Why change may not be as difficult as you thought…
16th June, 2011 - Posted by stellacollins - 2 Comments
For a long time I’ve been a little perplexed by the Change Curve that I’ve often seen described as the way people deal with change. It seemed strange to me that change should always seem to be described as a rather negative activity when many of the people I knew and worked with seemed quite capable of handling change – and regularly even embraced it.
For anyone not familiar with it the Change Curve is a model to describe how we face change and suggests that we go through a series of stages of handling change: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance, hope.
And this curve seems to have derived from the work of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in the late 1960s and the publication of her book On Death and Dying. Apparently this research was actually conducted on people who were dying rather than people experiencing bereavement and may not have been particularly rigorously conducted. Somehow over the years the message got distorted and people came to understand these steps to be those associated with change of a more general sort and they got applied to the workplace.
So there’s a new book out called The Truth about Grief by Ruth Davis Koningsberg which explains what may be a more realistic, better researched, description of what happens when people are grieving. This may be of value to many people. One of the arguments in the book is that the Kubler-Ross model was a convenient way to describe some peoples experiences, or at least part of their experience, but once the model became commonly known it may have actually prolonged or changed the experience for some.
And it would seem from the new research that people may experience some or all of the emotions mentioned in the Kubler-Ross work but that there are no fixed stages to them, so they are not inevitable.
Another useful insight in the book is that 80-85% of people recover from grief after about 6 months regardless of whether they are offered any interventions and the author believes we are almost programmed to deal robustly with grief (Davis Koningsberg emphasises this doesn’t mean we stop missing people after 6 months but that we are able to function normally again). Obviously this does leave some people requiring more support.
Bereavement is clearly a stronger emotion than those experienced at work but it may be that this new research describes the reaction to changes at work more effectively too, particularly when it’s an unwanted change such as redundancy.
Or perhaps there are better models for describing changes that happen at work – this may be particularly helpful when change seems to be the new ‘normal’ – perhaps we don’t have to go through all those negative emotions that we’ve been told are the normal reactions to change. You may be able to face it head on without so many negative emotions.
I’ve certainly always balanced the Kubler-Ross curve with another that suggests the stages of change may be uninformed optimism, informed pessimism, hopeful realism and informed optimism.
It will be interesting to hear what other models of change you have come across or your direct experience of change.
Posted on: June 16, 2011
Filed under: Uncategorized
2 Comments
Ros Baynes
June 16th, 2011 at 9:54 am
I’ve always liked the Kubler-Ross curve, but only for enforced and (initially atleast)painful change. I entirely agree with your 4 stages, from uninformed to imformed optimism, for other types of change. Interesting debate!
Paul Wright
July 7th, 2011 at 10:46 am
Hi Stella. This is interesting because I too have used the change curve and have always emphasised that it was based on negative change not positive change. Your posting has now prompted me to think again. I have heard many times people say “Ooooh yes, thats exactly how I felt” or “OMG, I now understand why my team reacted the way they did” BUT are these actually examples of people making meaning out of the model and bending their reality to fit it rather than the model reflecting true responses. Aaargghhhh. My brain hurts.
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