There is an old saw that says that efficiency (or management) is doing things right, with effectiveness (or leadership) being doing the right things. I am sure you have come across this before.

I’m not enamoured of this simplistic bromide, having wondered before on this blog whether is in fact such a thing as leadership. (Search on "leadership," or click on the "leadership" tags or categories to find the threads).

I started to ponder on what this might mean in relation to communication.

If we took the idea of efficient communication, what would it mean? Email is quite efficient – it’s just a matter of typing it and sending it. Twitter and text messages are even more efficient. In this sense, being efficient equates with being "less effort." And then it occurred to me, that this refers to less effort for the sender of the message.

I have a friend though, who regards a phone call as more efficient than a series of texts or emails, say when trying to schedule a meeting. So after a couple of texts or emails about suitable times, he’ll call, saying it’s easier that way. Perhaps he’s also thinking about the effectiveness of the communication – in a phone call he can get it resolved and get a commitment to a time, coming up with alternatives quickly based on the reaction of the other person.

What about effective communication? What would that be? I guess from the perspective of the sender receiver model of communication, you would say that effective communication would be that in which the receiver gets the same message as the receiver intended. So, effective communication has much more consideration of the receiver than the idea of efficient communication, which seems to be more related to the sender’s convenience.

Thinking about this idea of effective communication, I think it is not so much a matter of the accurate transmission of a message, as it is about understanding the response you have received.

In this way of thinking about it, effective communication would be achieved when the parties were satisfied that they had agreed on the meaning of the gesture and response involved.

In any one interaction, it might take several attempts to reach this point of both parties being satisfied that agreement on the meaning had been reached. Many of our interactions actually never reach this point – for example, I might go away from a fight with my partner convinced that he doesn’t understand me.

I think effective communication requires genuine attempts to understand each other, and so repeating yourself, paraphrasing and summarising are all used in the process of coming to understand the meaning of what you are negotiating. When people are coming to grips with proposals for organisational change, effective communication requires methods like paraphrasing, that employ redundancy or duplication, rather than efficient communicating of a message in the shortest time or least amount of effort possible.

Efficiency of communication and effectiveness of communication are certainly not the same thing in organisational change. Further, quests for efficiency in communication may well work against the effectiveness of your communication about change.

How do you communicate something that is likely to be unpopular? For example, how do you tell your team that they are going to have to give something up because of a cost cutting measure that is going to be implemented?

I remember when I was a manager in a large corporate how, in the second half of the financial year we would regularly be told that our travel budget was being reduced by 25%, 50%, or once even 100%.  We got to expect it, and started to build it into our budget at the start of the year. No more travel for the rest of the year, even though you have staff and colleagues in Auckland and you live in Wellington, a 1 hour flight or 700km drive away. How are you supposed to keep a team going in those circumstances?

How do you break the news that there is going to be a review of the organisation’s structure and it may affect many people’s jobs?

How do you tell staff that you need to reduce the number of cars in the fleet, and that the pool cars have to go?

If you have a large number of people to tell, it is tempting to go for efficiency and send out an email – write it down once, send it out, job done.

It is readily apparent that such an approach is not really job done. You have to continue to work with these people, and so you cannot just do anything. You will need them in the future. If they think you’ve done the cowardly equivalent of dumping your girlfriend by text, then it’s likely you’ll get some unanticipated consequences – resistance perhaps, or ignoring the new policy. They decide they can’t trust you, thereby making it difficult to get anything done in future.

Perhaps you go for the more personal touch and tell everybody face to face. Do you do it individually or in group meetings? How do you deal with any resistance? What if people reject the idea, reject you, or even attack you?

I think that for unpopular decisions, the more personal the communications method, the better. The scale and geographic spread of your organisation will have a big influence, but the nearer you can get to a face to face communication, the better. So, phone is better than email. Videoconference is better than phone. In person is better than videoconference.

It’s useful to think about unpopular decisions from the point of view of the decision itself (unpopular outcome), the process of coming up with the decision (fair process), and the opportunity to deal with the consequences of the decision (work arounds).

