conversation matters

Organizational Studies that Don't Just Sit on the Shelf: Participatory Action Research

Organizational studies don’t have a very good track record for making a difference in organizations. There are lots of reasons for this. Sometimes the findings offend a high level official so the study never sees the light of day. Other times the client who asked for the study just isn’t in a position to do anything about the findings. Sometimes the findings are not credible, or are too abstract – lots of reasons but in the end, all too frequently, the recommendations are never carry out.

I am using the term "study" here, but you could substitute the terms "lessons learned," "evaluation" or "assessment" and see the same absence of results. In most situations in which an organization asks or is required to take an in-depth, objective look at an issue, the study report is more likely to be the end rather than the beginning of change.

Participatory Action Research is a way to conduct an organizational study that has a very different outcome, that is, change starts to happen while the study is still being conducted. By the time the study is completed there is already a buzz in the organization about the issues and people are trying out changes. There are a number of ways to design Participatory Action Research and I’ll write about other designs in up-coming posts. But central to all Participatory Action Research are four basic principles:

1. employ a social scientist to design the study to insure the reliability and validity of the findings
2. involve a team of internal employees (who will be the beneficiaries of the findings) in all phases of the research, that is, data collection, analysis, recommendations and implementation
3. design organization wide conversations about the findings and recommendations
4. assess the results of the implementation as input to continuing the organization’s learning about the issue being studied.

I’ve just completed a study for a government agency that I want to use here to illustrate how Participatory Action Research works and why it makes a difference when other studies don’t.

The Situation: For some time this agency has questioned the effectiveness of its longstanding process intended to improve the quality of its reports for clients. That process involves submitting the reports to a series of hierarchical reviews before they are released. My task was to take a systematic look at the hierarchical review process to accurately describe how it works and more importantly to learn what impact the review process has on the quality of outcomes. And I had a very important second task - to conduct the study in such a way that the findings from the study wouldn’t just sit on the shelf in some decision maker’s office. The goal was to embed the findings in the minds of organizational members.

The Participatory Action Research study I designed to address this issue used semi-structured interviews. That means there was a standard set of questions, but the interviewers were instructed to encourage interviewees to raise issues the interview team had not yet thought of and to follow those trails when they seemed promising. In a study like this one, where the issue is not well understood, having that flexibility is essential. Had interviewers just stuck with the original interview question a great number of critical insights would have been lost. Using semi-structured interviews and multiple interviewers required adding four research practices to the four principles listed above:

5. ensure consistency across multiple interviewers
6. take verbatim notes to reduce interviewer bias in the data
7. analyze interview data using qualitative data analysis software in order to compare the data from differing perspectives
8. ensure interviewee anonymity and keep faith with those who have offered their insights

The first principle is to have as a principal investigator a social scientist that is knowledgeable about how to conduct qualitative research to insure both the reliability and validity of the study. In this study I served in that role of principal investigator. But with Participative Action Research the social scientist doesn’t conduct the study alone, which leads to the second principle.

The second principle is to involve an internal team of people who will be the beneficiaries of the findings. The beneficiary is not the person who sponsored the study; rather it is those whose work could change based on the findings – often those on the frontline. Participatory Action Research involves this internal team in all phases of the study. Team members become joint researchers, collecting data, analyzing the data, and constructing recommendations.

Identifying Interviewees: In consultation with the agency sponsor, four departments were selected to be involved in the study, making sure a diversity of types of work were included. I met with each department head to outline the parameters of the study and to offer anonymity both in terms of the department and the interviewees.

Each department was asked to identify eight interviewees including both frontline workers who produce the products, and those in the hierarchy who conduct the reviews; and taking into account a distribution of level and experience. Each department was also asked to provide a two person interview team made up of one frontline worker and one person in the hierarchy.

Preparing the Interview Team: I developed a set of interview questions and a protocol for conducting the interviews, which I had tested earlier and revised based on the responses. A protocol is a step-by-step guide of how to conduct the interviews. It includes how to introduce the study to the interviewee, issues of confidentiality, how to probe responses, how to take notes, etc. The protocol satisfied the research practice of ensuring consistency across multiple interviewers.

