceptance
Steadying
Moving
Testing
Search for
meaning

Figure 3.
The components of
change journeys

Moving away

Moving on

and the future. Concomitantly, there is a shift in orientation from the old
towards the new. The map comprises a number of major regions or phases
labelled as sensing, worry work, positioning, shock, holding on, hoping, sharing,
letting go, moving, moving away and moving on. Within these phases are a large
number of components which, taken together with the phases, represent a wide
range of differing calling points in managers journeys through change. The
components are listed under the appropriate phases in Figure 3, and are defined
by the corresponding component descriptor tables presented in Tables II-XXI.
The descriptors capture the feelings, thoughts and behaviours which together
make up the experiences of individuals as they journey across different parts of
the change map. The tables are intended to be self-explanatory.
Where gaps occur in the tables it is because no direct quotes were obtained
from the sample of interviewed managers. Additionally, the framework may not
be complete, emerging as it does only from the research data collected. An

extension of the interviewee sample may have produced still further phases,
components and descriptors. Taken together, however, the contents of Figure 3
and Tables II-XXI richly depict the terrain of managers change journeys.
Observations and comments on the relationships between the detail of the
framework constituents and other frameworks presented in the literature will be
reserved until later in this chapter. Before that, it is important to comment on the
dynamics and nature of the framework, and to provide examples of how it is lived
out in the processes and responses of individual managers experiencing of
organizational change attempts.

Change
journeys

29

The dynamics of change journeys

As noted, Figure 3 describes a map of the terrain across which individual
managers journey through change. The phases and components represent the
spectrum of routes and calling points on these journeys. Again, as noted earlier,
the map is constructed on a time dimension. Thus, there is a starting point to each
journey (up to 18 months previously) when individuals sensed that change was
on the agenda. The finish point, some 18 months on, is, for some managers at
least, an emergence from their journeys by moving on or moving away
(psychologically if not physically) from their organizations. That said, it must not
be inferred that individuals proceed from these start points to these end points in
a deterministic manner. Their journeys do not progress through each of the
phases in turn, proceeding in an ordered step-by-step fashion along a common
route. Certainly, it appears to be the case that, overall, individuals journeys
through change progress from the starting point of the framework and move
towards the end point but, beyond that, it is important to note the research
findings which suggest that:
Phase

Reaction

Feelings

Anxiety, e.g. apprehensive, nervous, I felt scared, concerned,

uncertain, on guard, red lights flashing
Speculating, e.g. whats going on?, whats going to happen?, anticipating
worst case scenarios, what will it mean?, no real way of knowing
Intelligence work, e.g. corridor activity, grapevining, intelligence work,
scanning, picking up signals, networking like mad, asking questions,
trying to keep abreast of the situation

Thoughts
Behaviours

Sub-phase

Reaction

Feelings
Thoughts

On edge, e.g. uncertainty, edgy, nervous

Waiting, e.g. waiting to hear it seemed like forever, well see what
happens, what next?, will it be me?, the spectre is still there
Pausing, e.g. we held our breath, all went quiet, why start something
new (everything is going to change)?, sticking it out, drifting

Behaviours

Table II.
Sensing

Table III.
Worry work: awaiting

Personnel
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Sub-phase
Influencing
Feelings
Thoughts

30
Behaviours

Evading
Feelings
Thoughts

Behaviours
Table IV.
Positioning

Reaction

Fight, e.g. excitement, confident, I was ready to race on

Options, e.g. I need to review my situation sharply, its an opportunity to be
noticed to steer to influence directly , where best to position myself
wheres the best chance?
Maneouvring, e.g. I made noises, I was very influential, I didnt sit there
and do nothing, I talked and wrote to a lot of people, I was trying to mobilize
support for what was coming, I got commitment from the MD, so that I
wouldnt be bypassed, I joined a taskforce
Flight, e.g. I felt like walking out, it didnt sink in, discomfort, Id had
enough
Eschewing, e.g. I didnt want to deal with it, the discussions need to take
place with my boss Im a pawn in all of this, its more than I can take,
I know whats going on, and I dont want to play that game
Withdrawing, e.g. Im better out, separating, I withdrew Im no good at
politics, I didnt join in, backing off, I withdrew, I didnt feel comfortable
with that process

Phase

Reaction

Feelings
Thoughts

Stunned, e.g. shocked, filled with horror, stunned, numb, astonished

Dazed, e.g. out of the blue, wed had no prior notice, I should have known
but it was a real shock, crisis!, I got it wrong, different criteria are being
used, It wasnt an exercise, were guinea pigs!, whats happening?,
totally confused, disaster!
Immobilized, e.g. panicked, wandering in a daze, disconnected, it
knocked me back

Behaviours
Table V.
Shock
Sub-phase

Reaction

Feelings

Suppressing, e.g. I switched into another mode and shut it out, I suppressed
what I felt, I needed that rationalization
Diminishing, e.g. you try to rationalize it, its a mistake, it could be
temporary, this wasnt deliberate, I dont believe theyll go through with
it, I cant believe it, this isnt happening!, it wont have a big impact,
it wont affect me, its still the same job I wanted to see it that way
Simulating, e.g. I carried on as before, I discussed it with others we
rationalized it, outwardly, everything is OK

Thoughts

Behaviours
Table VI.
Holding on: minimizing

Individuals journeys through change are best viewed as an unfolding

process, in accord with Spencer and Adams[22] view of life transitions as
being processes rather than events.

The various phases and components are linked, but only in the sense of
having valencies towards some parts of the change journeys more than
towards other parts. This finding equates with Hodgkinson and
Stewarts[25] research on the phenomenon of catastrophe. They found that
it was useful to see the experiencing of catastrophe as having a number of
components thoughts, feelings and behaviours which are interlinked,

Change
journeys

31
Sub-phase

Reaction

Feelings
Thoughts

Oddness, e.g. feelings of unreality, it was an incredibly weird feeling

Unreality, e.g. its still hard for me to think of her as having left, this isnt
real, Ive got to appear happy, what am I doing?
Upholding, e.g. busy dealing with practical things, soldiering on theres a
job to be done, carrying on

Behaviours

Table VII.
Holding on:
maintaining

Reaction
Sub-phase

Yearning

Mitigating

Feelings

Grief, e.g. very sad, dreadful,

like grief, missing, painful
Longing, e.g. the people the things
wed done, I was proud of what we
were, we were little families I miss
that, we no longer meet I miss that,
repeated reviewing like a dreadful
nightmare
Replaying, e.g. reliving the way it was
put to me, sleepless nights, vivid
dreams, replaying the events leading up
to , replaying in different ways,
I miss it and have great difficulty
withdrawing from it. But its still there,
and when you want to you can

Suppressing, e.g. jollying one

another along
Avoiding, e.g. I try not to think
about them, avoiding all
thoughts of, forget it, you
cant dwell on it

Thoughts

Behaviours

Distracting, e.g. keeping busy,

putting on a brave face its
difficult

Sub-phase

Reaction

Feelings

Angry and guilty, e.g. I felt anger inside me, very angry, rage, furious,
very resentful, very pissed off, I felt I deserved more, a lot of guilt
Blaming, e.g. angry, but not sure who to be angry with, you dont
understand, they do a good job and anyone cant do it, this is mad
lunacy appalling disgraceful, such absolute bullshit, its the wrong
way to do it, what about the culture theyre spouting about?, whats gone
wrong with the system? Id been doing a good job, look what you made me
do, what have I done?, whats wrong with me?, I felt guilty that I
was staying, I felt blamed and scapegoated
Expressing (limited) anger, e.g. limited assertion, irritability, I got really
angry and then felt guilty about it, I felt like hitting someone but it wouldnt
do any good

Thoughts

Behaviours

Table VIII.
Holding on: yearning
and mitigating

Table IX.
Holding on: protest

Personnel
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24,2
32

and some of which tend to come earlier in the process of working, through
issues, others later.
The different steps in the journeys through change are not always distinct
and separate. Thus, the various phases and components emerge, unfurl,
move into the foreground and recede into the background as the journey
Sub-phase

Reaction

Feelings

Destablized, e.g. emotionally confused, I felt destablized, undermined,

weird, it was all too much, I felt split, it took me over the edge
Disintegrating, e.g. whats happening?, I got so confused, in a muddle,
have I the right perceptions?, I cant rely on my perception, where am I
now?, I dont understand what theyre doing, self-doubt, self-critical,
unsure
Disordered, e.g. no sense of direction, aimless, not in control, I fell
apart, cracking up, butterflying, totally inefficient

Thoughts

Table X.
Holding on:
disorganization

Behaviours

Sub-phase

Reaction

Feelings

Despondent, e.g. sadness, despair, disappointment, depressed,

drained, demotivated, I felt like crying, very, very vulnerable,
a shocking feeling of rejection, a real feeling of desperation, I felt
isolated, I got lower, in a hole, very dark, a painful sense of failure
Hopeless, e.g. I felt that Id been singled out for destruction, a victim,
I dont know why I bother, hopeless, futile, what can I do about it?,
after all that effort, pawns in the game, I might as well be dead for all
anyone in this building cared, Im on the road to ruin
Withdrawing, e.g. my boss found it very difficult to communicate at all
he avoided me, they passed me on, no one wanted to know,
I withdrew, collapsing, they didnt understand, I went home and had
a damn good cry

Thoughts

Behaviours
Table XI.
Holding on: despair
Nature
Feelings

Vulnerable, hit hard

Thoughts

Its important to talk about it, telling others is hard

Behaviours

People who had stared down this hole themselves were very helpful. They
kept my spirits up, Counselling from a consultant, I talked with my wife

Phase

Reaction

Feelings
Thoughts

Hopeful, optimistic (for me)

I hope this is temporary I dont think I could live with it, I know what
its like and it is possible to come out with a positive result, the feeling was
that if you were left, it would be good

Table XII.
Sharing

Table XIII.
Hoping

Despair

Behaviours

Sub-phase

Reaction

Nature 1: realized
Feelings
Various, e.g. discomfort, relief washed over me, tremendous
Thoughts
it sunk in, a gradual realization that , it became more real, it became
clear that , it clicked, the reality became self-evident
Behaviours
Owning up to myself the reality of what Id done
Nature 2: shocked realization
Feelings
Knocked back, surprise and horror, negative, shit!
Thoughts
Sudden realization that , the project doesnt exist!, were back in a
mess!, we dont call the shots!, the writing is on the wall!, God, Ive really
made a mistake and I passed up three job offers!, my God, something is
fundamentally wrong with the infrastructure of this organization!
Behaviours
Various, e.g. little control, I literally almost walked out
Nature 3: reviewed realization
Feelings
Dawning
Thoughts
Theyre not a complete bunch of shits were contracting, no one is saying
that we dont want you but there are no jobs, youre the only one whos
looking after your career, theres no negotiating about this, in the end,
on reflection, I realized that it would have been unlikely that my department
would continue to exist with that number of managers
Behaviours
It triggered me to fundamentally review, a complete rethink, reviewing,
self-questioning

Sub-phase

Change
journeys

33

Table XIV.
Letting go: realization

Reaction

Nature 1: accepting
Feelings
Various, e.g. very painful, coming from a zero base, relief
Thoughts
Its very painful to let go of what youre good at, enjoy and feel comfortable
with but there you are, overall, I agreed with the basis of the decisions,
I accepted that , its common sense, Ive nothing to lose anything is
an achievement, things are never going to be the same again
Behaviours
Deciding to survive, Ive got to deal with it, When youve got the decision
as a fait accomplis, my nature is to look forward, Letting go, You have to
accept whats happened and get on with it
Nature 2: reluctant accepting
Feelings
Disappointment, uncomfortable, less than happy, resignation
Thoughts
I didnt accept the reasons, but I did accept it, Ive got to do it, theres no
real alternative, its the only option Ive got
Behaviours
I stayed I wasnt pushed over the edge enough, I got on board I wasnt
convinced, but I had nowhere else to go
Nature 3: welcoming/accepting
Feelings
Wonderful!, pleased, excitement, a superb situation, I felt good again
Thoughts
Fine, agreement, its the way I would want to work, back on track
again, at long last!, I fit that!, its an opportunity a challenge, I can
throw off all my baggage
Behaviours
Without this, I could think it but never do it because of the (organizational)
blocks, the change came easy to me Id found the organization frustrating
in many respects, liberation!

Table XV.
Letting go: acceptance

Personnel
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24,2
34

Sub-phase

Reaction

Feelings

Stabilizing, e.g. the wash of horror easing away, tired and very flat for two
months, in neutral, in limbo, a sense of more stability, fragile, but
a growing sense of optimism

Thoughts

Adjusting, e.g. I spent a long time wilfully forgetting, a sense of needing to

feel better about myself, no clear idea of what Im going to be doing, what the
people will be like, how were going to do it, looking at the future, sense of
starting anew

Behaviours

Settling, e.g. putting a distance between me and the past, getting back into
shape, I wasnt about to get into 12-hour days again, I was slow to get into
it, building a platform, it took me a long time to settle

Sub-phase

Reaction

Feelings

Aroused, e.g. excited, adrenalin going, enjoying the challenge doing it

better than the others, fun, tremendously stimulating, re-establishing
my confidence
Or uncomfortable, difficult, an incremental fight, frustration,
wearing, a very emotional time it took a toll on me
Addressing, e.g. need to get on with it lets address this, theres work to
be done, starting to feel that I could get involved, the reality is less bad
than I expected, it started happening, pioneers!
Or choppy waters, mental turmoil, the sheer work, snowed under,
Im doomed to fail, I cant work any harder, I wish Id gone
Trying, e.g. learning, questioning, attending courses, taking
ownership, trying to put it into practice, very new behaviours,
calculated risks, getting on top of, breaking the mould
Or struggling hard, a real hard slog, a long, long working day, working
ridiculous hours, conflict, playing the game but not getting rewarded

Table XVI.
Letting go: steadying

Thoughts

Behaviours

Table XVII.
Moving
Nature

Evangelism

Feelings
Thoughts

Exhilaration, excitement, on a high

Making them realize that there is a different way of doing things, my hope
is to liberate others
Passing my experience on, cross-fertilizing, walking the talk, preaching
the gospel

Behaviours
Table XVIII.
Sharing

progresses. Such dynamics parallel the findings of Parkes on loss[39].