My suggestion is to use the following structure as your starting point.

1. Summarise the issues relating to the decision.
2. Outline the process you went through to arrive at the decision.
3. Say what the decision is.
4. Provide opportunity for people to tell you the implications of the decision from their perspective.
5. Ask them to identify possible actions or solutions in response to the implications they raise.

Of course it’s even better if you already know what the implications of the decision are before you announce the decision. But beware. The implications for you in your position as manager can be quite different from the implications for your people in their positions as direct reports to you.

So it’s more powerful still if you get to your people before the decision is finalised, tell them what you are contemplating and then ask them what the implications are from their perspective. (Don’t assume you know what their perspective is, even if you now them well and used to do their job yourself.) You can then problem solve with them about how to alleviate the negative implications they’ve identified. And you never know, they might identify some positive implications or opportunities you hadn’t thought of.

Approaching the end of 2009, it is a bit of a shock to realise that this newsletter has also been going nearly a year now! Also, the milestone of finishing my doctoral degree two years ago is starting to retreat into becoming part of the “recent” past rather than the “immediate recent” past.

This year I have learnt a lot from six new clients I’ve not worked with before. Here are eight things I have learnt or had confirmed this year, in no particular order.

1. There are multiple perspectives on any issue. Many times the people involved don’t know what the other perspectives are. Sensitive topics are often discussed only “in the shadows,” i.e. in private settings with certain trusted others. People see the shouting which has a great impact (“unprofessional”), but not the reason for the shouting (e.g. frustration built up over time). They see colleagues seemingly getting away with things, but don’t see the often laborious performance management processes happening (necessarily) in the background. Making these different perspectives known more widely can help people see the situation differently and thus respond differently. This allows the possibility for people to move out of “ruts,” deeply habitual or “stuck” patterns of relating. I have seen many examples this year of how people’s view of the “facts” can change, with discussion, some time to reflect, and further discussion. It seems important to me in organisational change not to close off the opportunity for further discussion, even with someone who seems entrenched, vocal and angry about an issue.
    
2. Misunderstandings often occur – people will make mistakes, including me and including you. When this happens, the sooner you spot the mistake, apologise and clear the air, and provide correct information, the sooner you can move on in some sort of working relationship. The other person may not “get over it” straight away, but in many business settings people are willing to give you another shot if you clean up any mess you make as you go along. Especially if you can demonstrate what your intent was and that you have acted as soon as you recognised there was a problem.
    
3. Power is not an absolute. Even the most powerful and feared of managers cannot “decree” that all problems will be fixed. It is how people respond to these decrees (or intentions of the manager) that determines how effective these intentions (instructions) will be. This means managers have to take the time to negotiate with their people, what their intentions mean. I have seen a number of examples this year where managers have not spent time discussing genuinely with their people how the desired changes will impact on them. There is a tendency for the power of the position to lead the manager to say “here’s what needs to happen” and then expect their people to adapt. Doing this, the managers dissociate themselves from any potentially unsavoury consequences of these actions. For example, it is much easier to say to a team leader that they should change the schedules of their team than it is to listen carefully to the team manager and help them to work out how to change the schedules without upsetting everyone. After all, what if the manager cannot work out how to do it?
    
4. Power is a function of the relative need that each party has for the other. This relative need is in balance and shifts over time. At some times, e.g. when it comes to performance reviews, the team member might feel a greater need for the manager. By contrast, at times of staff shortage or additional workload, the manager might feel more need for the team member. Power is not so much a matter of one person holding absolute power over another. This means you have to be thinking about the relative need people have for each other when you are in a change situation. It is valuable to take the time to analyse the effects of power relating in your organisation – where has the balance of power been in the past, and what direction is it moving in now?
    
