Perhaps it’s natural to think about change in the new year. It marks a new calendar period, the start of brighter evenings, a change of seasons…depending on where you are in the world. The first time I visited Thailand was a big change for me, my first experience of Asia, somewhere I had longed to visit for years. It was December, the end of one year with a new year in sight. It was a development programme for leaders from 17 countries, an exciting experience.
One of the speakers, Dr Lim Peng Soon, led a day looking at Managing Transitions, based on William Bridges’ research and writings under that same title. I want to share some of his insights here, drawing on Bridges and some of my own insights too in case they may be of benefit to others. I’m also interested to hear more from you on this topic, e.g. what have you experienced, noticed or learned when leading or coaching others through change? We can distinguish between ‘change’ and ‘transition’ as something like this: change is what happens around us; transition is what happens within us. In other words, change is situational, transition is psychological or even spiritual. The latter is a process of reorientation from what-has-been to what-is-going-to-be. This involves moving from endings (leaving the past) through a ‘neutral zone’ (the inbetween phase) to a new beginning (the future state). If change leaders don’t pay attention to leading transitions alongside leading change, they can lose talented people, struggle with communication as anxiety is high or trust is eroded, find low levels of poor performance or high levels of stress and absenteeism. This demands attention from the outset. How people experience leadership and change will have as much impact on the desired outcomes as practical change plans and programmes. As Soon comments, ‘In change management you start with the end in mind. In transitions management you start with the end-ings in mind’. This points to the need to recognise that change often implies loss or leaving. Who will lose what? How far does it matter to them? How can we mark endings and show proper respect for the past? What can we hold onto alongside that which will change in order to ensure a degree of continuity? The endings phase starts as soon as people become aware of the changes. As leaders, it’s a phase that at its best entails drawing close to people, listening to them, hearing their questions and concerns. Too much emphasis on a positive future can feel insensitive at this stage, especially if it seems to negate or prohibit people sharing how they feel about the loss that change implies. ‘When you’re feeling the pain, it can be hard to see the gain.’ The neutral zone is where people often feel ambiguous or disorientated. They may be starting to move on but haven’t yet let go of the past or grasped hold of the future. During this phase, the future may seem unclear, uncertain or scary. People may feel more confused, irritable and tired than usual. They may appear to zigzag between moods, sometimes enthusiastic, sometimes despondent. As leaders, listen, be patient and be prepared to provide support. The new beginnings phase is where the proverbial psychological dust is beginning to settle, the future looks clearer, people start to feel more focused and energised and previous difficulties are perceived as opportunities or challenges. People are ready to move on, to push ahead with creating and stepping into the future state. As leaders, this is the time to positively envision, to stoke the fires of inspiration, to involve people in creative and engaging tasks. In my experience, one of the biggest leadership challenges is to be sensitive and patient throughout the transition. Leaders tend to go through transitions faster because they create and lead the change. It takes time for other people to work through the changes the leaders have already processed. People can be inappropriately labelled as ‘resistant to change’ when they are simply working through a normal transition process and experience. On this point, Soon cautions us to be aware of the ‘marathon effect’. Leaders may race ahead and become very critical of people apparently lagging behind, especially if they appear to be holding up the changes. In a marathon, the front row sets off first but it takes a while for the middle section to start moving and even longer for people at the back. By the time people in the middle and back sections are moving, leaders can be already racing off to the next initiative. Finally, the fact that people go through the same change doesn't mean they go through the same transition. Some may embrace change enthusiastically from the outset, others may struggle at first but move on to become solid supporters in time. In Bridges' model, people tend to experience something of all three states simultaneously. It's really a question of which is the dominant state at any point in time and to act as leaders and coaches accordingly.