The interview teams from the four departments came together for the first of three meetings. In this first meeting I demonstrated the interview protocol and the interviewer group made revisions to the questions. Involving the interviewers in refining the questions was important for two reasons, 1) interviewers were able alter the language of the questions so they would have more meaning to their colleagues, as well as adding new questions that were important to the interviewers, and 2) the discussion and language changes helped the interviewers to “own” the questions – the start of making it their study.

Collecting Data: I assigned each interview team to a department to conduct their interviews – a department other than their own. This not only reduced interviewer bias, but served to broaden the interviewee’s understanding of the review process.
The interviewers found conducting the interviews informative, they 1) discovered practices that would be useful in their own department, 2) empathized with the difficulties others faced in departments other than their own, and 3) gained a clearer understanding of their own department process by seeing it through the eyes of others. After interviewing they reported:

“What is illuminating is seeing other processes.”

“It was very helpful. You don’t realize that things could be better or worse in other offices. We asked interviewees what things needed to be fixed and we thought we could profit from those fixes too.”

“It helped us look at our own process. We’ve revamped a number of things.”

“It was also revealing to us that we’re not doing that bad.”

The research practice of using verbatim notes to reduce interviewer bias in the data was employed. Taking down what an interviewee actually said rather than paraphrasing, which is the interviewer’s interpretation of what the interviewee meant, is critical to the validity of the study. Having a team conduct the interviews allowed one person to concentrate on the notes and the other to focus on asking the questions and follow-up probes. Verbatim notes are also useful in writing the report because interviewees’ actual words help to substantiate and bring the findings to life.

The teams conducted half of the interviews and I, as principal researcher, conducted the other half. The comparison between the content of my interviews and the interview teams’ interviews provided a reliability check.

Analyzing the Interviewee Data: After the interviews had been completed, the interview team met again to report to each other on what they had learned. Out of those reports and the discussion that followed the team identified common themes across all four departments. This was an important meeting that served several purposes, 1) it provided the initial themes used to code the data in a qualitative database, 2) it broadened the interviewers’ understanding of how the review process is conducted in different offices, and 3) the insights of this group provided additional data for the study.

A new group of frontline workers and members of the hierarchy were then brought together as a focus group. I provided them a brief written description of each of the themes the interview team had developed, which they then discussed at length. This meeting served to both validate and amplify the themes with new insights.

The research practice of analyzing interview data using qualitative data analysis software was particularly critical with this study because of the large number of interviews. This type of software makes it possible to sort unstructured data and then examine it through multiple lenses, (e.g. role, theme, tenure, etc.) It makes it possible to organize and manage thousands of pieces of related information, explore themes, and make comparisons.

I entered all of the verbatim interview notes into a qualitative database and coded the data with the themes identified by the interviewers as well as a number of additional themes that emerged from the lengthy task of coding. Coding the data entails assigning codes to every sentence of every interview and as new themes emerge, returning to already read interviews to re-assign codes. Based on this analysis I then wrote a first draft of the report.

The draft was sent to each of the interviewers to read and revise. The interviewer team came together for a third meeting to talk through the draft report. They brought with them their corrected copies of the draft. Each team was also asked to bring a thought leader from their own department with them to the meeting to participate in the discussion. In this review meeting the interview team made revisions to the draft and validated the findings. The team then turned their attention to constructing recommendations based on the findings, which then became a part of the final report.

By the third meeting, change related to the study issue had already begun to happen. There was now in each department a group of 5-6 employees (consisting of the interviewer team, the focus group members and the thought leader) who had a thorough understanding of the findings and a vested interest in using them to make change.

The research practice of ensuring interviewee anonymity and keeping faith with those who have offered their insights was followed. Each person who had been interviewed and promised anonymity received a draft of the report and was asked to read through it to make sure none of the quotes could identify them. Before sending them the draft I had taken care to sanitize it as thoroughly as I could, but even so, a handful of interviewees ask for changes in their quotes to further ensure they would not be recognized.

By the time the final report was ready to send to the sponsor, sixty employees spread across the four departments had thoroughly read the draft. Which meant there was already an organizational buzz about the findings of the report.

I now return to the third principle of Participatory Action Research, designing organization wide conversations about the findings and recommendations. To produce change in an organization, the findings of the study have to become a part of the organizational conversation. With Participative Action Research those conversations begin to happen during the study, but that isn’t adequate to bring about change. It is critical to convene small and large group conversations across the organization to provide employees the opportunity to process the findings for themselves and to think through what the findings mean for how their work needs to change. It is necessary to have such conversations among high-level decision makers, but equally critical that those whose work will change hold such conversations and make recommendation specific to their own department.