Parkes described the consequences of loss not as a set of symptoms which
appear then fade away but rather as a set of clinical pictures which blend
into and replace one another. Similarly, Hodgkinson and Stewart[25]
describe the components of grief as waxing and waning, continually
blending dynamically.
More than one phase or component of a journey can be experienced more
or less concurrently. Indeed, and beyond that, any one individual might

Sub-phase

Search for meaning

Feelings

Various, e.g. sadness, back at the bottom of the roller coaster, miserable,
washed out, exceptionally low
Or reflective, hopeful, it still amazes me
Formulating, e.g. I understand more now, its been an education, it
reminds me of, it was all done at the top in theory, times have changed
Id always believed in fairness and justice, for a while, it was less acceptable
to behave in certain ways for image reasons, the expectation that change
will occur quickly is unrealistic, getting a clear view of what Im good at
and not good at, I can see why
Reviewing, e.g. its important to put things in perspective and learn from
them, putting the company into perspective its important to go through
this process, a deep personal review, self-questioning, the time has
come to re-evaluate, finding an identity

Thoughts

Behaviours

Phase

Reaction

Feelings

Various, e.g. Ive moved from considerable disquiet to beyond acceptance to

somewhere around welcoming, Im feeling very confident at the moment and
this feeling extends into the future, the horizon has lifted
Or let down again, sad
Resolving, e.g. sadly, my relationship with the organization is getting less.
Theres more chance of me leaving than ever before, the role of the company
in my life is not what it was. Im not getting the value out of the relationship
that I used to, Ive made up my mind, in the long term, I wont be with this
organization, Im clear that I want to work as an independent
Proceeding, e.g. Im positioning myself to operate outside the company,
theres a lot to do, Im at a jumping off point, looking positively outside

Thoughts

Behaviours

Phase

Reaction

Feelings

Various, e.g. Im feeling better about myself it took a long time, I feel
powerful
Or I feel sad, Im slightly battered
Resolving, e.g. Ive joined my sense of self, its okay to be me, Im
valued because I bring years in the company and grey hair!, weve lost
a lot of the negative vibes the future is bright, Ive been at the forefront
the flag ship!, the organization has a long way to go Id like to be part
of it
Proceeding, e.g. Im changing and growing, Ive adjusted, Im in control,
now we understand how to do it, we now do it a different way, its second
nature now

Thoughts

Behaviours

also be embarked on more than one journey at any one time. These
findings meet agreement in the work of Kubler-Ross[38] on the
experiencing of death and dying. Kubler-Ross notes that the stages that
people go through can exist side by side and at times, overlap. Further,
Spencer and Adams[22] report that it is not uncommon for people to go

Change
journeys

35

Table XIX.
Moving

Table XX.
Moving away

Table XXI.
Moving on

Personnel
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36

through multiple transitions at the same time and be at different points on

each.
Just as Spencer and Adams[22] report that there may be backing and
forthing on the steps in peoples transitions, and that individuals may
get stuck somewhere along the (transition) curve, so too do individuals
progressions across the phases and components of the Figure 3
framework. Individuals journeys do not just move on from one calling
point to the next; backtracking, revisiting and prolonged stopoffs at
any one point are commonplace.
The pace of the journeys undertaken and the speed of progress vary
considerably. Once more, this finding is in accord with other descriptions
of the dynamics of individual change reported in various parts of the
literature. Thus, to quote again from Spencer and Adams[22], it is
possible to go through the whole (transition) curve very quickly. However,
if you are facing a major, significant life change, the adjustment process
will take much longer. Cotgrove et al.[36], researching the loss of loved
ones, also describe the differences in the length of time to go through the
phases and, beyond that, the differences in the intensity of emotion felt in
each phase. This latter observation again concurs with the interviewee
quotes cited in this article. Finally, Parkes[39] describes not only the
differences from one person to another as regards the form of each stage of
grieving, but he also notes differences of duration.
Overall, then, a consideration of the dynamics of the framework presented in
Figure 3 reveals that, in moving from the starting point towards an end point,
each individuals journey across the terrain of change unfolds as a process
composed of interlinked, overlapping phases and components of variable
salience, sometimes separate and sometimes coincident. The speed of progress of
the journeys varies considerably and is uneven with movements back and forth,
as well as stopping altogether at some points.
The research data demonstrated that each individuals journey, though
variously combining and emphasizing different phases and components
(examples of the journeys follow this section of the chapter), is nevertheless
conducted across a common terrain, and can be identified on a common map of
that terrain, namely the framework in Figure 3. Moreover, this framework not
only enables the determination of a route map which is descriptive of individual
managers responses to their organizations change initiatives, but also links
strongly with and accommodates a very broad church of research work
investigating individual change processes in a wide diversity of situations. Thus,
mention has been made so far of work in the areas of life changes and personal
transitions, loss, catastrophe, grief and death and dying. These links reaffirm the
finding in the previous chapter that such terms are not out of place in describing
the experiencing of change within organizational settings.
Further links with the literature will be pursued later when the phases and
components of the framework will be referred to in more detail. However, it is
more appropriate at this point in the presentation of the research findings, to

move beyond discussing the dynamics of the framework in the abstract and to
illustrate its utility in capturing the nature of individual experiencing and stories
of change as revealed in the one-to-one interviews and subsequent transcriptions.
The nature of change journeys
Tables XXII-XXXIII provide examples of individual managers journeys through
change. They are, however, but a few of the many examples collected. Lack of
space forbids a full report of all the journeys described by the interviewee sample.
The tables are constructed from the phases and components represented in
Figure 3 and are accompanied by commentaries extracted from the interview
transcripts. All except Tables XXXII and XXXIII are representative of complete
stories (though not necessarily completed journeys, even though many of the
stories cover an 18-month period). The two exceptions present parts of journeys
taken from longer stories, and are included for the purpose of further illustrating
the range of change journeys experienced by the managers.
It is again anticipated that the tables are largely self-explanatory and that each
table tells its own story of change. However, several general comments may be
helpful by way of initial explanation. Thus:
Table XXII is illustrative of a previous observation that, despite the
significance of the levels of change being attempted across the
organizations, this does not mean that major change is required of every
individual. Here, the manager in question certainly sensed that change
was in the air, and worried over it for a full six months. Nevertheless, at the
end of that period, though there was certainly turbulence, there was no
significant change.
Journey

Reaction

Worry

Oh, Gawd, Im scared

Change
journeys

37

Sensing

I think Ill be staying but will it be me?

Hoping

The feeling is that if you are left, it will be good

Announcement

Yes! Big relief!

Acceptance

Journey
Shock

Acceptance

Testing

Moving on

No change back on track again

Table XXII.
No change

Reaction
I was offered the job in the morning and started in the afternoon.
I knew what the job was, but there was an awful lot to learn
It wasnt planned and it meant a significant change to my life, but
I welcomed it I wouldnt have liked to have stayed in my previous job
I learned very quickly, I asked a lot of questions, read a lot and quickly
got on top of the job. I gave the appearance of being in control within
days though, of course, there were many months of learning
Im in control

Table XXIII.
Getting on top

Personnel
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38

Tables XXIII-XXVI are all examples of managers who journeyed across

the change terrain and emerged moving on. En route, the managers
variously encountered the differing types of change referred to in the first
article of this series. Hence, beyond turbulence there was variance (Table
XXIII), congruence (Table XXV) and discontinuity (Tables XXIV and
XXVI).
Table XXVII provides an example of an individual who journeyed through
change but emerged moving away from the organization (a far from
uncommon result).
Tables XXVIII-XXXIII represent examples of individual managers who
have yet to emerge from their change journeys; though some (Tables XXIX
and XXXIII) are almost there, others (Tables XXVIII, XXX and XXXII) are
stuck en route, and another still awaits and worries (Table XXXI).
Stress (the final category referred to in the first chapter) is particularly
obvious in some of the tables (e.g. Tables XXVI-XXVIII, XXX and
XXXIII).
The journeys through change represented in Tables XXII-XXXIII (and the more
than 50 other journeys not captured in these tables) are undertaken across the
common terrain represented in Figure 3. However, these journeys are conducted
in far from identical circumstances, depending on the nature of the changes
encountered. Thus, some journeys are conducted across an uneven terrain
(namely turbulence), some on an incline (namely variance), some across chasms

Journey
Shock

Reaction
Were guinea pigs

Acceptance

We were apprehensive but we agreed

Testing
Table XXIV.
Its second nature
now

Moving on

Journey
Shock

It was a challenge. It was hard work we were still carrying out our
normal workload a bit of a balancing act. There was conflict and there
were frustrations, but we had some successes, and it was good fun
Its second nature now

Reaction
The announcement

Acceptance

At long last! Wonderful! Liberation!

Testing

Sharing

Exciting, exhilarating. You can go on for a long time on a high, though

Im beginning to get burnt at the edges
Walking the talk. Evangelism my hope is to liberate others

Meaning
Table XXV.
At long last!

Theres an inevitability about this its in the nature of man

Moving on

Its a wonderful time in my life

Journey

Reaction

Sensing

Id been getting all sorts of messages

Change
journeys

Shock

It was totally contrary to everything that Id been told

Despair

I felt very criticized, not understood and totally incompetent

Disorganization
and
minimizing

I felt totally confused. I thought that I must be going nuts. Had I the
the right perception? Paranoid? Id lost all sense of judgement, I felt
out of control; Doubt. Am I dreaming this?

39

Yearning

Despair

Realization
and
protest

Steadying

Testing

Meaning

Sharing

I had vivid dreams, replaying the events leading up to replaying

them in different ways. It was like a dreadful nightmare
I felt isolated but was unable to talk to other people. I had a real
feeling of desperation. At one stage, I didnt think Id survive. It was
a desperate time
I realized that I had no alternative. I had got to get my self-esteem and
credibility back into shape sufficiently to carry on. I had to own up and
take responsibility for what Id done; I felt betrayed, cheapened and
scapegoated. I was very angry with the organization for blaming me.
I am responsible but look what you made me do
I moved (within the organization). I spent a long time wilfully forgetting.
I started to feel better a sense of more stability. I was defensive
fearful that things could get out of control again
I was continuously building anew. I attended courses, some things
went well, It took a long time to feel better about myself
Getting a clear view of what Im good and not good at. Developing
my understanding of the reality and limits of my relationship with the
organization
It was important to talk about it

Moving on

I feel powerful. Ive put things into perspective and learned from them.
It is okay to be me and to trust my perception and that its not the only
one

(namely discontinuity), some are welcomed and often conducted in high spirits
(namely congruity), and some are demanding and frequently arduous (namely
stress).
Moreover, each journey through change comprises a number of phases and
components and involves a diversity of calling points. Thus, some journeys are
fast and direct, while others are much slower and circuitous. Further, all
individuals journeys provoke a very wide range of thoughts and actions. All
journeys are characterized by often deeply felt emotionality. Business-led
attempts at significant organizational change may thus lead to significant
individual experiencing. It is important, therefore, that the initiators of change
take note of the fact that, whatever the shoulds, desired and supposed to bes
of organizational change, the actuality is of the reactions, processes and
responses of human beings embarking on often intensely personal and varied
journeys across frequently difficult terrain.

Table XXVI.
Okay to be me?

Personnel
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Journey
Shock

Reaction
All of a sudden were going back!

Protest

I dont want to Im not ready to go

40

Realization

Were going back! Theres no negotiating about it

Acceptance

Shock

When youve got a decision as a fait accompli, my nature is to look

forward to start seeing the benefit of it
Nothing happened no offers no one called

Minimizing

Early releases are uncommon

Realization

Despair

Minimizing

It sunk in a gradually dawning realization. I might as well have been

dead for all anyone cared
I felt very left out, a shocking feeling of rejection. I called people,
nobody ever called me, not once. I got lower, my boss got more and more
defensive. He was finding it difficult to communicate at all he was
avoiding me
This wasnt a deliberate thing

Protest

Maintaining

There was no one picking up the ball of responsibility. There were

several who ought to have done
I was busy, dealing with practical things

Protest
and
despair

This is mad! This is lunacy! I was very pissed off; It was grim. No
parentage, no imagination, no caring. No one was rooting for me

Shock

Despair

Sharing

Positioning

Realization

This is the situation. If you dont land a job by the end of the month,
then Ill be offering you a redundancy package
A basic animal fear I wont be able to support my family. I felt
unwanted and very, very vulnerable
My family, wife and friends were all very supportive, and people who
who had stared down this hole themselves were very helpful. They kept
my spirits up
Networking in a big way meetings and lunches. The action kept me
from going bonkers
It started to pay dividends I was offered temporary work

Acceptance

Testing

Meaning

Moving away
Table XXVII.
No parentage

Then the joyful occasion a post! He wanted me and I wanted to be

wanted
I started I found that I had lots of relevant experience I can help
euphoria! That put a lot of confidence in me
Im fairly marketable my broadness isnt a liability. One hell of a
change! Im learning who I am, what I stand for, and what Im prepared
to compromise on and not. The rejection, I felt, wasnt personal people
were embarrassed. I wouldnt be frightened again
Im feeling very confident at the moment and this feeling extends into
the future. Im unlikely to go for years and years without getting another
job. Id take the money and go and do it

Journey

Reaction

Sensing

Intelligence work. I was apprehensive how would it affect me?

Change
journeys

Shock

I ended up in the region

Acceptance

Testing

Minimizing

I was sad and disappointed, but then one has to accept that the
management has to make the decision. I didnt accept their reasons,
but I did accept it
I got on with it as best I could, but I found the changed job role very
difficult. I was slow to get into it it filled me with horror
I havent been doing it as I should have been hardly at all

41

Disorganization
and
testing

Journey
Shock

I have become very self-critical perhaps I should have said this

perhaps I should have said more. I think Im becoming more selfcritical and its rubbed off into other areas of my life, especially with
the children; Ive got to do it, Im not through this

Table XXVIII.
One has to accept

Reaction
Out of the blue we were thrust into a completely different scene

Minimizing

I wanted to see it as still the same job and thought that way

Yearning

Acceptance

Testing

I enjoyed my work. I miss it, it was very interesting. I have great

difficulty withdrawing from it but its still there, and when you want
to get your fingernails dirty, you can
Its very painful to let go of what youre good at, enjoy and feel
comfortable with. But there you are
Stepping into unknown waters is difficult

Realization

Ive complete control over the process!

Acceptance

Thats tremendous

Testing

Exciting and new but going through the pain is very difficult

Meaning,
protest
and
yearning

I can now see why but it takes some getting used to. Im seeing it
evolve and starting to understand, but our days are numbered; There
is no reason why I should agree with whats being done but, in my job,
you have to preach the gospel. I choose my words very carefully;
At heart, Im an engineer. I miss it most of us were not brought up in
a step-back environment. I was right in the middle of it and now I
delegate. Only three years ago, we were little families. I miss that

The ubiquitousness of individuals experiencing of change?

This research study has focused on managers experience of change in
organizations. Figure 3 represents a framework or map on which to locate the
experiences. Earlier in this chapter, it was noted how the dynamics of the
framework relate well to other studies on individuals in the wide variety of other
change contexts reported in the literature.

Table XXIX.
Going through the
pains

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Journey
Shock

Reaction
Its happening! It wasnt an exercise

Minimizing

I couldnt believe it

42

Protest

I felt very angry. Exceptions were made. I felt guilty

Yearning

Disorganization

I was proud of what we were. It was like a family and someone dying.
Id been with them through good and bad times. It was almost like grief,
living through that dying
I felt split. It was all too much. It wasnt real

Testing, protest
testing and
disorganization

Despair
and
hoping

Everyone was rushing around, play acting and saying the buzz words;
how could they forget whats going on?; we were working ridiculous
hours. I was stressed; people arent honest about the reality I dont
see it happening. Im confused, butterflying, not in control. Im in a
muddle and totally inefficient
Suddenly, I came to the conclusion nothing will change. How much
do people change when it comes down to it neither peoples attitudes
nor the behaviour at the top
Im yo-yoing up and down. I feel a sense of failure Im on the road
to ruin? Sad; I hope this is temporary I dont think I could live
with it

Journey

Reaction

Sensing

Weve asked questions but, at the moment, we arent getting any

answers
Im very worried. A lot of people are concerned

Realization

Table XXX.
On the road to ruin?

