Stephen Billing’s Blog

How we experience the present moment is very different from how we normally think about time – as a point on a line separating the past from the future. Although most leaders are not consciously thinking of this, it has important implications for how to deal with people experiencing organisational change.

I have written here about how we think of change as being a movement from one equilibrium state to another. We have come to think this way because our thinking privileges static states over moving process (more on this here).

This has a lot to do with how we think of time. Not so much how we manage time, but the difference between how we think of time, and how we experience time.

This is a useful distinction to understand because it helps to explain why people respond to change the way they do, and it helps leaders of change to make productive responses to their people when they’re going through change.

The most common way of thinking of the present moment is as a point on a continuum moving from past through to the future. The present separates the past from the future. The present is a point in time, distinct from the past and distinct from the future, although ever moving towards the future.

As Ralph Stacey points out, in this view of time the ‘here-and-now’ is distinguished from the ‘there-and-then’. Seeing time as a point on a line is useful in business because it allows you to make project plans that help you to get your projects done effectively. So far, so good.

But consider for a moment how you actually experience the present moment. As you are dealing with important budget decisions or people issues, you do not experience your present thoughts and options as an arbitrary point that somehow occurred all on its own, divorced from the past. In fact, the present arises as the results of the events of the past. Past budget discussions influence your present experience of your budget challenges and decisions you make. Likewise, your past interactions with your staff affect what you decide to do next in relation to a particular performance problem or issue with one of your team.

The present moment has arrived as a result of myriad events of the past. You could say that the present is the inevitable result of the events of the past. If the events in the past were different, the present moment would also be somehow different – for both parties. For example, your past experience of your boss and your thoughts about the future will influence how you respond to the news that there will be a review of your business unit. Ditto for your team.

The experience of the present moment is informed by past experience and also by your expectations about the future.

I think this helps to explain why it is so powerful in change settings, to give priority to allowing people to voice their experience of the past and their expectations of the future. People experiencing change in their work settings are responding to that change based on their past experiences and their future expectations. In many cases they may not even have articulated these in their own minds.

It is certainly unlikely that you know enough about their past experiences and future expectations to be able to interpret their responses accurately without paying them some attention.

And you will not find out what they think if you are hell-bent on delivering key messages via power point slides in mass auditoriums.