Chapter 20: Making Change Easier 315
Imagine that you’re experiencing change in your work life. You’re a manager
who needs to keep a change process on track while making sure that your
staff are engaged and motivated (so that productivity loss is kept to a minimum),
and also ensure that you can keep yourself upbeat and healthy. The big
problem when change like this happens in an organisation is that people feel
powerless. The perception of lack of control leads to negative stress and lack
of motivation. Very little room exists for manoeuvre in big-change objectives
set by top management. The people who have to implement the change can
get some sense of control and stay engaged in the change process if they
can decide the steps of how to actually put the change in place. Teams and
individuals can apply the goal-setting techniques of Chapter 4 and experience
less stress.
Take some time out to sit your team around a table and brainstorm any
impending changes (and team in this sense can be your family or a larger
social group). This process is a good way for the whole team to find out what
each other’s concerns are as regards the change. If the team is too big to fit
around a table, break the team into several groups and allocate one point to
each group. The team then comes together and one group talks about what it
discussed, thus bringing more valuable insights.
Understanding the Structure of Change
In order to make change easier to understand, we use two models to illustrate
what you may be experiencing and what you may allow for when you find
that change is making you feel uncomfortable or making you behave in a way
that’s out of character.
The Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle
Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about the ‘Five Stages of Grief’ in her famous
book On Death and Dying. Although originally designed to deal with death,
her model is useful in helping to understand change.
You don’t come across this model in standard NLP courses. However,
people are fairly familiar with the Kübler-Ross ‘Five Stages of Grief’ as applied
specifically to corporate change. The reason we include it here is to pace
anyone who doesn’t know much NLP but who has used this model for
organisational change, as a lead-in to applying NLP to change.