Worrying

Sensing

Maintaining
and
despair

There are all sorts of discussions, grapevining, gossip and speculation

going on. But we dont know whats going to happen, and our own
speculation may be wildly wrong
Youve got to continue to do your job, but its a continual backdrop
which sometimes peaks; You cant put it to one side because it has such
an effect on ones life. Id like to move house we need a bigger house,
but I cant take the riskI cant I cant

Sensing

Coffee machine discussions and concern

Table XXXI.
There is not a lot you
can do

Awaiting
and
despair

You have to stick it out, and see what happens; Im not optimistic.
Theres not a lot you can do. Were pawns in the game. Im a foot soldier
in the army. I go home tired. It doesnt go down well with my wife
and children

Now we will consider the individual phases and components of the framework
(which are presented in Figure 3, defined in Tables I-XXI and represented in
Tables XXII-XXXIII) against the cycles, stages, phases and components reported

Journey
Acceptance

Reaction
Its a mistake

Change
journeys

Testing

Trying to get things done, working hard but snowed under

Yearning
and
despair

I missed them very much; There are no positive outcomes

its counter productive. My department has probably been affected
more than most

43

Despair
and
yearning

It will never be the same again, sadly. I feel sad putting on a face
is difficult; We no longer meet. I miss that we were a nice little team.
I dont like my job like I used to

Journey

Reaction

Sensing

It was clear that by the end of June

Table XXXII.
We no longer meet

Positioning
and awaiting

I was trying to mobilize support for what was coming

The spectre of redundancy was still there

Shock

The team moved on, and I still didnt have a job

Protest

Despair

Realization

What about me? Is there something wrong with me? Ive put in so much
my partner has got two promotions. He did very well out of it but
what good has it done me?
Im left on the outside. I felt left out, betrayed, abandoned and let down
by the organization
No one is saying we dont want you but there are no jobs!

Positioning

I made noises

Acceptance

Despair and
protest and
meaning

It was the only option I had. I got on board. I was less than happy and
I wasnt convinced, but there was nowhere else to go
Disappointment no one has done it for me. Is it a dead-beats hang
out?; I felt I deserved and wanted more; Id always believed in
fairness and justice. Times have changed. It comes home to you that
youre the only one whos looking after your career

in other areas of the literature reviewed in the first chapter. Consequently, this
section will link back to the literature through that first review. By this means, not
only will the framework in Figure 3 be further examined, but a better view will be
formed of how unique or ubiquitous is this framework in capturing individual
experiences of change. Can this framework serve as a template on which to locate
and perhaps bring together the very fragmented literature in this area which, to
date, has largely remained within specialist disciplines? Each area of the
literature considered in the first chapter will be reviewed in turn.

Table XXXIII.
What good has it done
me?

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Cycles of experiencing and learning

As reported in the first chapter, the Gestalt cycle of experiencing identifies the
stages of individual experiences as sensation and awareness, energy
mobilization, contact and resolution, and closure and withdrawal. All these
stages may be seen to be represented in the framework of Figure 3, which at a
macro level may be viewed as representing one experience, and at a micro level
as constituting many, many experiences or cycles within an overall Gestalt[4].
Figure 3 is also illustrative of the myriad possible steps, and the immense
amount of activity and energy that may be involved in moving beyond initial
sensing towards contact or testing. Thus, the holding on and letting go
phases represent major calling and, sometimes, stopping off points, or what
Gestaltists, for example Nevis[4] and Houston[44], would call interruptions or
stoppers preceding contact. The struggle for meaning and its resolution in
moving on or moving away are also well illustrated by the research data, and
paint a very rich picture of the experiences which underpin such terms as
closure and withdrawal.
Kolbs cycle of learning[5] may also be seen to be represented in Figure 3.
Again, the cycles comprising experiencing, reflecting, conceptualizing and
experimenting may be viewed at a macro level and at a micro, hour-by-hour,
day-by-day level as individuals journey across the terrain of change.
Perhaps more revealing, and emphasizing the centrality of learning and
unlearning to change processes, is the representation in the research data of the
major schools of thought[7] on learning. Hence, as will be seen in the next
chapter, and however frequently it was inadequate or inept, much effort was put
in by the organizations as a whole, and by the individuals themselves (for
example, Table XXIII) into information transfer and the transmission and
acquisition of facts and information relating to the organizational changes.
Essentially, the testing phase is, in most cases, a process of discovery learning,
enacting the principles of cybernetic learning through a process of trial and error
or action and feedback, and often involving experimentation with very new
behaviour (Table XVII). Equally, the subsequent component of the moving
phase in Figure 3, that is search for meaning, is almost, by definition,
demonstrative of the cognitive learning processes of assimilation,
accommodation, the building of maps or schema, and the development of
meaning. Some of the interviewee quotes presented in Table XIX emphasize the
consequence of such cognitive processes, for example, understanding, putting
into perspective and seeing why. Further, the categories within Table XVIII of
formulating and reviewing lie at the heart of the cognitive reframing necessary
to unlearn and relearn.
The data presented in Tables II-XXI vividly illuminate the truly experiential
nature of many individuals change journeys. As such, the data also demonstrate
the typical features of experiential learning processes including, for example,
finding an identity (Table XIX), sense of self and growing (Table XXI) and
owning up to oneself and self-questioning (Table XIV). Finally, both social
influence and social conditioning are represented as learning processes within

Figure 3. The process, both of influencing and being influenced by others at both
a conscious and less conscious level through modelling (for example, walking
the talk and evangelism, (Table XXV)); disconnection (for example, feeling
isolated, (Table XXVI), feeling left out and that no one called (Table XXVII), and
not getting any answers (Table XXXI); suggestions (for example, get on board,
(Table XXXIII)); playing roles (for example, play acting (Table XXIX)); and
internalization (for example, its second nature now (Table XXIV)) are very
much in evidence in the data.
Not unexpectedly, then, the literature on experiencing and learning has more
than a little relevance to the individual experiencing of change and can
conveniently be identified and help to inform further Figure 3 and the associated
research data collected. The learning outcomes of individuals change journeys
will be further expanded and evidenced in the final chapter.
Steps in transition
Mention has already been made of how the structure and dynamics of the
framework presented in Figure 3 are in accord with the overall findings of
research into individuals experiences of life changes and personal transitions.
At another level of detail, the seven stages of the transition curve described
by Spencer and Adams[22] as loss of focus, minimisation of impact,
descending into the pit, letting go of the past, testing the limits, searching for
meaning, and integration and moving on, and by Parker and Lewis[23] as
immobilisation, denial, incompetence, acceptance of reality, testing, search for
meaning, and integration, can each be readily identified among the phases
and components of Figure 3. That said, Figure 3 also identifies the additional
phases of sensing, worry work, positioning, hoping and sharing. Moreover, in
Figure 3 a number of additional components within the separate phases are
also identified. Thus, within the holding on phase, the components of
maintaining, yearning, mitigation, protest and despair illuminate the pit
referred to by Spencer and Adams[22]. Beyond that, the tone and potential
composition of the letting go phase is revealed by the identification in Figure
3 of the comparatively discrete components of realization, acceptance and
steadying. Further, it is important to note that the concluding phase of moving
may not be integration and moving on, but rather a moving away from that
which has now been seen, accepted, tested and understood as the new state of
play within the organization.
Finally, and at a further level of detail, the component descriptor (Tables IIXXI) which captures the different thoughts, feeling and behaviours which make
up the various components and phases of Figure 3, offer a very much richer and
more illuminating account of the true felt nature of individuals experiencing of
change than is indicated by Spencer and Adams[22] reference to emotional
hiccups. Overall, then, the figures and tables presented in this chapter
accommodate and can serve to anchor research findings on personal transitions
on a larger template which more fully maps the range of possible routes taken by
individual managers journeying through organizational change.

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Catastrophe
The recent work by Capewell[26], Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] and Lifton[27], in
contributing to an emerging body of knowledge on catastrophe and crisis
psychology, was reviewed in the first chapter. Parallels were noted between
individuals experience of man-made disasters and of significant organization
change attempts. Closer scrutiny of the data collected in this study further
emphasizes this conclusion. Hence, Capewells[26] identification of the feelings of
betrayal, loss, emptiness, anger and fear are represented in interviewee quotes
such as I feel betrayed I was very angry Id lost all sense of judgement
I had a real feeling of desperation I was defensive fearful that things could
get out of control again (Table XXVI), and drained, in a hole (Table XI). The
data in Table I are also reflective of the intensity of emotions described by
Capewell[26].
Further, the deep questioning of self and of life itself referred to by Hodgkinson
and Stewart[25], and vigorously demonstrated in Liftons[27] hierarchy of
formulation, is also evidenced in the interviewee quotes already cited, and others
not included. Thus, the search questions noted by Lifton[27] (that is, Why did it
happen?, How did I escape?, Why do I feel like this?, What does the way I
feel now mean about me as a person? and What does all that I have been
through mean about the way I understand life?) are in evidence as How can this
be?, I couldnt understand why, Whats gone wrong with the system? (Table
XXXIII). Its my knowledge area thats being kept, not me, I felt confident that
I would remain. I was born and raised on hard work and rated above average
a number of those I knew got the chop it was inevitable that they were going.
Im one of the chosen few, Is there something wrong with me?, Where am I
now? (Table X), Self-questioning (Table XIV). Why this change in me and, if I
went back, would I be like I was again?. Im learning who I am, what I stand for
(Table XXVII), A complete rethink (Table XIX), Id always believed in fairness
and justice but times have changed, It will never be the same again (Table
XXXII). I took three days off talking with my wife what do we really want
to do with our lives Ive decided to adjust my life style family now decidedly
first.
It would seem that, within the interviewee data collected, there is an abundance
of examples to support the earlier assertion that many managers experience
organizational change as a man-made catastrophe. Again, this experiencing can
be accommodated in Figure 3 and suggests that a further understanding of
organizational change might not just come from the study of texts on
organizations but also on crisis psychology. This suggestion will be given further
weight when strategies and tactics for helping individuals through change are
examined in the next chapter.
Survival
The phenomenon of survival is, of course, closely linked with the aftermath of
catastrophe. Liftons hierarchy of formulation, which related to survivors search
to understand that which has happened to them, was considered in the previous

section. However, further consideration of Liftons work[27] is revealing of other

aspects of survivors processes, particular that of survivor guilt. Lifton identified
two kinds of survivor guilt, both of which were described by managers
interviewed in this research. Hence, there is existential guilt which relates again
to the question, Why me?, and is evidenced in some of the quotes in Table IX:
for example, A lot of guilt, I felt guilty that I was staying and, to quote from
another interviewee in the sample, Im safe, but, oh God, what about the others
I felt guilty what do I say to them?.
A second kind of guilt identified by Lifton was guilt that focused on the
survivors actions, or their absence. Again, this guilt was represented by
managers questioning like, Did I do enough (for the others)?. Lifton[27] found
that this second form of guilt was often especially intense where there was
competition for survival. Other relevant quotes by interviewees included, not
having enough space to fit them in, no matter how good they were I felt
terrible, I dont even like thinking about it, to be honest and I think weve
overdone it, and I feel sad that it should go into decline and that people should
feel that it was the wrong move for them. It makes me feel that I didnt do the best
I could for them.
Lifton[27] suggested that guilt (and the allied concept of self-blame) can
represent an unconscious attempt to deny or undo a survivors sense of
helplessness. He also suggested that, for some people, survivor guilt may have a
symbolic function, serving the purpose of a testimonial. By continuing to suffer
oneself, the survivor provides an enduring memorial its a way of expressing
loyalty. Another interviewees transcript included I knew some of them very
well indeed, and their families. Most painful was red circling and blue circling
them, and knowing how many of these people would end up without jobs. It was
a nightmare gas chamber management. The memory will stay with me.
In addition to a search for understanding and guilt, Lifton identified other
aspects of survivors processes including psychic numbing through distancing,
denial of memories, conscious numbing (for example, by keeping very busy) and
unconscious numbing (becoming emotionally dead). Each of these experiences
was reported by a number of the interviewees, for example, I switched into
another mode and shut it out, I suppressed the way I felt (Table VI), Feelings
of unreality, It was an incredibly weird feeling, Busy doing practical things
(Table VII), Keeping busy, I try not to think about them, Avoiding all
thoughts of (Table VIII) and I spent a long time wilfully forgetting (Table XI).
Other central aspects of survivors processes noted by Lifton, such as the
imprint of death, were not evidenced in this study. However, given that this study
was located in the context of organizational change, and that Liftons work was
based in part on the aftermath of Hiroshima, this may not be surprising! What is
remarkable is how some managers experiences so closely parallels survivors
experiences of the dropping of the first nuclear bomb! That such parallels can be
drawn in terms of the types, if not the intensity, of processes involved, truly
emphasizes the scale of the organizations changes as perceived by those
managers involved.

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Trauma and PTSD

As explained in the literature review in Chapter 1, traumas refer to events that
are outside the range of usual human experience, would be markedly distressing
to anyone, and may be associated with the phenomenon of PTSD. Data were
presented in Chapter 1 which indicated the appropriateness of using the term
trauma to describe some managers experiences of organizational change. Thus,
Hodgkinson and Stewarts[25] descriptions of how traumatic incidents leave
people feeling uncertain about a world that has now become unpredictable, and
in which the fabric of everyday existence has been torn away to reveal hazard,
danger and risk, accorded with a number of the interviewees responses to the
triggers for change.
The three main groups of symptoms of PTSD[28] all emerged as reported
components of managers journeying through change. Some interviewees
reported avoidance, denial and numbing reactions as seen in the previous
sections (for the phenomena of survival and PTSD certainly overlap). Other
interviewees (for example, the manager whose change story is captured in Table
XXVI) reported a second symptom of PTSD that of re-experiencing
phenomena. The third symptom, that is, increased arousal, was also in evidence
(for example, among the interviewee quotes presented across the sub-parts of
Tables II-XXI ).
Returning to the phenomenon of re-experiencing, Laufers work[45] is of great
interest. Laufer studied the experiences of Vietnam veterans who had been
exposed to war trauma. He discovered that, although the veterans may
experience both the re-experiencing and the denial symptoms of PTSD, the
evidence seemed to indicate that the two symptoms have different origins. Hence,
re-experiencing was linked to single combat exposure or witnessing acts of
abusive violence. Denial, on the other hand, was associated primarily with
participation in multiple acts of abusive violence. Unfortunately, insufficient
evidence was collected from the managers sampled in this study to test whether a
parallel hypothesis relating to organizational change could be validated.
Nevertheless, it would be a very interesting theme for further research for, if the
parallell holds, one might expect even more denial from managers who
participate in more and more change attempts and would such appear to be the
future for managers in the organizations of today and tomorrow?
Loss
The process and phases of loss have already been referred to in the earlier
sections on the dynamics of change journeys. Evidence was presented in the first
chapter that organizational change can lead to managers perceiving and reacting
to loss. That loss can be prospective or actual, and be at an obvious level for
example, the potential loss of income or, at a deeper level, in terms of loss of
fundamental beliefs and assumptions, and even self-meaning. The phases of loss
described by Cotgrove et al.[36] (that is, shock and denial, anger and depression,
understanding and acceptance) form a core part of the framework presented in
Tables II-XXI. For many managers, organizational change represents loss. A

