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MANAGING CHANGE
Conversations On The Leading Edge Of Knowledge and Discovery With Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove COPYRIGHT (C) 1998 THINKING ALLOWED PRODUCTIONS Reprinted with permission from Thinking Allowed Productions
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Our topic today is "Managing Change," both personal and organizational. We live in an era of increasing transition and change, and yet we're not necessarily skilled in dealing with such change. How can we learn the skills necessary to survive and thrive in such an era? With me is Dr. Cynthia Scott, an organizational consultant, clinical psychologist, and president of the Heart Work Group in San Francisco. Dr. Scott is the author of numerous books, including Managing Personal Change, Managing Organizational Change, Take This Job and Love It, and Self-Renewal. Welcome, Cynthia. CYNTHIA SCOTT, Ph.D.: Welcome. I'm glad to be here. MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to be with you. You know, change is all around us, and yet it seems as if one of the most fundamental human instincts is to deny change, avoid change. We get threatened by change; I guess it upsets our homeostasis. SCOTT: Exactly. We don't like it. I think the first experiment I ever did in change was to ask people in the dorm to use a different toilet and a different sink for a week. People were so upset. We get our little mazeway patterns, we get our little ways that we like to do things, and we get comfortable. So it isn't that you are bad or weak if you resist change; it's very normal. MISHLOVE: There's something comforting, I suppose, about having a habit, knowing that every day -- it's like rituals. SCOTT: Well, if you think of much change we're dealing with -- think of the information in the New York Times today; that is the amount of information that a person in the sixteenth century had to deal with in their entire lifetime. So all that onslaught of information -- my grandfather was born when there were no airplanes, and so when I write to him and say, "This is where I've been this week," it's so different for him. We're trying to deal with much more than we ever have before. MISHLOVE: Well, I realize that it was just a few years ago when nobody had personal computers. Now they're ubiquitous. People a few years ago didn't have VCR machines; now they're everywhere. So we're living in an age of information explosion, communication explosion. Businesses are changing. The professions that were once thought to be -- if you became a certain profession, an engineer for example, you'd be secure for life. Now we see that many people are out of work in these professions. SCOTT: What people used to think, I think, Jeffrey, was that the safest place you could go to hide from change was the center of these large organizations, like GE or IBM or whatever. And what's been happening is the center has been slowly sinking or being sucked out. The liposuction on middle management in the last ten years has been dramatic. And so there's no more safety in the middle. Safety is now on the edge of the organization. It's at the synapse; it's where this organization meets another organization, and how can you be most helpful to join those things. So when I speak to people about where the safety is -- and I don't think there is any anymore -- if there is any, it's around the edge of the organization. Can you speak two languages? Can you cross-speak between marketing and sales? Are you able to translate? Can you speak to the customer and bring it back inside? Those are the skills that bring safety now, not the center hiding-out skills. MISHLOVE: It sounds as if what you're saying is that it's no longer enough to be a specialist, that it's important -- when you use the term interface, that means being a generalist, being able to speak many different languages. SCOTT: Well, if you look at what the Japanese are looking for when they hire new people -- I did some work at the Nissan plant, and they are now looking for people who are willing to learn two to three or four jobs, not just one job as you're saying, the specialist, but being able to switch jobs. And again, it's making them more healthy, in terms of being able to have different kinds of work along their career stream. Most people are going to have four to five different careers in their lifetime. How many careers have you had? I mean, count them. MISHLOVE: I've certainly had four or five already. SCOTT: Me too. MISHLOVE: In fact, this week it seems as if I've had four or five careers. Yet there's this basic human instinct. It's as if our culture is growing in such a way that we have to address our very humanness, in some way. What it means to be human is somehow changing. I mean, we have this notion of prizing our traditions, and I find that when you look at people who proclaim the value of tradition so strongly -- the real orthodox, conservative people -- what they are talking about doesn't even sound really traditional any longer. SCOTT: I think if you look over history, you begin to see what are the elements of tradition. When you look across cultures, you look at what are the things that still mean things to people. It's family; it is what you say, Jeffrey, I think, tradition, but tradition that makes meaning in the world. It's the notion of coherence. It's how do I find where I fit? How do I know what I mean in this world? What is my job? Why am I? I mean, those are the big existential questions, and I think people are asking them more and more. And in some ways the traditionalist view is, it's simple, the answers are simple. And I don't think they are. MISHLOVE: One of the things that you point out in your work is that as people confront a situation of change, in an organization or personally, the first stage they go through is a stage of denial -- it's not really happening; this is not happening to me. But then, as they begin to come to grips with the fact that it is happening, they turn inward. They have to deal with it internally, and there they have to come to grips with their own resistance. SCOTT: Well, not only their own resistance, Jeffrey, but their own loss. You see, it's a grieving process. The denial is very helpful, because you don't have to feel the loss. You can just pretend that it won't happen. Often what I see in companies is productivity goes up, people do the old way real hard, real fast, and it looks real good. So if you're the manager, you walk out on the floor, and you've just said, "We're going to computerize," or, "The new system is coming," or whatever, and you go out the next day, and people are working real well. It looks good. You think, "Great. No problem here." MISHLOVE: Business as usual. SCOTT: Business better than usual. Because what people do in the denial is: "If I get real good, they won't see me. They won't come and get me. They'll like what I've been doing." The resistance phase happens when people have been confronted in some way with having to deal with it, meaning you can no longer submit your reports on the typewriter; it has to be on a computer. And the confrontation comes, and what happens is people experience a loss of identity about who they are. If I'm not a typist, well then, who am I, and how do I fit into this changing notion of work? The resistance just breaks loose all over the organization, and what you see as a manager, you see people getting sick, not showing up; you see them breaking things. I mean, the sabotage, the accident level, goes way up in organizations. In one organization I'm dealing with right now, actually, people are kind of smashing their service trucks, but they don't know why. You see, they're really upset and very angry at their loss of who they are. So the resistance is normal. I want to make the point real clear that the resistance is normal. It's not bad or weak people. You have to go through it. End Part I
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