Participatory Action Research is, at its heart, a conversational process, not an impersonal survey, nor an experimental design with “subjects;” rather it is a conversation between organizational members. That conversation takes place between interviewer and interviewee, between members of the interview team, and between organizational members in the conversations set up to discuss the findings. All of the conversations are a part of the change. In the end all change is a result of organizational conversation – the only question is who is invited into the conversation. Participatory Action Research is a methodology to focus the organization on conversations that matter and invite into the conversation those whose work will change.

For the agency study I have used as the example in this post, we are now poised at the step of designing the organization wide conversations. So stay tuned.

A Wiki for Generals

Previously I wrote about the process and benefits of having Soldiers update doctrine through the Army’s new wiki. Eventually there will be 230 manuals up on the wiki. There are 100 additional manuals that won’t be put up. These manuals contain the fundamental approach and language of the profession – the Army’s enduring principles. Here are a few examples of the kind of knowledge in those 100 manuals.

Fundamental Principle 3-2. The Army's operational concept is full spectrum operations: Army forces combine offensive, defensive, and stability or civil support operations simultaneously as part of an interdependent joint force to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative, accepting prudent risk to create opportunities to achieve decisive results. They employ synchronized action-lethal and nonlethal-proportional to the mission and informed by a thorough understanding of all variables of the operational environment.

Definition:
5-6. While command is a personal function, control involves the entire force. Control is the regulation of forces and warfighting functions to accomplish the mission in accordance with the commander's intent. It is fundamental to directing operations.

Construct:
7-7.1. The Army conducts five information tasks to shape the operational environment. These are information engagement, command and control warfare, information protection, operations security, and military deception.

If having soldiers contribute to a wiki in order to keep Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (ATTPs) up-to-date, then there surely is a corresponding benefit for the Generals to keep the policies and enduring principles up-to-date in those 100 manuals that will not become ATTPs. In this time of accelerated change any organization’s principles and strategies require constant examination and challenge.

Too often in organizations senior leaders view KM initiatives including new social media as something they need to provide for the frontline – but do not see it as something they need for themselves – a process that would enhance their own ability to develop new ideas and knowledge among themselves. But the opposite is true, it is at the policy and strategy level that organizations are in most need of the kind of on-going involvement and engagement that the new social media provide.

The Army has a many great examples of Generals participating in knowledge management activities, like Major General Michael Oates holding open chats with the troops, and Admiral Stavridis who blogs regularly and participates on Facebook.

There are even more examples of Generals actively supporting knowledge management activities. The strategic communication that General Caldwell has embedded in the Command and General Staff College is excellent, not to mention General Dempsey’s instigating putting the ATTPs up on the wiki.

These examples show, that as in the past, the Army is leading the way in its knowledge management initiatives. Generals are involved in KM through their efforts to learn from the front line. However none of the examples are about the Generals learning with and from each other.

All Generals have colleagues and trusted advisors with whom they exchange thinking and ideas. That is the one-to-one exchange that is necessary, but that we have learned is not sufficient when dealing with issues of such complexity. With complex issues there is a need for in-depth discussion that makes use of cognitive diversity that can only be achieved by engaging in an on-going dialogue among those most impacted by the issues.

It may be that Generals in the Army already have a top-secret web-site where they hash out the principles of how to fight this new kind of war we are in. But if they do not, then having a corresponding Wiki up where the principles that guide how the Army fights OCO available for an in-depth discussion that might result in a change to doctrine, would seem to be of equal importance to the frontline addressing ATTPs.

This is an issue, not just in the Army, but across most organizations. The task for KM professionals is how to design systems and initiatives that could assist those at the top in creating much needed new strategic knowledge and to share with each other the knowledge they have learned from their experience.

If the Army Can Put Its Doctrine Up On a Wiki, You've Got No Excuse

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of watching an astounding event - a room full of Soldiers typing Army doctrine onto a wiki so that Soldiers in the field could make changes as they were discovering new and better tactics in the midst of fighting a war.

There were a couple of amazing things about this event. One was that it was happening at all, because to the Army, doctrine is close to sacred. It is written by doctrine specialists and then verified and authenticated at many levels within the hierarchy. So opening doctrine up to Soldiers is a very big deal. The second amazing thing was how quickly it happened – just three weeks after the General said, “Make it happen.” the first eight manuals went up. A hierarchical organization, of one million plus employees, just shouldn’t be able to move that fast!