number of the managers stories of change represented in the subsequent figures

exemplify loss for example, loss of all sense of judgement, felt competence,
control, self-esteem, credibility (Table XXVI), contact, caring, ability to support
the family, being wanted (Table XXVII), job role and self-criticism (Table XXVIII).
Death and dying
The similarities between the dynamics of individuals journeying through
organizational change and the findings from Kubler-Ross[38] research on death
and dying have also been noted earlier in this chapter. Each of the stages
identified by Kubler-Ross[38] as shock, denial, isolation, anger, hope, depression
and acceptance, also find parallels in the data presented in the tables of this
chapter.
Thus, interviewees remarked that they felt shocked and numb (Table V) or
stated that This isnt happening! and Its still the same job (Table VI), I felt
isolated, unable to talk to other people (Table XXVI) and I withdrew (Table XI),
I felt anger inside me and I really got angry (Table XII), Hopeful and I hope
this is temporary (Table XIII), depressed and hopeless (Table XI), relief and
I accepted (Table XV).
In fact, the only stage within Kubler-Ross framework which was not evidenced
in the interviews with managers in the research sample was that of bargaining, in
the sense of attempting to postpone the inevitable by seeking one more time. In
the first chapter, the question was posed as to whether it would be stretching the
imagination too far to suggest that managers experiencing significant
organizational change might display similar responses to those revealed in the
Kubler-Ross study. The answer would appear to be in the negative; some
individuals do experience organizational change after the manner of coming to
terms with approaching death. Parallels with bereavement and the process of
grieving also emerge in the next section.
Grieving
It was noted in the first chapter that both the organizations sampled in the
research were engaged in downsizing activities as part of their change attempts.
The impact of such downsizing for those who have been made redundant has
often been linked in the literature to the processes of grieving (for example, by
Herr[46] and Hopfl[47]). Herr suggests that people who are laid off can
experience symptoms of shock and grief as severe as these that result from the
death of a family member. Much less attention, however, has been focused on
grieving among those remaining in the organization after the downsizing and
who have, and are, experiencing this and many other changes of circumstances
within their organizations.
Two eminent workers in the field of grieving, Parkes[39] and Marris[33], are
agreed that, while the term grief is normally reserved for the loss of a loved
person, in fact the concept of grieving can be applied to many situations of
change. Reference has already been made in this chapter to how the dynamics of
managers journeys through change possess a number of the characteristics of

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the grieving process. Marris[33] described the process of grieving as one of

psychological reintegration and embodying a struggle to recover meaningful
patterns. Parkes[39] identified the functions of grieving as being realization,
serving to make real the fact of a change, and viewed grieving as a process of
unlearning. Both views accord with the process of grieving being located
within the framework depicted in Figure 1, following a path from shock
through holding on to letting go. Similarly, Hodgkinson and Stewart[25]
consider the process of grieving as a series of tasks, including experiencing the
pains of grief, accepting the reality of change, and withdrawing from the past.
The final task, that of reinvesting energy in new activities, equates to the
testing phase in Figure 3.
At the level of the data collected from interviewees and presented as the
components of Figure 3 and the descriptions in Tables II-XXI, the grief stages
described by Parkes[39] as numbness, pining, disorganization and despair,
and recovery are all in evidence. Parkes[39] places emphasis on pining or
yearning the symptoms of a special kind of anxiety known as separation
anxiety as being the characteristic feature of the pang of grief. Yearning was
a not infrequent component of some managers change journeys (for example,
Table VIII). As suggested by Parkes, yearning can also be present in an
individuals dreams. The managers story presented in Table XXVI is
illustrative of this phenomenon, being a form of the attempted problem-solving
behaviour described by Hadfield[48], who commented that unfortunately the
recovery of a lost object is one that cannot be solved, even in dreams. Equally
in evidence was the contradictory state to yearning, that of mitigation (Table
VIII). Whereas yearning represents a search for and an attempt, as it were, to
recover what has been lost, mitigation acts to escape painful reminders of that
loss. Such contradictions or ambivalence are frequently present during the
progression of grieving processes. Marris[33] cites other examples: for
instance, feeling lonely and yet shunning company an example of which was
presented within Table XXVI (namely I felt isolated, but was unable to talk to
other people).
It was mentioned earlier that grieving is a process, not a state it does not
appear and then just fade away of its own accord. Marris[33] emphasizes the
need for, and the importance of working through the grieving process. He
further identified some consequences of aborted grief; those of delayed grief
(where little emotion is expressed, but is triggered later and often by less
consequential events); and inhibited grief (the grief being displaced by
physical disorders or neurotic conditions) and chronic grief. The methodology
adopted in our research limited the possibility of evidencing delayed grief,
though inhibited grief was seemingly apparent in the manner and demeanour
of some of the managers interviewed. Moreover, there also were indications of
chronic grief, for example in the ongoing yearning, disorganization and
despair recorded in Tables XXX and XXXII. Further consideration will be
given to the phenomenon of stuckness and the importance of working
through the various phases of change experiences, in the next chapter.

Worry work
A particularly interesting finding to emerge from the interviewee data was the
phase of experiencing change referred to as worry work[39,48]. Worry work
occurs before an event actually takes place. It is in anticipation of an event and
focuses an individuals attention on possible and prospective dangers.
Parkes[39] opines that worry work provides an opportunity for appropriate
preparation and planning. It may be seen in Figure 3 that the components of the
worry work phase mirror those comprising the holding on phase, with the
additional component of awaiting. Parkes[39] has further noted that worry work
enables people to start to alter their assumptions and expectations of their world,
and to experience, in part, the emotions that follow a disastrous event before it
happens. He likens worry work to grief work (an activity which apparently was
first identified by Freud[49] in 1917), distinguishing them on the basis that the
former is founded on anticipation and the latter on memory. The preparatory
nature of worry work can help to equip an individual both intellectually and
emotionally for what is to come. As one interviewee remarked, most of them had
realized ... the material that had been put out all of that helped to condition
people into a state of readiness for the bad news. On the other hand, worry work
is absorbing of immense and often self-defeating psychological energy, and
considerably intrudes on an individuals thinking as illustrated by the
managers story presented in Table XXXI. Further, it may prove unnecessary
because the anticipated and feared event does not transpire, as was the case with
the manager whose story is captured in Table XXII. Worry work may also be
unduly provoked and prolonged by the manner of, and the lack of adequate
communications by the organization in the first place, as will be seen in the next
chapter, a part of which will examine helping and hindering factors to change.
Conclusion
Previously, the question as to the ubiquitousness of individuals experiencing of
change was posed. As was noted in the first chapter, the literature on the
individual experiencing of change is fragmented and largely located within
discrete, specialist disciplines. Moreover, comparatively little of this literature has
been focused on managers experiences of significant organization change
attempts. The literature which has actually been located within the areas of
organizational change has, in the greater part, been directed towards
exhortations as to how managers should respond and behave in such change,
rather than illuminating the reality and actuality of managers experiencing.
The framework depicted in Figure 3 serves as a template on which to locate
and explore the nature of individual managers experiencing of organizational
change. It also provides a means of mapping the paths and dynamics of
managers journeys through change. Additionally, it would appear able to
accommodate a great deal of the literature which relates the experiences and
findings of workers in a wide diversity of other change contexts. To that extent,
the framework in its totality looks to be one which is ubiquitous in its
applications. That said, it is clear that different change situations are located on,

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and emphasize, different parts of the framework, and are constituted from
different framework phases and components. Even more importantly, and at the
level of the individual and his or her own experiences of change, each journey,
when mapped onto the framework, is demonstrably different and unique. The
framework depicted in Figure 3 may well be ubiquitous in providing a map of the
terrain of change journeys, but it is not prescriptive of the actual routes taken by
individuals, nor does it predict, other than in a very general way, the length,
speed, calling points and diversions, backtracking, interruptions, stop-offs and
halts that make up each individuals journey.
Nevertheless, the mapping of individuals journeying and experiences on the
framework does enable the individuals stories of change to be understood in
terms of where they have come from, where they are and where they might be
headed for. The mapping is also revealing not of rational, logical reactions,
processes and responses to change, but of the psycho-logic of individuals
experiencing, including their subjective perceptions, deeply felt emotions,
personal meaning and their individualistic responses and behaviours.
Though many important issues have emerged in different sections of this
chapter which have implications for the instigators, designers, managers and
facilitators of organizational change, none is more important than the most
obvious. Managers are human beings and, as human beings, they respond in a
human way to prospective and actual changes in their organizational lives. And
yet and the next chapter will emphasize this point so often, this simple fact is
ignored in the management of organizational change. Iacovini[50] has remarked
that it is as if an unconscious conspiracy of silence exists by many of those
involved in organizations about the feelings of sadness, anger, denial and fear
experienced by employees. A consequence of such a conspiracy is that much
individual experiencing of change remains locked within the private domains of
the individual. And when this privacy is breached and experiences are voiced and
expressed when managers feelings, thoughts and behaviours in change are
apparent and cannot be ignored they are often explained as evidence of
resistance to change. Far from it! The very great majority of managers
interviewed in this research were highly motivated to succeed in the changes.
Simply, they were occupied in the often difficult business of journeying through
change. Within the black box of individual experiencing that links
organizational change attempts with their achievement, many managers are
undergoing the trials of transition, catastrophe and survival, loss, trauma, PTSD,
death, grief and worry. They are learning, unlearning and relearning. They are
experiencing the reality, for them, of change.
The next chapter will explore the outcomes of managers journeys through
change. It will conclude with a consideration of helping and hindering factors and
their implications for the more effective management of future change attempts in
organizations.

3. The outcomes and

influencing factors of change
Introduction
The research originated in the observation that, in recent times, the role of
management development specialists has shifted in response to the
widespread and radically different order of change being demanded of, and
attempted by, organizations. At one time, management developers were
largely in the learning business, helping managers to do more and better.
Now, however, management developers are being required not only to
facilitate learning, but also, and more fundamentally, the processes of
unlearning and relearning which are demanded of movement from out of the
old and into the new. This observation was extended in the first chapter to
include the authors opinions that, while there appears to be growing
agreement as to the implications of this new order of change in terms of what
is demanded of managers in organizations in the way they are and act, the
agreed conclusions and exhortations appear to be founded more in an
idealized world of what ought to be than in a real world of what is.
The first chapter reviewed the literature relating to individuals experience
of change. This was found to be widely spread across a range of fragmented
subject specialisms. Moreover, only a relatively small part of the literature
reported directly on managers involved in significant organizational change
attempts. The chapter also served to describe the spirit, aims, location and
sample of the research project, as well as the methods of data collection and
analysis used. In essence, the research was designed to tap into, open up and
develop a better understanding of the in-depth experiences of managers who
were responding to demands for change and were, in turn, requiring change
of others. Beyond that, it was hoped that the research would enable the
development of frameworks on which to capture managers experiences,
provide a template for bringing together literature pertinent to the
experiences, and highlight issues and pointers for those charged with the
more effective management of future changes in organizations.
The research approach was structured around individual managers stories
of, and journeys through, change. The first chapter presented data relating to
the starting point for the individuals journeys, that is, the organizations
change objectives and how they were perceived by individual managers.
These triggers to change were reported as a series of categorizations and
frameworks which were drawn from, and fleshed out by, the interview data
collected. Several important points emerged from the data relating to the
differing experiences of the managers. Thus, for example, it became clear that
while both the organizations sampled were attempting very significant shifts

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in the way that they were oriented towards, organized for, and went about,
their business, this did not mean that every manager within their
organizations was being asked to change significantly. While for the majority
of managers, at least some, and for many managers most, of the changes
required of them fall within the category of major discontinuities, this was not
always the case. Depending on how individuals were currently placed,
different managers experienced different levels of change demands and their
journeys through change were not conducted on even change terrains.
Further differences in managers experiences of change emerged when
distinctions were drawn between the so called primary and secondary
triggers of change. Individual managers do not respond directly to sensed
primary organizational triggers, namely the organizations formal and
communicated change objectives. Rather, they filter, process and transform
such triggers into personal implications, that is, into secondary, personal
triggers to change. Different individuals perceive the same primary triggers
differently. What for one manager might be perceived as minor turbulence in
his or her life, might for another manager raise traumatic personal issues. In
the first case, the most that the secondary trigger might require would be
some minor improvement and learning. In the second case responding to the
same primary trigger the transformed secondary trigger might require
significant unlearning and relearning. Particular changes have particular
meanings for particular individuals. Thus, while significant organizational
change attempts do not necessarily require significant change of some
individual managers, even minor organizational changes can have major
implications for other managers.
The data emphasized the essential individuality of managers experience of
organizational changes. While from an organizational standpoint, change
management may well be centred on achieving, for example, delayering,
devolvement of responsibility and teamwork, the reality is that what is set in
train and requires managing and facilitating, is often individuals responses
to invoked personal issues, for example wrongdoing, disrespect and loss of
control. This latter, then, may be the reality of the change management task,
for this is the personal reality out of which individual managers experience
and respond to organizational change attempts. At one level, line managers
are indeed seeking to manage towards the recognized objectives encompassed
in primary organizational triggers to change. At another level, on the ground
as it were, what managers may actually be managing (or not as the case may
be) is their own and others change journeys originating in a wide variety of
personal, secondary triggers to change. Thus, they are working with
individual perceptions and responses which, whether voiced or not, represent
the actuality of change in organizations.
The second chapter was built around a framework of the components of
change journeys. This framework was developed from the research data and
was used as a template on which to locate and capture the reported thoughts,

feelings and behaviours of managers as they responded to the triggers for

change and commenced and progressed their change journeys. Further, the
developed framework, together with its related categorizations, enabled an
exploration of the components, nature, dynamics and processes of managers
experience of change.
Managers journeys emerged as unfolding processes composed of
overlapping and interlinking phases and components, positioned at various
points on the change terrain. These phases and components moved into the
foreground and receded into the background as managers moved from the
start towards the end point of their journeys. Moreover, the pace of
individuals journeys varied, with often uneven progress as individuals
backtracked, revisited and stopped off at various calling points.
The mapping of managers journeys on the framework revealed where the
managers had come from, where they were up to, and towards where they
might be headed. The mapping also enabled managers journeys to be
understood in terms of the reasoning and emotionality which underpinned the
psycho-logic of individual managers reactions and responses to
organizational change attempts.
Each managers journey through change proved to be unique. However, all
the managers journeys could be mapped onto the same comnon framework of
the components of change journeys. Additionally, this same framework was
found to link strongly to, and accommodate, a very broad church of other
reported research into individual change processes in a very wide diversity of
change situations.
Thus, while individuals experiences of change are unique, the framework
developed from the research appeared to be ubiquitous as a means of
capturing that experiencing and in bringing together much of the
fragmented literature on individuals in change. The nature of the literature
referred to in the second chapter, spanning as it did the phenomena of
experiencing and learning, life changes and personal transitions, catastrophe
and survival, trauma and stress, loss and death, and worry and grief work,
also emphasized the profoundness of many managers experiences. Accounts
of such phenomena do seem to relate to, and illuminate, managers
experiences of business-led attempts at significant organizational change.
Indeed, such accounts often more closely match the actuality of managers
experiences than much of the rhetoric which is commonly used in the
management literature in prescribing the ought to be world of
organizational change.
If the previous chapters in this series have focused on the start point or
triggers for change, and on the consequent journeys undertaken by managers,
this final chapter will focus on two further aspects of managers experiences
of change. First, findings on the outcomes of managers journeys will be
presented or, at least, where they had reached the end point of the research,
which for most of the managers sampled was about 18 months into the

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changes. Second, data will be presented on what the managers, looking back,
found to be helpful and hindering to their change journeys. Implications of
these findings will be drawn for those who have an interest in facilitating
managerial change.
Outcomes of change journeys
A categorization of the reported outcomes of the sampled managers journeys
through change is presented in Figure 4. As noted earlier, these outcomes are
based on interview data collected some 18 months into the organizations
change attempts.
It is also important to note that, as reported in the previous chapter,
dependent on their particular situation, some managers were embarked on
more than one change journey. A manager might, for example, be managing
the contracting out of his or her departments services to outside providers
and, at the same time, be adapting to a flattened hierarchy and attempting to
Unchanged
(coped, managed, as they were)

Repositioned
(altered job, role status, circumstances)

Released
(liberated, potential realized)

Stuck
(blocked, unmoving)

Individual
process/path
(e.g. "journey")

Stressed
(showing stress symptoms and effects)

Learned
(developed knowledge, understanding, skill, attitude)

Reframed
(reoriented, transformed, grown)

Moving
(out of the past)

Moving on and moving away

(into the future)

Figure 4.
Outcomes of the
journeys

Anticipating
(sensing, worrying, positioning)

adopt a new team-based style of working! Additionally, he or she may be

immersed in personal transitions sparked off by perceived loss of status,
control, and personal relationships! Consequently, any one manager might
concurrently have reached different outcomes on different journeys.
The following list presents the outcome descriptors which serve to describe
and illuminate the meanings of each of the categories in Figure 4. The 11
examples contained in the list are drawn directly from the interview
transcripts and capture some of the thoughts and feelings of managers who
have been responding to their organizations change attempts. The outcomes
may be:
Unchanged
So whats changed? Its all been at the top in theory, my values are still the same,
fundamentally I havent changed, Ive experienced the talk about culture change, but I dont
know that Ive experienced the actual change, X is now batting for me Id been looking for
someone to replace Y, Im disappointed a lot of my work is what I did before.