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Critical reflexivity…hmm…what’s that? Sounds complicated. It's something about noticing and paying attention to our own role in a story; how I influence what I perceive in any relationship, issue or situation. I was re-reading one of my favourite books, An Invitation to Social Construction (2009) by Kenneth Gergen this morning which introduces this concept with the following explanation: ‘Critical reflectivity is the attempt to place one’s premises into question, to suspend the ‘obvious’, to listen to alternative framings of reality and to grapple with the comparative outcomes of multiple standpoints…this means an unrelenting concern with the blinding potential of the ‘taken for granted’…we must be prepared to doubt everything we have accepted as real, true, right, necessary or essential’. I find this interesting, stimulating and exciting. It’s about journeying into not-knowing, entertaining the possibility that there could be very different ways of perceiving, framing or experiencing issues or phenomena. It’s about a radical openness to fresh possibilities, new horizons, hitherto unimaginable ideas. It’s a recognition that all my assumptions and preconceptions about reality could be limiting or flawed. I’ve found this critical reflexivity principle invaluable in my coaching and OD practice. How often people and organisations get stuck, trapped, by their own fixed ways of seeing and approaching things. The same cultural influences that provide stability can blind us to alternative possibilities. The gift of the coach or consultant is to loosen the ground, release energy and insight, create fresh options for being and action. It resonates with my reading of the gospels. Jesus Christ had a way of confronting the worldviews, traditions and apparent ‘common sense’ outlook of those he encountered in such a way that often evoked confusion, anger or frustration. It’s as if he could perceive things others couldn’t see. He had a way of reframing things that it left people feeling disorientated. He operated in a very different paradigm. I will close with words from Fook & Askeland (2006): ‘Reflexivity can simply be defined as an ability to recognise our own influence – and the influence of our social and cultural contexts on research, the type of knowledge we create and the way we create it. In this sense, then, it is about factoring ourselves into the situations we practice in.' I was speaking with a colleague recently who felt trapped in unresolved conflict. It was a key relationship, one that couldn’t be avoided, and all previous efforts had failed. As a consequence, both parties were feeling frustrated, de-energised and despondent about the future. As we explored how they had attempted to fix things in the past, it became clear they had focused on all the negatives…a long list of annoying and painful experiences from the past. Their conversations were characterised by blame and demands. It felt intractable.
The problem with such patterns of behaviour is that they create a negative expectation of the future. Both parties now felt stressed before they even spoke with each other. The stress affected their perspective and their resilience, their ability to hear and to cope. So we decided to try a different approach. How to build a positive expectation in order to create a different focus, a different conversation and, ultimately, a different relationship. It wouldn’t be easy but it felt worth a go. My colleague felt sceptical but, nevertheless, willing to give it a try. Firstly, we agreed that next time they spoke, they would meet off site in a physical environment (e.g. café, park) that they both found positively stimulating and energising. This helped to break them away from the current environment that held such negative memories for them. Secondly, we agreed they would speak only of the positive moments in their relationship together. They found this hard at first. The negative experiences felt so overwhelming that they could hardly think of any positives. Nevertheless, they managed to remember some examples. Thirdly, we agreed that after sharing such positive examples, they would each share future hopes for their relationship: ‘what we would like our relationship to be more like, more of the time’. They reflected each others’ hopes back to each other: ‘So you would like…’ Fourthly, we agreed they would move on to discuss ‘what it would take from me to make this work in practice’. This shifted each party’s focus from the other onto themselves. ‘This is how I would need to change…this is what it will take for me to do it…this is the help I will need.’ This kind of approach demands openness to fresh possibilities, humility, a willingness to forgive. It demands imagination and courage too, an ability to envision and embrace a new future. It’s not easy and the support of a friend, counsellor or coach can help make the journey possible. I would be interested to hear examples from others who’ve worked on conflict resolution too. What was the issue? How did you approach it? What happened as a result? What made the biggest difference? What did you learn? What would you do the same or differently next time? Gareth Morgan in Images of Organisation (1986) commented, ‘People have a knack for getting trapped in webs of their own creation’. It’s as if we can create ways of seeing the world personally and between us that become fixed and prevent us seeing alternatives. According to social construct theory, we never really see the world for what it is, but rather as how we learn to perceive and make sense of it. This means that we attribute meaning to people, objects and situations, rather than perceive them objectively.