5. Communications processes are often considered as “what the most powerful want to tell the others.” This is often encapsulated in the idea of “key messages” that is so seductive to communications professionals and project teams. By default this approach ends up being one way communication. After all, in the term “key messages” there is no concept of “key responses.” As the manager of a change initiative of whatever scale, provide opportunities for people to tell you what they really think. Make sure you listen to them. And make sure there aren’t any inadvertent punishments (from their point of view) that will be incurred if they tell you their real thoughts. For example, if they tell you that they have doubts about the effectiveness of the issue, don’t write them off as “resistant” and then avoid giving them interesting projects that you would have previously given them. After all, the alternative is that they will tell others what they really think, and not you. Believe me, it’s much better for you, if they tell you. So seek to understand and explore with them those things that appear as resistance.
    
6. Things done poorly by predecessors or others in the past can leave legacies of mistrust. Sometimes, people can say things that make you wonder “where did that come from?” I’ve had two projects this year in which people have attributed to current managers (“management”) sins that were actually related to past managers, rather than the incumbents. People sometimes do not seem to separate out past wrongs done to them by managers who are no longer around, especially if they feel that somehow you have done something that is unfair to them. If you are a manager with a predecessor who has left a legacy of unfulfilled promises, then you have to work much harder with your people to create the kind of mutual trust you desire.
    
7. I hope that you have not been in a workplace where accusations of workplace bullying occur. I have consulted to several such workplaces now. Where people are in deep seated conflict, then the situations are often accompanied by each party accusing the other of bullying them. My perspective is that organisational politics consists of the daily exercise of power, involving people negotiating, discussing, being polite or impolite to each other, revealing, concealing, pulling rank, delegating and so on. This is how humans in organisations negotiate what they are doing together. When these day to day negotiations break down and it becomes apparent to one party that they cannot go on together, this is experienced as violent. Hence the accusations of bullying that accompany intense organisational conflict. These political processes enable organisations to flourish and get things done. The breakdown of these political negotiations is experienced as violent. When bullying accusations arise in deep seated or long standing conflict situations, the challenge is to find ways for the parties to continue to work together. This is an area where services such as mediation or EAP can really add value, if they are seen in this way. But the challenge is nevertheless a political one. It’s not a matter of attempting to “rise above” politics, which is simply not possible.
    
8. As well as my usual experience of goodwill from managers and staff in the projects I’ve been involved in, I’ve also found myself in situations this year where people have been very upset by organisational proposals, addressing their managers or me with varying degrees of hostility, often in open forums, but sometimes one on one. Misunderstanding and personal threat are behind such reactions. It can be quite challenging when this happens, so it’s no wonder so many consultation processes for restructures or other contentious proposals omit any requirement for face to face discussion and rely on written proposals and written feedback to say they have fulfilled the requirements for “consultation.” This written approach is much more comfortable for the “coalition of the powerful” and the project teams and HR people they hire. Nevertheless, I have found that fronting up to staff about contentious proposals or issues and being calm when others are not is very powerful. Remaining calm, rather than becoming activated by the emotions of others, and continuing to discuss the issues raised rather than reacting to attack has had great results. I’ve later had feedback from people who initially shouted or attacked me or the ideas I represent saying how they can now see what was intended, but couldn’t at the time. This confirms for me that people’s feelings change over time, as their perspectives change. Therefore it makes sense to work with the range of different perspectives of issues. And believe me, with any complex issues, there will be a range of perspectives you can work with.

As a final thought, there are often situations where people are questioning your change proposal, sometimes in very sharp terms. While it appears they may be trying to undermine or challenge your proposal, this is not necessarily the case, even if they seem highly critical, are angry or divert discussion to seemingly irrelevant issues.

They may also be genuinely thinking about how they will take up the proposal, how it will affect them and what they will have to do with their teams to maintain their relationships and get the desired results. And it might seem quite difficult or even impossible to them, at that moment, to see how the change proposal could be successful.

I faced several of these situations this year, where people were upset and seemed unable to address the issues I was raising on behalf of my sponsor in the organisation. It has been confirmed for me that it works best to assume that questions about your desired change are genuine enquiries into the change, and to respond accordingly. This has enabled me to respond graciously and facilitatively to what could be seen as personal attacks. If you treat such questions as resistance and respond as such, then you are assuming that the other party is damaged, that there is something wrong with them. You immediately appear defensive and it then becomes very hard to work together with the other parties to achieve your organisational change objectives. Again, it becomes apparent that there is value in remaining calm while others around are not.