Repositioned
Im now hands-off, losing involvement, theres much less interface work, Ive a larger and
more varied workload, theres a lot more monitoring, Ive a bigger responsibility, Im
seeing less of my family, Ive opted out of social activities, Ive complete control over the
process thats tremendous, Im empowered to do what I want to do, Ive lost control, lost
the rudder, Im less free, Im at the forefront and Ive got a promotion, Ive now got
everyones respect, were the flagship of the company!

Released
Its a matching process exciting, a wonderful time in my life, the organization has
moved towards my beliefs its been good for me.

Stuck

Yearning:
Three years ago we were little families I miss that, I loved my job I used to get up
looking forward to work, Ive lost contact I dont know how theyre feeling, what
theyre doing. I miss them very much, without doubt Im an engineer at heart, whos
learned business. I miss it and have difficulty withdrawing from it but its still there
when you want to get your fingernails dirty.

Mitigation:
I shut these things out, I try to convince myself that everything has turned out for the
best.

Protest:
Angry I still dont see why; exceptions were made and contractors dont match the
service provided, It stinks!, I still feel bad that I compromised some of my deeply-held
beliefs, the company has behaved counter to its own mission, and the discrepancy
disturbs me, I didnt do my best for them, it was a nightmare. We called it gas
chamber management it will stick in my memory.

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Disorganization:
Im confused, Im in a muddle, I dont know what Im doing Im totally inefficient.

Despair:
Im sad, Whats the point?, Im now very self-critical and that has spread to other
areas of my life, putting on a face is difficult my personality has been affected.

58

Acceptance:
I still believe you need the continuity not contractors, Im not toeing the line, I dont
talk with passion theres no reason why I should agree with what the company has
done.

Testing:
I was beginning to act in the new mode it suited me. Ive done everything I should be
doing in theory, but Ive hit brick walls its very frustrating, I havent given up but
Ive run out of ideas.

Stressed
You can go on a long time on a high but Im beginning to get burnt at the edges, theres a
lot of pressure for the experienced ones who are left, Im tightening up those who work for
me and certainly the family at home would say that, I go home tired and that doesnt go
down well with my wife and children, Im battered, Its taken a toll on me quite a lot, a
very emotional time its like when my father died I shouldered all those things then,
emotional breakdown.

Learned
My broadness isnt, as it seemed, a liability, some of my skills arent being used much, but
I have rediscovered and enhanced other skills like listening, my skills base hasnt changed
particularly but theres a lot of confidence that I hadnt had before I can help and Im
available , Ive learned a style of management based on openness, building common
ground, working without direct authority, its been an education, learning how to work with
contractors, Im starting to understand this, and I can see why the company wants it, next
time Id try to find a mechanism whereby I informed the next layer and took them with me,
we had a set of principles Id set out my stall and then to turn around it
tremendously damages the flag that ones put up Ive learned a lesson from that its
totally wrong to give an impression I have to rein in my action (I still feel strongly about the
flag), learning about who I am, what I stand for, what Im prepared to compromise on, I
know myself more, they dont see the value of people, they maintain the machinery but not
the people, companies like ours tend not to learn.

Reframed
Im now a business manager, with a bottom line, my mind set has changed about the impact
I can have on this company, I had always believed in hard work, I now realize that the
severance pay will keep us for considerable time, and Im unlikely to go for years and years
without getting another job, its the end of an era (however good you think the future is going
to be) it will never be the same again, times have changed the Empire has gone and were
contracting. It used to be that if you didnt do anything dreadful and you did a good job, then
youd be with the company forever, I now trust my perceptions though there are other
perceptions I still struggle with that, Ive put the organization into the context of what I
want out of life , you think of them as just work colleagues, until one day the penny drops
and you realize that actually they are friends and there arent too many friends out there. I
didnt think this way 12 months ago.

Moving

The outcomes

Things are moving, the organization is taking shape, you cant dwell on the past, theres
always something new, Ive a strong sense that were moving away from the past, but with
not much sense of a future.

Moving on
My instinct is to stay, theres a major role for us, Ive got a chance to do well, its
exhilarating to feel part of a process, seeing things growing before your eyes, weve a long
way to go, and Id like to be part of it but I will not go through again a situation like Ive been
through in the last 18 months, its second nature now.

Moving away
The role of the company in my life is not what it was its changed a lot. Im not getting the
value out of the relationship that I used to, the company has lost my total confidence, loyalty
and trust. The company was my life, the emotional relationship with the organization is
getting less. Theres more chance of me leaving this organization than ever before, Im at a
jumping off point. Im looking positively outside it puts me back in charge, Im beginning
to think what am I doing here working for a company like this?, I now feel capable of taking
the money and doing it parting company with the organization, I now want to retire as
early as possible on as much as possible, Ive moved from a position of very considerable
disquiet about the prospect of redundancy, beyond acceptance, to somewhere around
welcoming it.

Anticipating
Sensing:
There is no clear picture, its not the end, there are further cuts to come, theres more
change to come, already plans are changing.

Worrying:
Im really worried, I dont really know whats going to happen, Im not settled, but Im
not sure I want to think about it, If there are any more Draconian numbers games, well
run into big problems with effectiveness, I really fear for this organization unless its
directors stop in-fighting and politicking, there has to be a clear long-term strategy
which is held for some time, Im on the road to ruin, maybe Ill be plucked out I still
bring quite a lot of added value, I hope this is temporary I dont think I could live with
it, Im sticking it out, but Im not optimistic.

Positioning:
Im concentrating on those things which will do me most good in the future things that
I can sell outside, Im working specifically with an eye to the future, to be able to say
Ive done those things, Ive focused on the skills I need to develop to position myself to
operate outside the company.

In the spirit of the previous chapters, it is anticipated that the figures and tables
presented are self-explanatory and do not require further interpretation.
Nevertheless, it is perhaps appropriate to elaborate at a general level on the
categories of outcome.
In Chapter 1, distinctions were made between the differing nature of the
changes encountered by individual managers. Thus, distinctions were made
between so-called turbulence, stress, congruence, variance and discontinuity. A
similar diversity exists in the nature of individuals change outcomes. Thus,

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some managers emerged from their journeys relatively unchanged; some

repositioned; some were stressed; others had learned and even reframed; some
were stuck at different phases of their change journeys; others had been
released; still others were moving, moving on, and moving away; and some were
anticipating further changes to come. Though no attempt was made to conduct
quantitative (as opposed to qualitative) analyses on the research data collected,
the number of descriptor examples presented in each outcome category in the
list is roughly representative of the frequency with which each category
occurred as an outcome for the overall sample of managers. Hence, relatively
few managers emerged from their journey unchanged or released. A relatively
large number of managers had derived learning from their experiences, and a
number had reframed. Some managers were clearly stressed. Many more
managers were stuck en route than had completed their journeys. A relatively
high proportion of managers were anticipating further change.
Viewed from an organizational perspective, and given the organizations
objectives for change, perhaps the categories most likely to give rise to concern
are those of stuck and moving away. Thus, some 18 months into the
organizational change attempts, many managers were still holding on to, and
had not yet let go of, the past, while some of those that had, were close to being,
or were already, lost to the organizations psychologically if not physically.
Stuck
In the context of this research, being stuck is used to describe the phenomenon
of managers having difficulty in progressing their journeys through change
beyond the holding on, realization and acceptance phases and components of
the change journey. As was noted earlier, passing through and even temporarily
calling off at such points is not only very common, but is contributory to
successful movement through change. It would be expected that some
managers would make slower progress through the earlier phases of a change
journey for, as described in the tables presented in the previous chapters, many
of them were involved in difficult and deeply disturbing shifts in personal
circumstances. Temporarily calling off at points on a journey, or making slow
progress, is not the same as getting stuck. Being stuck implies a lack of
movement, an inability to progress into the moving phase or a continual
movement backwards to revisit earlier phases in the journey.
The shift in tense from past to present to future requires a radical reorientation. A number of authors for example Nevis[4] have commented on
the paradox of change, that is, that a person cannot move from one state to
another until the present is fully experienced and accepted. The more profound
the change, the more difficult that shift is likely to be. Marris[33] referred to
grieving as a slow, painful and difficult process requiring, as it does, the
reconstruction of a radically different way of seeing life, and inflicting a mental
wound which only heals slowly and leaves scars. Spencer and Adams[22]
reinforce the same point, suggesting that whatever the change, in order to have

something new in our lives, people have to let go of the way things used to be
and that takes time.
To re-emphasize the point, making s1ow progress on a change journey is not
the same as getting stuck, although viewed from the undoubtedly urgent but
nevertheless often unrealistic viewpoint of an organization, they may look to be
one and the same. Spencer and Adams[22] comment on the fact that commonly,
once an event has happened, people are expected to get back to normal
reality, however, is very different. Iacovini[50] has recently written about
genuinely being stuck and has suggested that in their urgency to achieve
change, organizations can, perversely, create an impasse in their employees.
The consequences of being stuck, for both the individual and organization
alike, may then be of real concern, for as Marris[33] has described, the
individuals life may become mummified in a phantasy of the past or
obsessed by unresolved conflict and in permanent crisis or empty and
meaningless behind a facade of purposive activity. For the organizations, the
consequences are obvious, and while superficially the organizations change
attempts may be seen, at least in part, to have been effected, Iacovini[50]
describes the consequence as phoney renewal.
Moving away
An equal concern for the organizations must be the number of managers who,
while remaining unstuck, nevertheless, on emerging from their journeys
through change, are moving away from their organizations. Though the tone of
interviewees statements on moving away was sometimes one of energy and
sparkle, more common was a tone of sadness, albeit coupled with acceptance.
A recent paper by Patch et al.[51] suggested that a central cause of
employees thoughts of looking elsewhere following recent and major
organizational change was the breach and breakdown of the traditional
psychological contract that was once prevalent between a manager and his or
her organization. Patch et al.[51] opine that while such a contract may rarely
have been agreed or voiced, being more in the nature of an understanding, it
nevertheless profoundly affected the ways in which organizations and their
members related. Further, when an organization has not lived up to its contract,
many managers beliefs, assumptions and basic tenets will be broken. The
consequence is that individuals reframe their view of the company and, as
reported by Patch et al.[51] and again in this research, what is lost is loyalty,
commitment and a willingness to make sacrifices for the good of the
organization. Such is one, albeit not the only, legacy of the organizational
change attempts studied. Referring back to Chapter 1, this legacy was not
among the formally identified organizational change objectives! Neither,
presumably, was the incidence of stress which also accompanied some
managers emergence from their change journeys. Sigman[52] has recently
reported on his experience of working in organizations and has noted the
widespread presence of managerial stress. He somewhat alarmingly writes of

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the perils that can accompany change in organizations and argues that the
nature of change management is such as to produce not just stress but even
more lethal consequences.
Of course, reference to Figure 4 and the list of outcome descriptors reminds
us that the outcomes of managers change journeys were not all negative.
Referring again to the change objectives identified in Chapter 1, some of those
objectives both organizational and individual were achieved. Overall,
however, the outcomes are clearly not a testament to the efficacy of change
management in two of todays organizations. Further, the question must be
asked as to whether using any sort of cost-benefit equation, the outcomes of the
organizations change attempts were worth the cost. On the evidence presented
in this chapter, there must be severe doubts as to whether the organizations
strategic and tactical gains outweigh the negative effect on many of their
managers and its cumulative impact on the organizations capability to
perform. For many, that is not to suggest that in the future, such organizations
should not attempt major change. The reality is that such changes are probably
imperative, given the envirornment and marketplace in which many
organizations are currently operating. However, future change attempts must
surely set out not only to target change, but to better manage and facilitate the
reality of that change in terms of individual managers experiencing. Marris[33]
has argued that the outcomes of attempted change may depend as much on the
management of the process of transition as on the change objectives
themselves.
Helping and hindering factors to change
The data reported (in this section) are again drawn directly from the interview
transcripts. The presented categorizations emerged solely as a means of
organizing and better understanding those data. As is the case for all the
frameworks presented in these articles, there is no suggestion that they are allencompassing frames which could not be further extended by broadening the
scope and the sample of the research. That said, the data appear to be rich, link
well to the literature on individuals in change, and most certainly provide both
a means of better understanding the nature of managers experiencing of
organizational change and many pointers as to what can be done to manage and
facilitate such change better in the future.
Much of this section is taken up by the presentation of a series of lists
describing the helping and hindering factors. Again, these presentations are
seen as self-explanatory the text referring to them will be used to highlight
particularly interesting points within the data and to reference these back to the
literature. Further, it will be taken for granted that pointers for improved future
change management emerge directly from the lists. Thus, managerial change
will be facilitated by seeking to instil and promote the reported helping factors
and by attempting to anticipate, counter and lessen the reported hindering
factors.

