In my last post I noted how we experience the present moment as the fruition of the events of the past and at the same time it is influenced by our expectations for the future. It is the same for your staff when they are facing change. They also experience the present moment as a culmination of past events which have also coloured their expectations for the future.
In this post I explore how humans view the past. In the process, discovering that narrative and stories are very important, more important than you might think.
The past happened only once, but how do we experience the past? I recently worked on a restructure with an organisation that had restructured 10 years ago. Apparently, after extensive consultation leading to an agreed new structure, the decision was made by senior managers to implement a completely different structure from what had been consulted on. The fall out from this had lasted 10 years and we had to address this explicitly when it came to making any changes to the current structure.
Another organisation I worked with had experienced the sacking of a CEO and industrial action as a result of a previous restructuring initiative. Again we had to take this into account in formulating our plans.
In both situations I was an external consultant. How did I get to find out about these events? From what I was told by those working in the organisation. In other words, they told me stories of the past, and in doing so, they joined me in to the organisation’s history and past experiences.
I don’t know exactly what happened in full in either of these situations, and neither did those who told me about them. Even those who were present at the time only had limited roles to play and hence did not have the full picture, even if they were active participants. We pieced the picture together through a number of iterative conversations. While the past happened only once, it lives on in our memories through the narrative or stories we tell others, and ourselves.
This is how it is for your people too – they are piecing together the picture from the information they have.
[...] as I have been writing my most recent posts about time seen as the living present (here, here and here), Chris has also been writing about the living present (here) – in his case about [...]
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