But let me begin at the beginning of the story.

TRADOC, the US Army Training and Doctrine Command, has the task of writing and maintaining more than 600 field manuals that specify how the Army is to fight as well as conduct the many support tasks needed to keep soldiers going. Everything from how to drive a humvee to how to throw a grenade has doctrine that specifies the approved way to do it. TRADOC oversees the doctrine, but it is the Proponents, each of which has responsibility for some vital process (Fires, Armor, Acquisition, Chaplin, Field Artillery, etc.), that have the SMEs with the in-depth knowledge. So they have the last word on doctrine about their subject.

Conditions change very fast in Iraq and Afghanistan so it has become increasingly difficult to update the manuals as quickly as change occurs. Faced with overwhelming change as well as diminishing resources, the newly appointed Commander of TRADOC, General Dempsey, made a bold stroke. He declared that not all of the 600 field manuals needed to be doctrine produced by professional doctrine writers. Many of the manuals, he suggested, contained tactics and procedures that could be more easily kept current by the soldiers in the field. And the best way to do that was with a Wiki! The Army had recently developed a trio of social media, milWiki, milBook, and milBlog – so had already got their feet wet with Enterprise 2.0.

General Dempsey assigned the Combined Arms Doctrine Directorate (CADD) the task of determining which of the 600 needed to remain as field manuals and which could go up on the wiki as Army Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (ATTPs). CADD was able to differentiate the “how to” knowledge, for example how to set up a checkpoint in Iraq, from the more conceptual knowledge that provides enduring principles for the Army. CADD quickly determined that 230 of the 600 field manuals could become ATTPs and be available on the wiki for Soldier input.

So then the question was how to get the ATTPs up on the wiki and more importantly how to get Soldiers contributing. The answer, a cooperative effort between The Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) and CADD, was a series of Kaizen events. The Kaizen events were a focused, intense, week-long change initiative where change in the organization began to happen during the event.

Business as usual for the Army, or for that matter for most organizations, would have been to pull together a tiger team to identify the issues that needed to be resolved, figure out how to fix them, and then handover the solution to Leadership to be implemented.

The Kaizen events the Army ran were not “business as usual,” rather they were “learn your way to the answer.” The event brought together the people who would ultimately have to implement the solution – the TRADOC and Proponent doctrine writers. They knew more about where the problems would crop up than anyone in the world, so it was that group that spent the week identifying the issues and making a list of what they and the leaders they reported to needed to do next to get the ATTPs working on the wiki. Top leadership including Lieutenant General Caldwell, Commander, Combined Arms Center, and General Dempsey were there - but for guidance and support - it was the group of implementers that did the heavy lifting. Doctrine is interwoven with nearly every part of the army – a classic example of a complex adaptive challenge. There are legal issues about records management, exceptions to policy that will have to be made, implications for having hard copy for a Soldier to take into the Battlefield where there is often little computer access, how to do search, and on and on.

During the event, legitimate concerns were raised about the feasibility of Soldiers changing doctrine. There were many “What Ifs” brought up: What if the ATTP says, “Be at least 15 feet away from where the grenade lands” and some Soldier decides to change it to 5 feet and then his comrades die because of his change? What if some Soldier that didn’t graduate from high school, writes in something with poor grammar and spelling? Or worst yet, what if that Soldier has important knowledge to contribute but doesn’t because of embarrassment about his/her writing skills? “What Ifs” are not to be taken lightly, but for many of these concerns the Army will have to “learn its way forward.”

While all this was happening, in a nearby room Soldiers were busy putting the manuals up on the wiki – the idea being, we won’t really know what the problems are until we start using the wiki. General Dempsey dubbed these first ATTPs as a pilot, to give everyone the freedom to make mistakes and to learn from those mistakes as they went along. The beauty of not having a perfect plan is that you don’t have to stick to it - it can change as you learn.

The second Kaizen event, with another group of Proponents, occurred three weeks later and at the end of that event there were 16 ATTPs up. And one more event is planned so that every Proponent will have at least one ATTP up. They will have all experienced how long it takes to get an ATTP up on the Wiki – before the event that was a great unknown. And as the weeks go by Proponents are beginning to learn how to monitor changes and what kind of monitoring is needed. The complex issues raised at the events are beginning to be addressed by the many parts of the organization that own them.