The basic organizer for presenting the data on helping and hindering factors
to change are split into three broad groupings of factors, i.e. factors relating to:
the formally designed organizational change process; the skills and qualities of
individual managers; and psycho-social aspects concerning organizational
environment.
Incidentally, these three groupings relate well to the three areas reported by
Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] as influencing the quality of individuals
emotional processing of, and their recovery from, trauma. Thus, Hodgkinson
and Stewart observed that the persistence of post-traumatic stress and the
failure of individuals to cope with, and process, trauma was related to
dimensions of the trauma itself, dimensions of the person, and dimensions of
the recovery environment.
Factors relating to the change process
The two main categories of factors relating to the change process itself, and
which were reported by the managers as helping and hindering their change
journeys, are:
(1) Helping factors: clarity/rationale; involvement; preparation; training.
(2) Hindering factors: continual changes; change of mind; speed of changes;
unpredictability of changes; lack of clarity/rationale; lack of
involvement; indirectness; incompetence; inhumanity; contrary to
norms; slighting/underestimating; inadequate training; workload;
bureaucracy.
The descriptors (in the form of direct and illustrative quotes from interviewees)
which serve to describe and define the above categories are as follows.
Helping factors
Clarity/rationale:
It makes sense, theres an inevitability about it, its quite right, weve got to do it.

Preparation:
Theyd been tremendously conditioned by the organization, by the system, by the
material that had been put out and by ourselves. Wed taken longer than we might have
done over the initial rounds of counselling. All of that helped to condition people into a
state of readiness for the bad news, good severance terms were on the table (people had
to let go without impeding the process by using their muscle).

Involvement:
Being told that this is the plan, and that we would have a say, feeling part of the
process.

Training:
Attending courses and getting a better understanding of myself and the current reality,
courses that explained the concept, the catalyst from group, going around other
organizations looking at things differently.

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Hindering factors
Continual change:
This company has been reorganizing itself for six years, weve been through
phenomenal changes for three years now (five reorganizations, and Ive had four jobs),
dramatic changes all at the same time, change, change and more change, change
hasnt stopped and it just keeps coming, a lot has changed and there is more to come.

Change of mind:
Already plans are changing, a new, long-term strategy everyday thats a major
problem, chaos, change, yes but less rapid change of mind.

Speed of changes:
There should have been less time expediency (they wanted to impress the market), the
speed of change quickly thrust on us we used to take our time, The fundamental
problem is the way things change so quickly, unrealistic expectations about how long
the change will take actually it will take longer, a lack of time to step back and look
again from square one. Were working with the edges a bit here and a bit there, not
enough time to deal with the team issues.

Unpredictability of changes:
Out of the blue, it caught us on the hop, unpredictable the paper came out, a
history of reliable precedents but not this time, no preparation.

Lack of clarity/rationale:
I didnt understand it it wasnt explained, the range of perceptions of what the new
management style was, an ambiguous view from the company as to what it really
wants at the end of the day, Im not sure that the vision is even properly understood by
the executive, let alone articulated, no picture of what would be left after the change,
no clear idea of what I was going to do, not knowing the criteria, it was done at the
top in theory, but it was not translated nor linked into how people do their jobs, it made
no logical sense, I hadnt been told it was important, not understanding why the
company wants this, they never properly related the benefit of the change.

Lack of involvement:
Waiting a long time to hear so draining it seemed like forever, no official
discussions with me prior to the announcement, very secret, not knowing who was
responsible, what angered me was the lack of explanations. It was like a Kafka trial
you dont know what the charges are, but youve been sentenced and theres no chance of
defending yourself , little communication lots of rumours, suspicion and wild
speculation, no consultations, an evaluation had taken place without the involvement
of my line manager, I was a statistic, not a person, typecast, categorized,
excluding people from the process, theyre talking to one another, but not to us, a
very closed process an inner circle behind closed doors, my views were sought but
not listened to.

Indirectness:
I read it in the daily newspapers!, the message was passed on I wasnt told directly,
being told as an afterthought, communication is difficult in large teams.

Incompetence:
No planned means for influencing peoples thinking, astonishingly incompetent,
transparent expediency.

Inhumanity:

The outcomes

Disgraceful, inhumane, a horrendous meeting, the normal process of being decent

to people was thrown out of the window.

Contrary to norms:
What about the culture its the wrong way to do it?, totally contrary to what wed
been told before, the company has behaved counter to its own mission statement,
which is phenomenally confusing for the people within it.

Slighting/underestimating:
The implication was that we were all a load of wallies, we know what weve got to do
its obvious. Dont keep ramming it down our throats, were told to preach the party
line but no one would believe you, we tried to give them a sense that there will be
something there at the end of the day it wasnt very successful they could see the
writing on the wall, theres something more to this something political is going on.

Inadequate training:
Only one quick course, never any training in this.

Workload:
The sheer amount of work, having to learn it and manage it at the same time takes a
bit of doing.

Bureaucracy:
Faffing around with all the bureaucratic operating plans and all the rest, swimming in
treacle, bureaucratic administration.

In sum, many more aspects of the way in which the organizational changes
were introduced were found to be hindering rather than helpful to the managers
change attempts. Where the organization and its management had invested
time and energy in preparing, explaining, involving and training people for the
changes, that investment paid off in terms of the consequent reactions and
responses of its people. In this respect, and as mentioned in an earlier chapter,
there were some differences between the two organizations sampled. One
organization invested very much more effort in communicating with, and
seeking the views of its managers as to the shape and nature of the changes to
be introduced. This investment was later undermined and its return dissipated
by the manner of subsequent decision making and actions. Nevertheless, some
of the common-sense steps towards facilitating change implied by the helping
factors listed above did provide dividends, and particularly by way of
comparison with the other organization which, having announced that major
change was forthcoming (with predictable consequences in terms of what, why,
who, how, when, where?) then contained its strategic and tactical decision
making behind closed doors until the day of the announcements. The result of
this approach was the huge amount of energy and time which was spent by
managers on the sensing activity and worry work which was reported in
the previous chapter.
Overall, however, and as noted in Chapter 1, there was very much more
similarity than there was difference between the change processes enacted in

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the two organizations sampled, and the lists of hindering factors were in large
part reported by managers in both organizations. Within the lists of hindering
factors, none is more predictable than the lack of good-quality communication.
The author has lost count of the number of books that have been written and
the number of courses that have been run on the importance of good
communications to employee effectiveness, and yet here we go again!.
The subject of communications has recently been re-aired by Miller[53], who
emphasizes that in times of change and uncertainty managers should
communicate what they know and be clear about what they dont know
being honest and truthful is important managers should share what they can
and be clear about what they cant discuss. Miller further advocates that
managers should emphasise the rationale should stay in touch with their
people and listen to their concerns should be prepared for questions
should listen, for often people just want to talk. While arguing that at times it
is completely appropriate for managers to withhold information, at other times
(for example during a reorganization) communication is vital managers who
dont communicate invite rumours.
Miller[53] has also stressed that the period between the announcement of an
intended change and its implementation is a crucial one, and that how
effectively that time is used can determine how well people will weather the
change. He concluded, as the research results indicate, that preparation can
make all the difference. In a similar vein, Hopfl[47] reported on the great
uncertainty and insecurity that arose amongst lower-level managers who were
left uninformed while change was implemented layer by layer from the top
down in an organization.
Stewart[54] has emphasized that with change comes increased ambiguity for
members of an organization and a greater possibility of failure. She identified
five types of ambiguity relating to:
(1) goals (what youre supposed to achieve);
(2) data (the very substance of the problem is unclear);
(3) roles (what you are supposed to do and with what authority);
(4) methods (how to achieve goals);
(5) criteria (the means of judging achievement).
All five types of ambiguity were reported among the descriptors relating to
lack of clarity in the list of hindering factors (earlier).
Among the other hindering factors identified are a cluster of factors directly
relating to the amount, speed, suddenness and frequency of the changes faced
by managers in organizations. Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] have commented on
the difficulties which arise as a result of change being sudden and
unanticipated. Similarly, the speed and unpredictability of organizational
changes have been reported as being of great concern to employees recently
surveyed at British Telecom[55] Spencer and Adams[22] argue that, while many

organizational changes are not in themselves inherently stressful, they become

so to the degree to which the individual is taken by surprise.
Referring beyond suddenness and speed as hindering factors to change, to
the factors of amount and frequency of change, Conner[56] comments on the
phenomenon of future shock. Conner defined future shock as the point at
which humans can no longer absorb changes without displaying disfunctional
behaviour and foresees its growing impact on organizations and individuals.
Wills[57] has also raised the issue of individuals abilities to cope with the levels
of change currently being attempted in organizations. He suggests that many
changes may be leaps too far, for the evidence is that individuals can only learn
incrementally. While such a view may underestimate the levels of learning
which are achievable by individuals, nevertheless, the results presented in this
and previous chapters do support a serious consideration of Wills observation
that leap-frogging beyond an increment extracts too high a price in terms of
its unsought-for consequences for individual and organization alike. Both
Conner[56] and Wills[57] acknowledge, however, that the nature of an
organizations environment is often such that organizations have little or no
choice but to attempt and continue to attempt such changes. They conclude that
the consequence must be to make ever greater demands on the skills and
qualities of managers in organizations. Conner identifies resilienceas the
single most winning characteristic, and Wills emphasizes the need for
emotional competence. A wide range of individual skills and qualities
perceived as helpful to an individual in change will be identified.
At this point it is important to re-emphasize that, while significant attempted
change may well be an imperative for many organizations, this does not preempt attempts to better manage and facilitate that change. There is much more
that could be done to acknowledge and work with the reality of individuals
change experiences at the least to practise what Conner[56] has described as
pain management.
Factors relating to the individual
Presented in the following list are the individuals characteristics, attitudes and
skills which were reported as being either helpful or hindering to the managers
journeys through change:
(1) Helping factors: a positive viewpoint; a future orientation; political/
situational awareness; focused; grounded; salient goals; readiness to
move on; aversion to standing still; opportunistic; competitive;
understanding change; skills fit; learning skills; financially secure;
resilience; empowered; self-knowledge; self-worth.
(2) Hindering factors: prior experience; lack of politicality; inaccurate
perception; instability; unsure of own goals; comfort with
known/discomfort with the unknown; not fitting; dependency;
unempowered; fearful; untrusting; caring for others/not caring for self;
low self worth.

The outcomes

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The corresponding descriptors for these helping and hindering factors are:
Helping factors
Positive viewpoint:
Optimism, having the confidence that it will always come out right, Ive got to come
from a positive view, Im very good at self-deception I can find all sorts of reasons
why its clearly in my interests and even after the event I can convince myself that
everything has turned out for the best.

68

Future orientation:
Not dwelling on the past you are where you are. Dwelling on how you got there can
drive you down, water under the bridge you cant carry your frustrations with you,
my nature is to look forward all the time and to start seeing the benefits, wilful
forgetting and building anew.

Political/situational awareness:
The most important aspect of change management is not the doing of it, but the politics
of it, keeping abreast of where you are and where you can best place yourself in the
organization, scanning developments, active scanning and grapevining, I maintain
my contacts.

Focused:
I only focus on the things that I can do something about, Ive an ability to shut out
things that I can do nothing about, I can focus very strongly, switch into another mode,
and forget/shut out, it was action that kept me from going bonkers.

Grounded:
I keep my feet on the ground, understanding the reality of how things are, putting
the organization into perspective by a whole picture review process, not panicking
but thinking through where I go to from here.

Salient goals:
Im able to revisit the fundamentals of what I want, being clear in my own mind what
I really want and making these goals explicit by writing them down, and verbalizing
them to others, it triggered a fundamental review a deep review of what I want my
career path to be from here on.

Readiness to move on:

I felt Id developed sufficiently to pick up something bigger, a good time for a change,
I wanted a change (there must be more to life), I had been stuck I was pleased that at
long last it was going to change.

Aversion to standing still:

Repetition bores me throughout my career, as soon as I could do a job comfortably, Ive
wanted to do something different, I get hacked off, but its better than nothing
happening at all, boredom with just keeping things going, I like doing things that are
totally different.

Opportunistic:
Spotting opportunities, Ive taken the opportunities that were there and came my way.
I grabbed and got in first.

Competitive:

The outcomes

Challenge excites me, and I enjoy doing it a bit better than others, a competitive edge,
I make it my business to be a success, I keep my edge.

Understanding change:
Knowledge of Tofflers Future Shock, dont change more than two things in your life
at any one time, knowing the theory of the situation (what are typical problems).

Skills fit:
Rediscovering my skills Id met these situations before, the role suits me I have
most of the skills, lots of interest in what youre doing.

Learning skills:
Learning is exciting, Im not afraid to ask questions, I learn very quickly.

Financially secure:
I have a pot of money, I was in a more fortunate position than some Ive a husband
whos quite capable of taking care of me (so I wasnt distraught), there are not desperate
financial demands on me.

Resilience:
Being able to bounce back, an unshakeable belief that this time youre going to
succeed, flexibility.

Empowered:
I started to feel I could impact, growing confidence, feeling empowered, proactivity.
I feel empowered to take responsibility for my own career, accumulated confidence I
feel empowered Ive got on in this company and outside, change throws up new
things. You need a confidence that you will be able to respond, and that comes from
having a diversity of past experiences something to tap into.

Self-knowledge:
Ive always known who I am. I have strong and weak points and I know what they are,
owning up to myself.

Self-worth:
Sussing out that its okay to be who I am, I think Im fairly marketable, identifying
my competitive selling point, I have valuable skills and experience.

Hindering factors
Prior experience:
Id been unemployed before. Insecure, the last thing I wanted in the world was to be
unemployed again, I didnt think it would happen Id been through these scenarios
before. At the last minute theyll say no, weve changed our minds.

Lack of politicism:
It took me a long time to understand the politics and how important they were, not
knowing the cast of characters, not understanding what they were doing, Ive never
been a great one for politics and manipulating people, I played politics but I didnt
know enough, there is a penalty to pay for sticking your neck out, I set myself up.

Inaccurate perception:
Paranoid, my perception of what was going on was totally inaccurate.

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Instability:
Easily flustered, destabilized, confused, overwhelmed.

Unsure of own goals:

I wasnt sure what I wanted.

70

Comfort with known/discomfort with unknown:

Its natural instinct to keep your hands on what youre good at and feel comfortable
with, Im uncomfortable with stepping into unknown waters, I need to be within a
hierarchy and slow movement.

Not fitting:
Its contrary to my personality, Im not the desired sort of animal, I find conformity
difficult, unless it meets my parameters, not gelling with my mentor.

Dependency:
I need support, someone whos there for me.

Unempowered:
I dont feel empowered I feel like a little girl, Im a pawn in the game, a foot-soldier in
the army, no control over the situation.

Fearful:
Its dangerous, a basic animal fear that I wont be able to support my family, I find
hire-and-fire quite paralysing.

Untrusting:
Not trusting the judgement of my managers (with hindsight Im not sure that was the
right thing for me to do), not being more clear to my colleagues as to where my
priorities were it would have made it easier if they had known, not being able to talk
to others about it that I hadnt been successful.

Caring for others/not caring for self:

If you know the people and care about them, its tough, its very difficult to be cold and
remote theyre not anonymous people theyre people youve grown up with for 20
years, squaring my conscience a lot of sleepless nights, shouldering it all, I cant
reveal my feelings to the others smile out there, put on a brave face, keeping it
running, Ive spent too much energy out there and not enough time on me it seemed
disloyal to the others.