I have been lucky enough over the last two years to get involved in the mental health sector through my work on change in mental health non-government organisations (NGOs).

I have been very invigorated by this work, which I feel helps people who have been affected by conditions that are not only frightening in themselves for individuals, but are also frequently misunderstood and stigmatised in wider society. As has been pointed out to me, people diagnosed with mental illness are unique in that they can be locked up against their will for indefinite periods without having committed a crime.

This is partly about our discomfort with dealing with behaviour that is out of the ordinary. I know that at times I have felt uncomfortable relating to people who are either experiencing the effects of a mental health condition or its treatment. The treatment can sometimes be as bad as the condition itself.

I have been particularly excited about my work with NGOs who offer what is known as peer support services. This means that people who have experienced mental illness and are in recovery assist others in their own recovery process.

I think that mental health NGOs have a particular set of challenges to deal with, and seven special alert factors are outlined in my latest white paper "Bringing About Change in Mental Health NGOs."

By the way, the picture shows the view from a side window in our master bedroom of a flowering hedge – a good tonic for any upset, don’t you think?

As regular readers will be aware, I have been advocating that conversations are the means by which change takes place in organisations. This is because organisations can be seen as themes of consistency and novelty that emerge from the myriad conversations that take place amongst many people over periods of time. So, organisations remain the same (and sometimes stay stuck), due to recurrent themes that predominate in the conversations that take place over the course of many interactions. Each of these interactions individually holds the potential for novelty. Think of regular team meetings, project meetings, coffee conversations, board meetings, informal meetings to explore certain topics, progress meetings, and presentation of proposals. Each has the potential for something new, but also has potential to reinforce existing patterns. "It depends."

During the conversations that take place during these meetings, participants make choices about what to bring into the public domain and what to leave unspoken. Thus, organisational participants are always negotiating a balance between what to reveal and what to conceal in their organisational conversations. Such matters as the status of your love life, your living conditions or issues in your family are obvious matters for judicious revealing and concealing.

But so are matters such as what you really think of the CEO’s presentation on customer service,  whether you think this change initiative will blow over and be superceded by something else, or whether you are thinking of looking for a new job.

What you think of your colleague’s idea for your current project is no less the subject for judicious revealing and concealing. After all, your relationships are subject to power relationships that both enable you and constrain you at the same time. So frustrating!

All conversations are subject to power relations that enable and constrain at the same time. Hence, your people are always determining what it is safe to reveal and what to conceal – perhaps not consciously. You are subject to the same dynamics. By which I mean that you as a senior manager are also negotiating what to reveal and what to conceal in each of your myriad interactions during the course of a day.

I contend that choices not to bring issues into the public domain tend to foster consistency and support the status quo (i.e. "no change"), while choices to bring issues up for discussion, which can be risky, perhaps even career-destroying, create the opportunity for new patterns of interaction to arise.

In other words, as a leader, your choices about what is acceptable for discussion – what you proactively raise as a legitimate subject for discussion, has a direct impact on the potential for change to occur in your organisation.

Your mundane day to day conversations with others have a big impact on the change potential of your organisation. If you’re thinking about the change you want in your organisation (and who isn’t?), ask yourself, "What topics am I legitimating," and "What topics are undiscussable?" Your intuition may tell you the answer.

Check out your intuition with someone you trust.Or else get someone from outside to help.

A colleague has recently drawn my attention to a comment by Margaret Moth, who explained her philosophy that, while you have little control over how and when a ball is served to you, you do have control over how you return it.

Margaret Moth is a New Zealand-borm CNN camerawoman who has covered war zones. She was hit by a sniper’s bullet in the face and had extensive surgery.