Personal and social construct psychology are interested in how people, groups, organisations and societies create their own ‘reality’. The language, images, metaphors and stories we use both reveal and reinforce how we see, experience and respond to the world. So, for instance, if we talk about a team, an organisation, an organisational structure etc, it may be to us as if those abstract entities actually exist in their own right, rather than simply as a way of thinking about and organising our psychosocial perceptions and experience. Depending on what images, beliefs, values and assumptions we hold about such ‘constructs’, we can find ourselves holding fixed views that blind us to alternative ideas and options. Social construct coaching is not about unearthing ‘the truth’ but exploring alternative constructs. Social construct coaching aims to help a person or group to surface, examine and challenge the constructs they have inherited and created and to experiment with creating alternative constructs to see what they may reveal, release and enable. Sample techniques: *Invite the coachee or group to depict a real work scenario, e.g. by drawing on paper, using objects (e.g. toys) or configuring people in a room to see what picture (or ‘construct’) emerges. *Encourage the coachee or group to reflect on what has emerged, e.g. who or what have they included and why, how have they positioned themselves in relation to others and why etc. *Challenge the coachee or group’s assumptions, e.g. who or what is missing, what evidence is there to support any assumptions, what evidence could point towards contrary conclusions? *Urge the coachee or group to consider how people from diverse situations might perceive or approach the scenario, e.g. from different genders, cultures, ages, jobs, positions in hierarchy. *Support the coachee or group to experiment with radical alternatives, e.g. draw the diagram upside down, swap roles and places, play with opposite words, images and metaphors. Person and social construct coaching can enable changes in perception, resulting options and personal-cultural behaviour. The most exciting examples result in a fundamental paradigm shift, a total reconstruction of how an individual or group perceives, shapes and responds to the world. People sometimes become stuck and struggle to find ways forward in their work and relationships because of how they perceive and respond to people and situations. I ran a workshop recently to help managers develop insights and skills in cognitive behavioural coaching (CBC). CBC is based on cognitive behavioural psychology. It is interested in how a person’s thinking influences his or her feelings and behaviour. It aims to improve a person’s effectiveness by reducing stress and opening fresh possibilities for the future.
Cognitive refers to mental processes: what we are thinking and what we believe. Behaviour refers to what we do: how we act in relationships and other situations. Coaching refers to helping a person enhance their life quality and effectiveness. CBC aims to help a person surface, examine and challenge limiting or self-defeating thoughts and beliefs. It is not just about positive thinking but more about reality-orientation. It focuses on what’s happening ‘here and now’ and on helping the person approach the future differently. A CB coach invites a person to talk about an issue, a challenge or something they are experiencing. Often, it is something that is causing the person frustration or stress. Sometimes, however, it could be simply that a person feels limited by a way of working or is struggling to find a way forward. In order for the person to be honest, the coach needs to demonstrate genuine interest and trustworthiness. The person needs to feel free to be open, without being judged, and to know the coach has the person’s best interests at heart. Listening and confidentiality are very important. If the person is feeling anxious, stressed or highly emotionally-charged, it’s unlikely that he or she will feel able to engage in a conversation about thinking patterns without calming down first. Creating the right cathartic space, perhaps over a coffee, can help the person relax and engage. A CB coach will allow a person to introduce an issue or situation he or she is dealing with and listen out for indicators of ‘cognitive distortions’, that is, ways in which the person is thinking about the issue or situation that are out of synch with reality or proving counterproductive. Common examples include polarising issues into extremes; over-generalising from specific experiences and ignoring all evidence to the contrary; predicting the future and excluding all alternative possibilities; assuming what other people are thinking or feeling; anticipating the worst possible outcomes. The coach will draw attention to these thinking patterns, invite the person to examine them, and offer supportive challenges that help the person think in new ways (e.g. ‘what assumptions are you making?’, ‘how far is what you’re thinking supported by the facts?’, ‘what are you not noticing?’). Finally, the coach will help the person plan a way forward to deal with the issue or situation differently. This could involve e.g. conversation, vividly imagining new scenarios or role playing to practise and reinforce new ways of thinking and behaving. Coaching is often characterised as two people sitting down together, engaged in conversation, with one person helping the other to think things through. I ran a short workshop today that introduced insights and practises from Gestalt psychology and coaching characterised by a more experimental, experiential approach. Gestalt is a field of psychology that focuses on awareness in the here and now. Insight can emerge through pausing for a moment to notice what we are thinking, feeling or experiencing in our bodies. Gestalt views thoughts, feelings and somatic experience as interconnected.