Low self-worth:
Perceived lack of (my) marketability, not owning my own skill and value, Ive
become very self-critical, Ive got the feeling of total incompetence, I needed to get my
self-esteem and credibility back into shape sufficiently to carry on.

The majority of factors identified will not be surprising to anyone familiar with
significant attempted change in organizations, either through their own direct
experience or through reading the management literature. Personal resilience
has already been referred to in the previous section, which cited the work of
Conner[56] and of Wills[57]. Schein[58], like Wills, also refers to emotional
competence as a requirement if managers are to be stimulated rather than
exhausted by the rate of change in organizations. Similarly, McKnight and

Thompson[59] use the term psychological hardinessas one of the qualities

needed to help employees insulate themselves from the worst stresses of
organizational change. Other qualities identified by McKnight and
Thompson[59] were hope, self-confidence, and belief in oneself, which would
appear to equate with the factors presented above as having a positive
viewpoint and future orientation, being empowered and feeling self-worth.
Beyond identifying these particular individual helping factors, McKnight
and Thompsons[59] study also revealed three broad ways in which individuals
respond to change in organizations. First, some individuals respond as
victims, perceiving themselves as threatened with hostile situations they
cannot handle their response is panic. These victim-like qualities seem to
equate with the factors of feeling unempowered, unstable and fearful. The
second type of response equated with competitiveness and politicking and was
demonstrated by individuals whom McKnight and Thompson described as
survivors. Such individuals were sensing what was coming and get
competitive for inside gossip, for available positions, and for the favour of
higher-ups. The third response, and the one suggested by McKnight and
Thompson[59] as being the most effective way of managing change, was that of
the navigators. Such individuals remained calm and gathered information
relating to the change, created a vision of a desired future, and assertively
pursued it. This type of response relates to the factors identified above as
grounded, salient goals and, perhaps, opportunistic.
In a similar vein, Handy[3] has reported what he calls the individual
lubricants of change required of managers if they are to be other than mere
flotsam on the waves of life. These requirements were subsumed under three
main categories. Thus, Handy demonstrates the need for individuals to:
(1) demonstrate a proper selfishness (rather than caring for others/not
caring for self) by taking responsibility for themselves and their futures
(i.e. being empowered rather than unempowered); having a clear view of
the desired future (future orientation and salient goals rather than being
unsure of their own goals) wanting to make sure that they got that
future (competitive and opportunistic, and not lacking politicism); and
believing that they can get it (being empowered and having self-worth
rather than low self-worth);
(2) put things into another perception and not think of things in the way
they have always thought of them (namely inaccurate perception);
(3) be capable of living with uncertainty, mistakes and failures (equating
with understanding change and its problems, and not being
discomforted with the unknown).
Handy[3] also highlights individuals blocks to change, including the they
syndrome (by which he means leaving it to others rather than having a sense
of ones own responsibility), futility, and lacking forgiveness of self and
others. These blocks equate with the factors described earlier as dependency,

The outcomes

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being unempowered and untrusting, having low self-worth or being selfcritical.

The references from the management literature cited so far in this section
serve to validate a good number of the helping and hindering factors listed.
Rather than pursue this literature in order to identify still more citations
relating to the list of helping and hindering factors, it is perhaps more fruitful
to step a level above these lists and to highlight two further and important
observations.
It is most noticeable that very few of the factors listed are of the nature of
skills in the conventional sense of that term. The clear exception are learning
skills. Some of the factors listed may be thought of as being contextual, and
concerning self-knowledge and understanding (for example, understanding
change, self-knowledge, situational awareness and perhaps, salient goals).
Other factors appear to be circumstantial, having more to do with the reality
of the situations that individuals find themselves in (for example skills fit, not
fitting, ready to move on and financial security).
The remainder and the majority of the factors considered as helping or
hindering change describe individual characteristics, attitudes and
perceptions which may be regarded as aspects of an individuals character
and his or her accustomed ways of being in and seeing the world (for example,
aversion to standing still, dependency, and self-worth). The picture that
emerges is that, in the main, the individual factors which influence a
managers journeys through change are not those that will be easily remedied
or enhanced through short-term training activities. Not that as has already
been identified in the previous section management training is unhelpful.
Rather it should be recognized that shifts in how an individual is in change
is more the subject of longer-term development work. That such development
is possible is evidenced both in the self-development reported in the outcome
section of this chapter, and the well-documented effects of deeper
development work exemplified by Stuarts[32] work on individual stress
character.
In the short term, and as testified, for example, by McKnight and
Thompsons[59] work, training in some of the helpful skills, knowledge and
understanding of change may enable less stressful and more productive
individual change journeys. However, many of the personal characteristics
which influence such journeys may simply be evidenced in, rather than
changed through, those journeys. Such is likely to remain the case no matter
how strenuously the need for individual helping factors is advocated by the
principal instigators and initiators of change in organizations.
It is revealing to look beyond the literature on managers in organizational
change to the wider literature on individuals in change. Throughout this
monograph, many references from this wider literature on change have been
used to reinforce, illuminate and extend the broad range of research findings.
And yet, within that literature, it is most noticeable that little emphasis is
placed on particular skills or qualities required of individuals in change.

Rather, the perspective adopted is that significant change can be expected to

be a very difficult and often painful process for human beings. Instead of
assuming, wishing, or demanding that this is not the case, the (nonmanagement) literature stresses the importance of providing help and
support to individuals in change. In part, facilitation is suggested in easing
the introduction of changes, but largely in helping individuals to cope and
deal with the difficulties which ensue from change.
In the next section, the focus will be on the psycho-social factors which
were put forward by interviewed managers as being helpful to or hindering
their change journeys. The greatest majority of these helpful factors were not
designed into the organizational change initiatives, but arose informally and
often accidentally.
Before moving on, it is important to stress that if the instigators of
organizational change are not to set in train what may become a sink or swim
situation, subject to primitive Darwinian-like processes of selection in which
only the fittest (in terms of individual skills and qualities) survive and
thrive, then due recognition needs to be given to the desirability of providing
for facilitation of change at the level of individual managers operating at the
work face. As has been suggested earlier, major organizational change
attempts require not just organizational design, but organizational
development.
Psycho-social factors
The following lists respectively capture the data on helping and hindering
which fall within the category of psycho-social factors. These factors relate to
the social behaviours and climate within which managers were embarking on
their journey through change.
(1) Helping factors availability of: acceptance; confirmation; sanctioning;
structuring; advice; confrontation; explanation; modelling; sharing;
group membership.
(2) Hindering factors: lack of availability; lack of support; lack of respect;
lack of understanding; lack of straightness; politicking; competitiveness;
low morale; lack of modelling; little opportunity to influence.
The following lists provide corresponding descriptors for these factors:
Helping factor descriptors
Acceptance:
He was the only guy who spent time with me to talk through the emotional and
personal, the counsellors were excellent they helped me to put my house in order I
could argue logically. I could articulate my gut feeling. My confidence went up, my wife
helped me to keep all the negative in perspective, and helped me with my negative selftalk, my boss listened and sympathized.

The outcomes

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Confirmation:
The confidence shown in me by my boss, he rallied round to help me, I felt good about
the support he gave me a very caring man batting for me, people saying youre really
good at this, a support network, he wanted me and the feeling of being wanted and
welcomed is very important to me.

74

Sanctioning:
The organization has got to call foul and show the yellow card when people dont
operate out of the style, empowered to fashion my own job, very senior backing, in
control of my own changes.

Structuring:
He chose me, head-hunted, an objective that I could identify with and work
towards, it became more real/took on meaning for me when someone else told me and
asked me to act on it.

Advice:
Support comes from getting it off your chest and asking others about how you might
handle it, my boss advised me to take a holiday, have a rest and not to feel pressured to
make decisions (I did nothing for two weeks), my wife said give it another six months.

Confrontation:
My wifes a useful challenger, reminding me of what Ive always said that I wanted to do,
and whether that matches what Im doing now, others asking are you satisfied with
where youve got to in the organization.

Explanation:
Others gave me some insight into the decisions, discussions conducted in the pub with
friends in the company who were in a similar position to me and who had joined at the
same time. We didnt come up with any real answers we rationalized it. I needed that
rationalizing.

Modelling:
I work for a very fine man who exercises leadership, walking the talk otherwise
people will say its bullshit.

Sharing:
I had someone to share it with wed had the same experience, and we shared views, a
team where information was shared openly, rather than protected and hidden, talking
to someone else in the same position as me she pointed it out. I hadnt realized, its
helpful to appreciate one anothers problems.

Group membership:
Being a member of a group gives you greater strength (in managing the downsizing).
We were all going through the same mental turmoil, a gang of managers weve
helped ourselves to a certain extent, I was one of a group of rebels, distancing
themselves from what was going on. I was one of them it was reassuring that I wasnt
alone, an open team in which personal agendas are okay.

Hindering factor descriptors

Lack of availability:
No one to ask, no one to tell you, you cant talk to the director, he doesnt want to know
hell only talk to the level below, no one wanted to know they were too embarrassed
by the anger I felt, no one explained, they kept passing me on.

Lack of support:

The outcomes

No one came to my aid, absolutely no one helping me, no support, one phone call
would have helped a lot just to feel that someone was actually rooting for me, no
support network, no one cared and was close.

Lack of respect:
Lack of respecting where people are coming from.

Lack of understanding:
I dont believe they recognize how they are affecting people, key figures not
understanding, nor valuing, not feeling understood at all, my boss didnt want to hear
or care. I was accused of whinging, but it was a real worry not a whinge.

Lack of straightness:
Lack of honesty, lack of openness, total dishonesty, coyness, lack of
straightness, no one would say no over the months it became clear that it wouldnt
happen. It created unnecessary uncertainty and difficulty for me, not good at giving
people bad news he was hoping something would happen.

Politicking:
Political cross-fire, Weak and political rather than sticking to their guns as to whats
right and wrong, my boss is very political ducking and diving, blowing with the
wind, taking a lead from above, politicking, political infighting at the top.

Competitiveness:
Competition is going over the top, were putting up walls and not telling one-another if
you think of something good to do, them wanting golden boys to fail, oneupmanship, the daily intense battles, senior managers are in competition with one
another.

Low morale:
Morale at rock bottom cynicism, negativism, morale couldnt be lifted for those
staying until we took away those who were going, its still them and us, money
doesnt buy loyalty.

Lack of modelling:
People not doing what they say, not much has changed for those in high authority, I
cant see change happening unless the people making the statements are seen to change
and put themselves out.

Little opportunity to influence:

My boss made recommendations and assurances, but it wasnt his decision, I have
very little chance to influence, lack of control, losing the rudder, not being part of
the dialogue, not a lot of solicitation of my views.

The data on helping factors mapped easily onto a categorization previously

developed by Stuart[60] in his investigations of managers strategies and tactics
for using, and being helped by, others as a part of their natural, everyday,
workplace learning activities. Nine of the 15 helping categories identified by
Stuart are represented in the first list (above) that is, accepting, confirming,
sanctioning, structuring, advising, confronting, explaining, modelling and
sharing. Only group membership did not appear in Stuarts categorization,

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perhaps reflecting the stress and sense of loneliness that can mark the onset of
significant change compared to more everyday learning experiences. It is of
interest to note the six helping categories identified by Stuart, not identified
above that is, stimulating (in the sense of being a source of spark and
enthusiasm), equipping (which in this context would mean providing or sharing
techniques for managing change), exposing (in the sense of drawing out, and
helping to clarify ones thoughts), building (as a means of developing and
progressing ones ideas), testing (as a means of trying out or sounding out ones
ideas) and feeding back (as a means of reviewing). Of these, expressing,
building, testing and feeding back all assume and require a basic amount of
information which was often unavailable to many of the managers sampled.
The stimulating and equipping categories require levels of energy and skill
from the helper which perhaps were just not there to be tapped.
Turning to the hindering factors, most of the factors listed have been referred
to directly or may be inferred from the literature on individuals experiencing of
change. Rice and Dreilinger[61], for example, have described their work with
the survivors of downsizing. With respect to the hindering factors of lack of
understanding and opportunity to influence, Rice and Dreilinger emphasize the
importance of understanding and being seen to understand individuals
reactions to the changes. They further consider that most survivors do not
know what they can or should do to protect themselves and that their lack of
power to ensure their own future simply compounds the insecurity they
experience. Among the recommendations that Rice and Dreilinger[61] make
for what managers and human resource specialists can do to support
individuals through change, is to provide them with information and with
recognition, both of which would help to remedy the aforementioned difficulties
of lack of clarity and low self-worth. At the heart of the authors
recommendations is the need to give survivors personal attention to stay in
touch with their employees feelings and to provide a great deal of tender
loving care (TLC). Rice and Dreilinger emphasize the value of spending
unstructured time in talking about feelings, rather than work. The importance
of TLC is mirrored in Marris[33] finding concerning the importance, on a more
informal basis, of supportive friends unobtrusively but persistently offering
companionship. The concepts of TLC and companionship both relate strongly
to the sampled managers felt lack of availability, support, respect and
understanding. Rice and Dreilinger[61] conclude their prescription for helping
survivors by advocating that managers take care of themselves as well as their
employees. Thus, they highlight the need for managers to attend to their own
wellbeing: You too are a survivor acknowledge your own feelings and take
advantage of others support.
In a similar vein to Rice and Dreilinger, Kirkpatrick[62] has identified three
key aspects of being successful in making change. Kirkpatrick stresses the
importance of empathy, clear communication (including the why and the when,
the facts and the figures, and being prepared to answer questions on them), and

participation, which link respectively to the factors identified as lack of

understanding, lack of availability and lack of straightness, The equivalent
factors identified by Iacovini[50] are lack of respect and lack of understanding.
Thus, Iacovini opines that the secret to real success in organizational change
management is the effective management of the emotional vulnerability that
accompanies change. He calls for an honouring of employees needs and
helping them to understand and make sense of what is going on.
The hindering factor identified as lack of modelling refers to the wellreferenced need, particularly well articulated by Argyris and Schon[10], for
those who are advocating and requiring change to do as they say, or to match
their espoused theory with their theory-in-use. The other side of the coin to
the individual helping factors of competitiveness and politicking which were
listed earlier and related to Handys proper selfishness[3], was the
identification of those same factors as psycho-social hindering factors. These
factors appear to be particularly unhelpful when displayed by directors and
senior managers at the very top of organizations and viewed from the
perspective of managers below them.
Overall, managers reporting on the influence of psycho-social factors in their
journeys through change paint a picture largely, though not completely,
removed from that painted by many authors as being among the requirements
for successful change attempts. In part, the hindrances may have arisen from a
collective failing, in that the widespread organizational changes reported in this
research, touching, as they do, on a very great proportion of the management
cadre and for many of the managers resulting in the significant loss, trauma,
stress, worry and pain reported in Chapter 2, may well be equivalent to some of
the disaster situations studied by Marris[33] where many people were bereaved
at the same time. The consequence in such cases, as observed by Marris[33],
was the collapse of the supportive community, giving rise to a collective
inability to recover from grief. Such a phenomenon may well have developed in
the organizations studied and the reported low morale would not be a
contrary indicator in this respect.
What was certainly the case, however, was that the designed change
attempts did not provide the level and types of support required by individual
managers. Further, this lack of support was deemed to be a major hindrance to
individuals change journeys. And yet, according to Iacovini[50], the
understanding of, and attending to, individuals vulnerability in journeying
through change can do more than just get them through their journeys. Iacovini
suggests that such support can enhance employees personal and professional
growth, add value to their lives, and lead to increased loyalty. Here, then,
perhaps resides a real missed opportunity in the organizations studied by
building in appropriate support, the outcomes described earlier could have been
skewed towards many more managers emerging from their change journeys
having grown, and for many more managers to be moving on rather than
moving away?