When I heard Moth’s philosophy expressed this way, I warmed to it immediately. It’s impact was strong – after all, it’s based on tennis, my favourite sport. The ball is served and then you choose how you want to return it. What a great position to be in as a tennis player, having the choice of where and how to return serve.

This is a way of saying that you choose your responses to the situations you are faced with. It gives you a lot of power to place yourself in charge of your life. And I was reminded of organisational change situations and how you cannot control how people will respond, sometimes unexpectedly, to the activities of your change project.

When I heard Margaret Moth’s statement, I was immediately transported to a tennis interclub doubles match I played the other day, and one of the serves I returned from a very good player (currently top 40 in NZ). He served it wide to my forehand, I was slow to read it and I just managed to get my racquet onto it, hitting it late. It hurtled down the line, past the outstretched racquet of his partner and landed just inside the line for a clean winner. That wasn’t where I was aiming it at all, but I liked the result. Perhaps the fact that it was a return from such a good player made it memorable for me too.

Then I remembered another serve in my subsequent singles match in which the serve came pretty much straight to me, quite fast and I dumped the return into the net. Seeing it was match point, I lost the match.

In both of these situations, the ball was served to me, I reacted as best I could, but with quite different results in each case. I had a choice, and my choice was to hit the ball back, preferably for a winner or at least a difficult shot for the other player.

My execution however was not entirely under my control. In the first situation, objectively speaking, the serve was very good and could easily have been an ace – it was a lucky return that went in – it could equally have gone out – but I was not in much control at all. In the second, it was a much more straightforward serve that I just didn’t return well. In both situations though, I had to react to the speed, direction and spin on the ball. Also there was the pressure of the match situation – the psychology of the game and how I responded in that situation. Another factor was the choice made by the server in the context of the match, to go wide or to serve straight at me, how hard to serve, what spin to put on, what he thought I might be expecting, what he thought my weaknesses were.

But the choices made by the other player and by me are not made independently of each other. They are part of a pattern that has built up over the course of the match, and from other matches we’d played before in different circumstances. 

So it is in change situations. You introduce change, and although you don’t control people’s reactions, they seem to fit familiar-seeming patterns. These patterns are specific to your circumstances, but are recognisable as the result of interdependent interactions, nevertheless. Some authors have categorised these patterns, for example as stages in a grief cycle. But even though the patterns are familiar (ball goes in, ball goes out), you cannot predict in any particular circumstance, what the result will be.

Will you hit a winner, or will you dump it in the net? It’s not entirely up to you. 

Many managers have fallen for the attractive prospect of "best practice." And many consultants claim to be able to bring best practice to your organisation. What is usually meant by this term is that they bring models or processes they’ve used or developed in the past, which they can implement with new clients.

There is certainly value in the experience consultants have had in other organisations – it can bring a new perspective to what is going on in your organisation.

The idea of best practice goes further than this – it implies that the same outcomes are possible in your organisation using the standardised best practice or models adopted in other successful companies.

In an interesting post "On Models and Scaling Up," Chris Mowles makes the point that the effectiveness of any model is due in part to the quality of the model and in part to the people working together with it, and so you can’t really separate out the contextual from the generalisable. This is the problem with ‘n-step’ approaches to change – the claim is that by following an 8 step or a U turn model, you will successfully implement change.

It is significant that the people working together with the model are just as much a part of the effectiveness as the model itself. In fact I think the people involved are much more important, and most managers are aware of this too, which is why they know that picking the right team is so important.

And yet best practice and its forebear benchmarking both divert attention from the people and the context, focusing entirely on the disembodied prescription or model, as though it can be implemented anywhere and get the same successful result.

Note that the process of naming something as "this" simultaneously names everything else as "that." So if I call something a circle, then I am also calling everything outside that circle "not circle." So by naming "circle" I have actually created two categories, ("circle" and "not circle") even though I am only focusing attention on one category – the one I have named. The other category becomes almost invisible in this process. So if in talking about "best practice" we are making the "people working together with the practice" almost invisible.