We reflect this analogical experience in our language. For example, I may feel tightness in my throat when I approach a situation where I struggle to have a ‘voice’. I feel ‘gutted’ (accompanied by a stomach ache) or find this situation a ‘pain in the neck’ (accompanied by tension in my neck). Our minds filter our thoughts and feelings, partly to enable us to focus (rather than being aware of everything going on within and around us, all at the same time, which would be overwhelming) and partly if those thoughts and feelings are unacceptable to ourselves or others, or cause discomfort. What we experience in our bodies is unfiltered by the mind. Sometimes, what we experience in our bodies is analogous to what we are experiencing psychologically. Paying attention to what we are experiencing physically can raise unacknowledged or suppressed beliefs or issues into awareness. In Gestalt coaching, the coach may help the client explore issues or experiences by physical experimentation. This typically means doing something, rather than simply talking about it. As with all experimentation, there is an element of let’s try this and see what happens. Examples: *Rather than telling me what you want to achieve, show me what you want to achieve by acting out what it would look and feel like if you were successful. *Rather than explaining to me what you would you like to say to a person, say it to me directly as if I were that person, or enact a conversation playing both parts. *Rather than tell me what obstacles you anticipate facing, create physical obstacles in the room that represent the obstacles, then experiment with tackling or moving them. *Rather than describe the relationships between stakeholders, try using figures or objects to represent the people and experiment with placing yourself within the system too. *Rather than outlining your key priorities as a list, draw them in proportion size-wise and try changing their relative sizes to see what new insights emerge. The coach’s role is to help the client design a suitable experiment, stay attentive and observe what happens for the client in the here and now as they do it. Some coaches feed back their observations to the client, some encourage the client to reflect on their own observations. When a client acts out a posture or scenario, the coach may mirror the client’s posture or movement, inviting the client to notice what he or she sees and feels when the coach does it. Finally, the coach helps the client make sense of any insights that emerge and how to apply them to the client’s context. I took part in an ‘immunity to change’ coaching psychology workshop this week. Based on work by Kegan and others, we looked at how and why personal and organisational change can be so difficult to achieve and sustain. The notion of immunity is taken from the physiological system where the immune system serves to protect and preserve. The psychological parallel could be regarded as an anxiety management system, designed to protect us from feelings of insecurity and threat.
The psychological immune system provides relief from anxiety. It enables us to function in the world, to maintain a degree of psychological health. The problem is that we can become locked in defended patterns of belief and behaviour, often out of conscious awareness, that prevent us facing fresh challenges and growing in resilience by surfacing, confronting and working through our deepest fears. It’s as if we become subject to our beliefs and assumptions, rather than choosing them. In the workshop, we worked through a 4-step process known as creating an X-ray or immunity map. Draw 4 columns on a sheet of paper. In the first column, write down the ‘one big thing’ about yourself that, if you could change and achieve it, would make a significant positive difference in your life and work. You may want to take feedback from others too. For example, what do key colleagues believe would make the biggest positive difference to your performance at work? In the second column, write down what you do (or, conversely, don’t do) that works against you fulfilling that goal. In other words, how do you actually behave in practice that’s different to the ‘one big thing’ that you want to characterise your behaviour in the future? Try to be very specific. ‘I do X’ or ‘I avoid doing Y’ rather than describing feelings or states of mind. You may want to ask others for feedback too on what they observe you doing or not doing, e.g. in the workplace. In the third column, start first by vividly imagining yourself behaving in real situations in the opposite way to how you described yourself behaving in the second column. Try focusing on those behaviours and situations that could feel most scary, threatening or dangerous. Allow yourself to really feel the feelings, to feel the deep discomfort, anxiety or pain that such behaviours and situations evoke for you. You may find this best to do with a coach who can provide appropriate support. In the fourth column, reflect and write down the core beliefs and deep assumptions you are carrying that lead to the feelings you are experiencing. These are often assumptions drawn from childhood experiences, e.g. ‘I must do everything perfectly if I am to be loved and accepted by others.’ Such assumptions are often unspoken, subconscious beliefs that guide our thinking, feeling and behaviour. Again, it can be useful to work with a coach to help you tease out such beliefs. This 4-step process is designed to surface underlying beliefs and assumptions that have such a powerful influence that they hold our current behaviours in place. They are the subconscious anchors that can hold us back from changing. By surfacing and ‘objectifying’ our beliefs, we have opportunity to weigh them up, examine and challenge their validity. How true are they? What evidence supports them? How well do they serve us? What alternatives could be more realistic and releasing? We closed this activity by setting up four chairs in the room, each representing one stage of the process. The person acting as ‘client’ would sit in one seat at a time while the coach coached them through that stage of the process. On completing one stage, the client would move to the next seat. We also experimented with physicality too, inviting the client to act out their goal at the first stage and their feelings at the third stage. The impact was dynamic, vivid and visual. According to the theory underpinning this approach, change efforts fail if they address profound issues at a surface, technical or behavioural level without attending to underlying psychological dynamics too. Deeply held beliefs and assumptions act like an elastic band, pulling the person back to where they started once the pressure to change is released. If the person or group is enabled to explore their personal and wider cultural beliefs, genuine transformation becomes possible. OK, I feel happy, excited, sad or stressed. Is it just me? Is what I’m feeling simply a personal emotion, the product of a purely internal process? Can it be attributed solely to my personal nature, my psychological disposition or temperament? Much therapy and coaching in Western culture views emotion in this way, as an essentially individual phenomenon.