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Facilitating managers change journeys

The aim here is not to repeat the detailed findings on helping and hindering
factors to change which were reported in earlier sections. As was mentioned in
introducing those findings, it will be taken for granted that they provide many
helpful pointers to the detailed tactics for facilitating managers journeys
through organizational change. Rather, the purpose here is to build on the broad
conclusions from the previous sections and to begin to identify some of the key
ingredients of a change facilitation strategy.
It is clear that the sheer level, amount, number and speed of changes being
attempted in organizations are themselves experienced by many managers as
major hindrances to accomplishing change. Yet, certainly within the current
and prevalent paradigm of thinking in organizations, there would appear to be
no choice but to attempt such changes, for the competitive market demands
them. Nevertheless, the research demonstrates that very much more could be
done to facilitate and support managers in their efforts to respond to change
initiatives.
Improved communication
Much that can be done is obvious, or should be to anyone who is prepared to
face up to the reality of what is involved in achieving organizational change
beyond just demanding that it happen. Thus, the preparatory ground needs to
be laid by communicating with managers. Organizations which do not
communicate provoke unnecessary uncertainty and ambiguity, invite rumour
and speculation, and prompt a huge investment of managerial energy in worry
work. The latter can be productive in enhancing preparedness and anticipation
of necessary processes of letting go. However, worry work can also be
massively wasteful of time and energy, and create unnecessary and nonproductive unease, pain, disempowerment, cynicism and political
manoeuvring. Preparatory communications can also lessen the stressful impact
of surprise and shock. Nor is communication necessary simply as a precursor to
change, for it is the essence of successful implementation, being not just a oneway exchange of information, but a dialoguing process which involves staying
in touch with, and listening to, individuals concerns.
Appropriate training
Appropriate training, too, has a part to play, albeit it would seem a
comparatively limited one, in enhancing individuals preparedness and abilities
to change. Most obviously, training can bolster efforts at communication by
helping individuals to develop their contextual understanding what is going
on and why. Also, training can be used to instil and enhance the new skills
required of managers by their changed roles and job activities (for example,
finance courses for those who are now required to manage a business unit or
profit centre). Training in learning skills is also becoming recognized as an
increasingly important part of managers skills repertoires.

Focusing more specifically on individuals change processes, workers such as

McKnight and Thompson[59] have reported on the efficacy of training
programmes which cultivate an appreciation for and a way of understanding
and speaking about the psychological aspects of managing transitions.
Beyond this, McKnight and Thompson[59] advocate the value of helping
managers to focus on their own experiences of change for example, how they
get stuck so that they can develop their self-awareness and understanding of
what change means for them and how they might move forward. Spencer and
Adams have produced some very useful material[22] which maps the steps of
personal transitions, and helps individuals to identify where they are up to and
what they might expect and do next to progress through the steps.
Towards individual facilitation
The essence of Spencer and Adams[22] work, which starts to move beyond
management training towards individual facilitation, is to help the manager to
accomplish the initial and fundamental steps of personal change and personal
empowerment[63]; that is, the raising of awareness and acceptance of how one
is.
The spirit and value of such a facilitative approach was put to the test in an
offshoot of the research, whereby the author and an internal resource colleague
were contracted to conduct a short enquiry focused on one particular work
group which had, and was experiencing, significant change both individually
and collectively. The first stage in this intervention replicated the process of the
research study, and thus involved one-to-one interviews with each member of
the group, helping them to recall, relive and recount their own journey(s)
through the organizational changes. Beyond these interviews, the next stage
was for the researchers to go away and analyse the interview data using the
frameworks which have been presented (and including, therefore, identified
primary and secondary triggers to change, level of the changes, mapped
journeys through change, outcomes, helping and hindering factors, etc.). These
analyses provided the substance for follow-up meetings with each individual.
Such meetings were designed to help the individuals to gain a better
understanding of the nature, processes and dynamics of change and to use this
understanding to:
inform their own experiencing of change;
identify progress on their own change journeys;
help ground them in the here and now of their journeys;
highlight outstanding issues and future directions.
The follow-up meetings were unanimously regarded as helpful by the
individuals concerned, particularly in developing their understanding of
themselves in change. Equally appreciated was the comfort that came with the
realization that they were not uniquely disturbed or inadequate beings, but that

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their experiencing of change was far from atypical. This latter outcome can be
likened to a reported consequence of so-called critical incident debriefings
recently conducted for emergency services in Lincolnshire[64].
Towards group facilitation
The success of the individual work prompted us to take one more intervention
step that of moving beyond individual towards group facilitation. By so
doing, we anticipated moving on from awareness and acceptance to a third key
step in personal development and empowerment, namely public acknowledgement[63]. Shortly after the individual feedback meetings, a special group away
day was held. The day was convened and fronted by the groups line manager,
but was led and facilitated by the two researchers. During the day, all
members of the group, including the manager, were encouraged and helped to
share their experiences of their own and their colleagues change journeys. The
process then moved beyond the phase of going public to considering the
implications of the data for individuals and for the group as a whole. Fairly
informal but explicit contracting then took place in terms of future behaviour
concerning one another. The away day was completed by a review of learnings,
particularly highlighting process issues.
The keys to the success of the day were judged by the participants to be the
permission for and opportunity to disclose and share, the sense of relief that
resulted, the deepened understanding that emerged, and the legitimization of
personal agendas for change within a frame for progressing the group as a
whole.
From the researchers point of view, the success of the intervention was threefold:
(1) It provided us with an opportunity to be helpful, enabling us to put a
little more back into a group of managers who had given us so much of
their time in contributing to the research.
(2) We obtained some validation of an approach which not only targeted
individual managers and provided some helping, and alleviated some
hindering factors to change, but which also started to affect the social
context which our research findings had indicated could be so powerful
an influence on the experiencing of change in organizations. The
intervention demonstrated how, in a relatively simple manner, a process
combining open communication, reflection, enquiry and active listening
could start to provide a number of the helpful psycho-social factors
identified. In particular, we were struck by the importance of the
development of understanding, the demonstration of availability,
recognition and respect, and the opportunity to participate, advise,
confront, influence and if not to provide TLC, then certainly to be
attentive and show empathic concern.

(3) We identified an embryonic process which, if enacted on a longitudinal

time-frame, and starting much earlier in the changes, would be truly
facilitative of managers journeys through change. This possibility
prompted a further search of the literature for models of interventions
which had been successfully used elsewhere in facilitating individuals
through significant change. This search was undertaken in the
aforementioned knowledge that outside the management literature the
emphasis was on interventions which were rooted in approaches which,
in the short term at least, did not seek to influence managers skills and
qualities but, instead, sought to facilitate individuals progress through
the fraught and disturbing phenomenon of significant individual
change.
Facilitative interventions
The work of Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] well represents the increasing volume
of literature based on developing a better understanding of individuals
experiences of change and how it can be facilitated. Hodgkinson and Stewart
present a rigorous account of what they call disaster management which
appears readily adaptable to the world of significant organizational change,
particularly as it builds on the process described in the previous subsection to
this chapter.
Hodgkinson and Stewarts[25] work focuses on the concept of grief
leadership. While not denying the role of expert outside facilitators (a resource
advocated by Arkin[64]), they consider that the process whereby experts are
brought in to work with individuals who are most affected causes
stigmatisation and ignores natural processes of support. Instead, Hodgkinson
and Stewart[25] highlight the role of organizational leaders in fostering
emotional and cognitive processing by modelling not a stiff upper lip and the
suppression of pain, doubt and need, but more by taking the lead in promoting
a more open attitude to vulnerability and emotional expression. This is not to
suggest that group leaders take their eyes off the ball of task achievement.
Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] argue for leaders having two broad areas of
concern: taking care of the emotional needs of group members; and restoring
the groups level of functioning. Neither do they see these as tasks to be
completed sequentially, a view which Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] see as a false
and unhelpful dichotomy. Rather, they assert that, post-shock, work must
continue, but that the way in which it does so is critical. They argue that, If the
leader expects people to get down to it, without acknowledgement of grief or
pain, this will be seen as insensitivity and will cause resentment.
The major vehicle for grief leadership advocated by Hodgkinson and
Stewart[25] is a group process called psychological debriefing. The aim of the
process is to minimize the occurrence of unnecessary psychological disturbance
and pain, and to prevent psychological reactions from assuming highly
disruptive levels for the individuals and the group. The intention is not that the

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debriefings prevent reactions from arising but that they provide a framework
for the individual to contain them, understand them and take further action.
The debriefings have a number of foci (the interested reader is referred to
Hodgkinson and Stewarts[25] original work for full details) which falls into
three broad kinds of work:
(1) ventilation and assessment of stress;
(2) discussion of symptoms and provision of reassurance and support;
(3) mobilization of resources, provision of information and the formation of
action plans.
Hodgkinson and Stewart[25] emphasize the importance of appropriate timing
as a key factor in the success of the psychological debriefing approach. This
point is strongly reinforced by Parkes work in the context of bereavement[39].
Parkes emphasizes the need to focus support where and when it is needed. For
example, early offers of help which involve an acceptance of the need for change
will be rejected. Initially, individuals are likely to be in the holding-on phase of
the change journey which was described in Chapter 2. The holding-on phase
precedes realization and acceptance. As discussed earlier, moving through the
holding-on phase and making real what has happened is a process that takes
time. Parkes notes that premature confrontation of reality results in panic,
shutdown and backtracking[39]. He also offers a further reminder that during
the holding-on phase of journeying through change, it is necessary for the
individual to experience the deep emotionality and thinking involved. Support
at this point involves clear indication that there is no need to bottle up feelings
and thoughts. However, this no more means that the individuals heart strings
are to be plucked than it means connivance in avoiding emotionality.
While ventilation or catharsis is appropriate, helpful and indeed a necessary
response to significant change, Parkes[39] again reinforced Hodgkinson and
Stewarts[25] emphasis on the importance of moving on at an appropriate time.
Parkes also noted that help given at a time when destructive thoughts and
behaviour are developing, is less likely to be resisted, be more acceptable and
more effective than help that is given a long time after these patterns have
become established (namely being stuck). Finally, when an individual has
reached acceptance, has completed the letting-go process and is ready to enter
the moving phase then, and only then, is the time to help by introducing the
individual to new ideas and opportunities.
The essence of psychological debriefing is the explicit tracking of
individuals, change journeys combined with the proffering of timely and
appropriate support. The process requires that the leader has developed his or
her sensing abilities and sensitivity, the skills of active listening, and has
acquired an understanding of the terrain of individual change journeys coupled
with an empathy for the individual experiences invoked by such journeys. The
concept of grief leadership, is, then, a demanding one. It implies that the ball of

facilitating change in the organizations is back in the court of those leaders who
instigate and demand the changes in the first place. To their portfolio of
business, team, and task briefings and debriefings, would be added
psychological debriefings. To their roles as leaders, managers, coaches and
mentors, would be added grief leadership. A tall order, one might say! And yet,
a seemingly necessary one if the outcomes of organizational change attempts
are to more closely match the intentions, and if the costs are not to outweigh the
benefits, be those counted at the level of the individual, the group, or the
organization as a whole.
So where does this leave the management development specialists?
Obviously, there is a role in training individuals in developable knowledge,
skills and awareness. Equally, and beyond factors relating to individuals, there
are roles in backing up the organizations endeavours to communicate and
prepare people for change, and in helping to create a supportive climate for
change. Above all, however, the most powerful entry point and lever for aiding
organizational change must be to reach, influence, develop and support those
leaders in the organization who are facing up to the realities of what change
looks like on the ground and who consequently are moving beyond
organization design and into organization development. It is the earnest hope of
the project researchers that this monograph, together with follow-up reading of
the many referenced texts, will be of help in this endeavour.
Conclusion
Returning to the start of the Chapter 1, the aims of the research were to develop
a better and deeper understanding of managers experiences of significant
organizational change attempts; to open up and highlight key issues and
processes involved in this experience; to enable a picture to be formed of the
outcomes of these processes; and, looking to the future, to identify possible
helping strategies for those remitted to lead, design and facilitate
organizational change. Those aims have been prosecuted.
Throughout, conclusions have been drawn, summarized and reinforced. It
would seem unduly repetitive to do so again. By way of closure it is proposed,
instead, to return to the literature on individuals in change which has been so
helpful in informing and extending the results of the research. The following
further extracts from that literature will hopefully press home a few of the more
important, and sometimes contentious, points raised in the work.
A survey by Ingersoll Engineers found a picture of companies faced with
accelerating rates of change but not yet fully organized to manage it effectively.
The 200 UK directors surveyed generally agreed top-level commitment to
change rarely extended to the nitty gritty[65]. Others state:
The key to managing a re-organization is balancing the technical side with the people and
process side of the change effort. There is a tendency to focus on structures, systems and
procedures. Managers draw organization charts, determine staffing levels, move functions,
and centralise or decentralise responsibilities. These tasks are important but they can

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overwhelm the entire change effort. When that happens, the people and process side of the
reorganization becomes secondary. The irony is that the success of a re-organization depends
on how successfully an organization manages its people and processes throughout the
change[53].
Business schools seldom teach the human side of change. The human side is not logical,
rational, or reasonable. It involves the feelings of employees such as fear, uncertainty and
doubt as they attempt to make sense of change and maintain their self-esteem. These
feelings are intangible. They are difficult to assess and manage, and executives may not
realise their powerful effect. But if organizations are to gain employee commitment, it is
crucial for them to understand how to deal with these issues[50].
Organisational change strategies expect an embracing of the new dawn without
recognising, acknowledging, and working with peoples strong feelings in the face of change.
Even where change is welcomed, people may still need to grieve the loss of old relationships
and locations to honour their past[66].
Resistance is a label applied by managers and consultants to the perceived behaviours of
others who seem unwilling to accept influence or help it is not necessarily the
phenomenological experience of the targets[4].
It is unlikely that (managers) will provide the necessary support to match the new demands
they are making of their employees. Employees are expected to emerge from the womb
running and without any visible means of support life as a wildebeest rather than as a
human being[67].
The reformers have already assimilated the changes to their purposes and worked out a
reformulation which makes sense to them perhaps through months of analysis and debate
and yet they deny others the chance to do the same[33]
They may justify by a conception of common interest, cost, benefits, profitability,
expansionbut people cannot reconcile themselves to the loss of familiar attachments in
terms of some impersonal calculations of the common good. They have to find their own
meaning in these changes before they can live them. Abstract purposes like maximising profit
over time require the rational man of economic theory, but in reality we cannot substitute
an abstract calculus of generalised well being for our love of people, places, kinds of work,
etc[33]
When those who have the power to manipulate changes act as if they only have to explain, and
when their explanations are not accepted, shrug off opposition as ignorance or prejudice, then
they express a profound contempt for the meaning of lives other than their own[33].

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