Being the Army, of course there was an AAR at the end of each event. The comments were not surprising, but were clearly heartfelt. One Colonel said, “Those of us who write the doctrine and manage the process are here in this room, being asked for our thinking about what would work and what would not work – and that puts us way head of the game.” The event uncovered how very many parts of the system this change will impact, which was helpful, if a bit overwhelming. Most importantly, the implementers in the room left with a clear perception that Leadership, because they were in the room, had a clear understanding of the complexity of this change effort and of the difficulties the Proponents will face – Leadership was learning along with everyone else.

One of the open questions is whether Soldiers will take the time to go to the wiki to enter a new tactic or procedure they have found helpful. I asked Jim Benn, Deputy Director of CADD, whether the soldiers in the field wanted a voice in the doctrine. Had they been asking for a wiki or some way to participate in changing doctrine? His response was that soldiers recognized that what they were doing in theatre was not what they were taught in the schoolhouse based on the current field manuals– so thought TRADOC ought to do its job better – but didn’t think of themselves as needing to be the ones to change it.

Since the beginning of July there have been 15,000 visits to the site – so Soldiers are curious and coming in to see what’s going on. There have been about 80 content changes across the 16 ATTPs that are up on the Wiki. And there have been some 40 discussions.

Those figures raise the question, Is that enough? If you look at the typical participation rate of communities and wikis, that is, 90% readers, 9% users who contribute periodically, and 1% making most of the contributions – it seems okay. But the Army is hoping for much more participation than that. However, my guess is that most Soldiers will not contribute from the battlefield; they’ll wait until they’re back. They’ll think of something that ought to be changed while writing up their AARs or attending training between deployments, or even when they look something up and see that what they read doesn’t match their experience. I do think they will contribute, but the Army may have to put some active knowledge management process in place to facilitate contributions.

With doctrine on the wiki the Army will achieve two major benefits. Deputy Director Benn gave voice to one, “If the process works as we conceived it, we will have a body of professional military people that are more engaged in codifying their operational principles - taking some ownership. We will get all the benefits from that expanded involvement, that is, we would become a smarter and more educated force.”

And the second benefit will be the Soldiers’ increased confidence in the viability of the ATTPs they are reading because their colleagues, just back from deployment, wrote them and those guys know what they are talking about.

And I predict the Soldiers will find other ways to benefit from having the ATTPs up - benefits not yet conceived of by General Dempsey or Deputy Director Benn. Because that is the nature of social media that once it is available, uses for it emerge that the promoters would never have imagined.

This has been an amazing change initiative to watch. Each time I reflect on what the Army is doing, I am brought back to the conviction that if the Army, with the all inertia it has to overcome, can make this change happen within a few weeks, then all of us ought to take a hard look at what we can and cannot make happen in our own organizations. Certainly this initiative has a lot going for it, the Army’s strong commitment to transformation, a General who had the courage to commit his organization to a course of action in the face of some legitimate concerns, and a group of very savvy change agents in BCKS who knew this could not be just a top down effort.

Don’t Worry About People Feeling Involved in Change

We’ve all heard the management adage, “Involvement is the key to implementing change.” When I’m consulting in organizations, too often I hear that adage framed this way, “The Board needs to feel like they’ve participated in this decision,” or “It’s important that the supervisors feel like they have input into what’s happening to them,” or “We need R & D to support this change so we’d better do something that will make them feel involved.”

These statements are made in good faith by managers trying to do the right thing – yet their language reveals an assumption that, not only do I hear, but that the target of the change effort often hears as well. The assumption is that what’s important is that others “feeling like” they’ve been involved, rather than that others actually are involved. If actually being involved was the goal, then I would hear something like, “I don’t see how we can address this change without the input from the front line – they know about issues we’re unaware of.”

The latter statement implies that the manager sees a need to make use of the collective wisdom of those who will be impacted in order to figure out what needs to be done. Knowledge is the end and involvement is a means to that end. “Feel like” implies that managers already have the answer or knowledge, but want those who will be impacted to think they are involved because that will make them more likely to go along with what has already been decided. Involvement has become the end.