According to this view, if a person experiences emotional stress or distress, a therapist or coach will help the person explore its roots, e.g. in early childhood experiences, a psychodynamic outlook, or in faulty thinking, a cognitive outlook. In such cases, the emotion and its roots, its underlying causes, are located intra-personally, that is, within the person experiencing it. A very different way of thinking about emotion is as a social, cultural and contextual phenomenon. This view proposes that I learn how to respond to experiences emotionally, I learn to attribute meaning to what I feel, culturally, and I subconsciously pick up things from my wider environment (e.g. organisational or team mood or climate) and experience them as if my own. This latter perspective views the boundary between a person’s internal and external experience as permeable and fluid, not solid, not fixed. It’s influenced by history, culture and context, as well as the person’s own life story and experience. So, according to this view, I could say, ‘What I’m experiencing emotionally, how I’m experiencing it, is about me, but it’s not only about me.’ A therapist or coach who views emotion in this latter sense is likely to work with the client to explore his or her experiential environment. What is it about the client’s situation that is evoking the emotion? What is it about that context that means the client is unable to deal with the emotion? What needs to change in the environment to enable a healthy emotional shift? So, what are you feeling? What do you attribute your feelings to? What are your feelings pointing to in your environment that could serve as sources of insight and transformation? Is it just you..? It's weird how I can sometimes feel suddenly and inexplicably anxious at work. At a cognitive level, I know I have experience and insights that can add value. At emotional and physiological levels, however, I can nevertheless feel that nagging, nervous grip. I want to explore this because I don’t want to fall into avoidance patterns or allow the anxiety to adversely affect my performance.
So I speak with a coach who invites me to think back to a time when I first felt that feeling. My mind drifts back immediately to when I was a child. I took a test known as the 11+. The results of the test would determine whether I would go to a school that I really dreamed of, or to a school that I absolutely dreaded. To fail would have disastrous consequences, or so it felt at the time. I found the test easy and left the room feeling confident and relieved. When I received the results, however, unbelievably I had failed. The head teacher was so surprised by this result that he challenged the local authority to explain. Apparently, I had inadvertently missed the back page and left it blank. I missed the one thing that turned out to be vital, and I hadn’t even realised it. And so a question and a conclusion emerged and embedded themselves in my subconscious mind and live with me today. What if I approach a situation confidently now, only to discover that I have missed something critical? What if I inadvertently miss the back page again? The thought is accompanied by the childhood belief that to fail = catastrophe, and the resulting feeling, anxiety. The coach offers a solution. To vividly imagine myself back in that experience as a child, but this time knowing what I know now as an adult, how things actually turned out. 1 year later, I took the 12+ and passed and finally realised my dream. Failure resulted in disappointment, but it wasn’t the end of the story. The back page was written, and I have the sense it's still being written now. |
Nick WrightI'm a psychological coach, trainer and OD consultant. Curious to discover how can I help you? Get in touch! Like what you read? Simply enter your email address below to receive regular blog updates!
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