This area of the toolkit explains our shared approach to change. It tells you why we describe any change as a journey, with highs and lows, and how it can be helpful to visualise this as a curve.
Change is a curve! If a change happens in your life it will affect how you feel. At various stages in the change you might feel curious or bored, angry, in control or overwhelmed, excited, relieved, nervous or strong. Much of this depends on what’s changing, on how much you can control it and on what’s in it for you.
© John M Fisher – for non-profit use only
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A lot of academic and psychological research has been done into how people respond to change. Although different researchers present it in different ways, most agree that change is a curve! If you plot emotions against time you find that as any change unfolds you go through a predictable series of positive and negative emotions, which form the peaks and troughs on the change journey. We’ve based our shared approach to business change on John Fisher’s personal change curve. It works because change is change – and people are people – whether they are at work or not.
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If we look at a Fisher Curve we can see the little stick man going through the highs and lows of change. The curve shows him coming to terms with the fact that change will happen, dealing with what that change means, and gradually gaining confidence in the ‘new world’.
Our approach looks at the key stages individuals go through during a personal change, and the emotions they are likely to feel – plotted to this curve. There is good evidence to show that these emotions come into play during changes at work, and that they can affect how individuals, teams and – in local government – whole services cope with change.
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We’ve adapted Fisher to come up with our shared approach to business change. The business change journey is a curve, shaped like the Fisher Curve, with peaks and troughs representing stages where people’s emotions are positive or negative.
We’ve grouped the 9 stages in 3 sets of 3. We refer to these as the first, second and third phase of change. The groups of 3 reflect what the people making the change need to think and do for the change to be a success. In the Change Toolkit section we offer suggested change management tools and techniques that have been appropriately mapped to each of these 9 stages.