That’s the test - if a manager already has an answer, he’s not involving others, no matter how many town halls or fireside chats he holds. He’s only trying to get others’ compliance by acting like he’s involving others – and it rarely fools anyone.

I learned that lesson many years ago while leading a Great Books Discussion Group. These groups meet once a month to discuss a book that all have read. The fundamental idea of Great Books is that the members have the ability to make sense of what the author is saying. Members don’t come to hear lectures; they come to have a discussion about the meaning of what they’ve read. The leader’s responsibility is to frame the discussion with two or three salient questions. One of the rules is that the leader cannot ask the group to discuss any question that the leader already has an answer to in her own mind.

The reasoning behind that very tough rule is quite sensible because it is close to impossible for any leader to ask such a question in an unbiased way. For me it meant I often had to read the book two or three times to formulate good, unbiased questions. If I, as the leader, violated the rule, I would find myself subtlety steering the group’s discussion toward my own bias and of course everyone in the group recognized what was happening. Framing unbiased and useful questions was great training for designing honest involvement in change efforts.

From that seven year experience of leading Great Books Discussion Groups, I also learned about the power of ordinary people to develop insights and understanding that none of us could have developed on our own, no matter how many times we read the book. If I could frame a good, honest questions, the discussion became a place of insight and alive with the pleasure of learning.

If managers bring people together to address the tough issues they face and if they frame honest questions, those discussions will produce insights that make the value of being involved obvious. There will be no need to worry about those impacted “feeling involved.”

Resistance to Change

I don’t believe in the tooth fairy, big foot, or resistance to change. I have no problem with the idea that sometimes people don’t want to make a change we think they should make, and therefore push back against it. The problem I have is the way the term “resistance to change” causes us to act toward the people who are doing the pushing back.

When we say that a person (or a group) is “resistant to change” we speak of resistance as if it were a characteristic of the person. We imply that something is wrong with them, akin to being “lazy” or “arrogant.” That leads us to think it is something we need to help them get over, perhaps by sending them to training or writing “agility” into the competencies they must display in order to be promoted. And if that doesn’t work, we feel free to write them off as just not worth our effort.

I have not met a person who is characteristically resistant to change. I have met many that push back against a specific change, but on other issues in their life and work they seek out change. Resistance to change is situation specific, not an attribute of an individual or group.

Organizations have somehow been drawn into thinking that resistance to change is a human characteristic. Perhaps, we have been oversold by the consulting industry that their help is vital to deal with the pervasive resistance we will surely face as our organizations change and evolve. I even frequently see articles that start with, “As is well known, people resist change.” But I’ve never seen research to support that claim, rather quite the opposite.

The research I see says human beings tend to seek out new experiences, that curiosity is the characteristic that got us to the moon and expanded our world through the World Wide Web. We are a specie that looks for the novel, the new, and the interesting. No, resistance to change is not a characteristic of human beings. But we do share the characteristic of pushing back against being required to make a change that takes from us something we value, that we perceive will cause us harm, or that just does not make sense to us. Perhaps “self-determination,” if not an innate characteristic, is a least a part of our national character.

There are two reasons I think the ubiquitous use of the term “resistance to change” is, not just inaccurate, but actually harmful.

First, the term lets us off the hook for the responsibility of attending to the concerns of those we are requiring to make a change. It prevents us from having to look too closely at the inconvenience and sometimes heartbreak felt by those we ask to change. It allows us to just write them off as “resistant” and feel ourselves justified.

Secondly, unless we are willing to look closely at what specific harm or stress those who must change experience, we can’t be helpful to them. The stock justifications we offer, “we must all tighten our belts” or “if we are to achieve our projected goals we must transform the way we deal with our customers,” do not address the issues of identity or values that trouble those who must change. If, for example, I am told that the way I have been doing my job, (a job that I know I’m good at and that has been the source of my success) is wrong, then with the change I may lose my sense of competence, perhaps my sense of identity. Those are not inconsequential losses however necessary the change may be to the organization.

We may be completely justified in the changes we impose upon others, but that does not justify insensitivity to the consequence for those who must change. And to deny the outcome of our actions by assigning the problem to the character of those who are impacted, is to employ a euphemism to easy our own discomfort.

The words we use to talk about people have a powerful influence on how we act toward them. It is easy to use a common phrase like “resistance to change” to reference a difficult situation we are facing, but insensitivity to our choice of words can have the unintended consequence of limiting the possibilities we are able to consider for dealing with the complexity of the situation. That is never more true than when we are dealing with change in organizations.

There is a clever limerick that always comes to mind when I think about the unintended consequence of the words we choose.

When the universe began,
God, they say, created man.
Conversely: dancing around the sod
Man, they say, created God
Watch your words or they may do
Something of the same to you.

The Four Room Apartment: Where the Energy is for Change

There is a model of change offered by a Swedish social psychologist, Claes Janssen*, which has always appealed to me, in part because it’s optimistic about the ability of people to change. It’s a simple model for visualizing where the potential energy is in a person, group, department or company – he calls it the “Four Room Apartment.”

Janssen says that each of us lives in a four-room apartment. We move from room to room depending on perceptions, feelings or aspirations triggered by external events. Someone who occupies a room today may, in a week, a month, or a year, have moved to another room of the apartment.

The four rooms Janssen describes are Contentment, Denial, Confusion and Renewal. Janssen says that as we change and develop as human beings, (and I would add as professionals) we continually circle through these four rooms.

In the Contentment room, we like the status quo. We are seen as and feel satisfied, calm and realistic. We are uninterested in attempting improvements or major changes – “If its not broke, don’t fix it.” But we can’t stay in contentment of course or we would never grow. As Sanford says, “Development occurs primarily in response to the challenges of life.” And no one gets through life without continually being presented with new, and often very difficult, challenges. A significant challenge - a merger, reorganization, new leader, new system, market crisis, job threat – can move us out of the Contentment room into the Denial room.

In a sense, people in the Denial room, already have the facts – that’s what they are in denial about. It’s the parent who finds herself still dealing with an adult son as though he were a teenager. Or the manager who, a year after his promotion to the new job, is fighting what everyone else already recognizes, that he has not made the switch from being an engineer to manager. They are, for their own reasons, not yet ready to deal with those facts. From the outside they are perceived as unaware or afraid of change.

When we are in the Denial room and finally acknowledges what we have been hiding from, that doesn’t solve our problem; it only moves us through the door into the Confusion room. Here we are seen as, and feel different, out of touch, scattered, and unsure. We muck about in the Confusion room, sorting out bits and pieces of our lives. Far from a state to be avoided Confusion signifies a readiness to learn. People in the Confusion room acknowledge they don’t have the answer. They have energy to spare; they just haven’t decided where to invest it.

We stay in Confusion until we own up to whatever fear or anxiety is keeping us from committing to the new. That moves us through the door to the Renewal room, and now we are perceived as, and feel, sincere, open, willing to risk. People in Renewal are trying out new practices and ideas. They are open to site visits to see what others have done and looking for articles about the latest innovation. The Renewal room feels like a place full of new converts, ready to put energy into a new path and wanting to convert others to the answer they’ve found.

But of course, over time Renewal subsides. We get comfortable with the new program, lifestyle, or relationship and we find ourselves back in the Contentment room. We have it “all worked out,” we have answers and we function comfortably within them; life is good.

Residing in any room is not a characteristic of a person’s personality; it is rather where they are at this time and in regard to this particular change. In time they will move because we all live in all four rooms.

As leaders or change agents, whose task it is to mobilize energy for a change, we need to work with people in the Confusion or Renewal rooms. In every Confusion room there are people already taking constructive action. They would welcome help to obtain needed resources or to coordinate activities with others. It is they who will carry the initiative forward – if they can be brought together to learn how their initiatives integrate with the whole. The seeds of success are sown in the Confusion room and sprout in the Renewal room.

The people in the Contentment or Denial rooms are not frozen, events will move them soon enough. But to mobilize change people in the Contentment or Denial rooms are not an effective place to spend a lot of energy or time. We need to continue to involve them in meetings with their colleagues, provide them information, but not to make them the focus of our efforts.

All of us need some part of our lives to remain stable especially when other parts feel
like they are in confusion. When professionals are dealing with personal problems like a divorce, birth of a new child, adjusting to a child leaving for college – or when they are dealing with work issues that are disorienting, being passed over for promotion, or failure of a project, they need stability in the other parts of their lives. And sometimes that stability is bought with denial. But when those troubling issues get resolved, then they have the energy to attend to what they had not seen before.

Weisbord writes about Janssen’ theory in Productive Workplaces. Jossey-Bass 1987