The emphasis is, in fact, on the least important factor – the model or the best practice itself. Concentrating on "best practice" risks leading to a selective interpretation of social facts – an interpretation seen only in terms of the "best practice." According to Axel Honneth, this can significantly reduce your attentiveness to meaningful circumstances in a given situation.

Instead of looking at best practice, focus your attention on the particularities of your situation, trying to understand all the factors at work, not just those prescribed in your model or best practice. Reflect on how your own participation is affecting, and is affected by, the way these factors are playing out in your organisation. That way you can help to make sure your attention is on what really matters so much more than a best practice or model – how you and others are interacting with each other and influencing each other in the process of getting the work done.

Photography by Ruby Cumming

When you think about it, it is fairly obvious that there can be no "I" without we, you (singular), he, she, you (plural) and they. "I" can only be thought of as "I and relationships with others." "I" cannot be thought of as a stand alone individual in isolation from others. You could think of "I" as meaning "interdependent I."

You can distinguish between interdependent I and others, but you cannot separate them – interdependent I only exists in relationship to other people.

The language of speaking about "I" tends to mean that you forget about the interdependent nature of "I" and it seems that maybe there is an "I" that is separate. For example, we come to take for granted that the "I" is resident inside the individual person, quite secluded from other people.

Think about the relationship between two people, A and B. This relationship actually consists of two relationships – AB = A’s perspective of the relationship and BA = B’s perspective of the relationship. In the world of mathematics AB=BA, but not in the human world.

Here’s another way of saying it. Everyone that I think of in the third person as "she", e.g. my friend Robyn, thinks of herself in the first person as "I", and she in turn thinks of me in the third person as "he" or sometimes as "you." So Robyn’s perspective of our relationship is different just in the quality alone that her "I" is different from my "I." It’s all a matter of perspective.

I have found it useful to bear this in mind in any corporate or business situation, especially when you are involved in change.

There are always at least two perspectives in every relationship, the perspectives of each party to the relationship, and both of them are valid.

So, as a leader of change, it is helpful if you remember that. Remembering that there are two perspectives will lead you to first seek out the different perspectives, and secondly to find a way to hold both perspectives at the same time, even if they are contradictory.

The most common response to being faced with contradictory perspectives is to become anxious. And then to try and resolve the two points of view so that the "right" perspective, or the "facts" can be found. The problem with this is that one perspective then is labelled "right" and one labelled "wrong." Usually the "right" perspective is the one that is closest to that of the most powerful people.

It is very helpful to have the capacity to hold contradictory points of view without becoming anxious. Apart from keeping a relatively calm atmosphere for others, it also helps you to facilitate the parties to see the other’s point of view and this allows the possibility for each point of view to be transformed, into something new. And this is at the very heart of leading change in organisations – the ability to assist others to transform their point of view.

This post is based on the ideas of Norbert Elias, in What is Sociology, 1978.

Photography by Ruby Cumming

Have you seen this blog post by Tiffany Monhollon called "How to Talk About Change at Work" that recently caught my eye?

For the last five months the author has had what is described as a seismic shift every 30 days. That amounts to five of these seismic shifts in five months. So, lots of change, by any standards.

Tiffany goes on to give a very personalised account of what she has learnt through these frequent and rapid changes in her organisation, and some survival tips that I think are very practical, and revealing of political processes. Essentially Tiffany’s tips amount to "how to be a good management recipient of change."

First of all she suggests figuring out what the change means, and recommends talking to a group of trusted others as a way of working out what it’s all about.

She then suggests finding something positive in the change. If you can’t see the positive immediately, she suggests expecting that there will be something positive that you can’t see yet, so open up the possibility that there will be something positive and keep looking for it. Don’t go to the next step until you can see something positive in the change.

Once you have identified something positive in the change then you can go ahead and find ways to advocate for the change by speaking positively about the change in terms of benefits for the organisation (and if possible, benefits for others). If you can talk positively about the change in this way, your change leader will be very grateful. This might be hard to do, so the author provides some creative ideas for how to do it, concluding that nevertheless it is a worthwhile exercise.

I quote here from Tiffany: "What your leaders need from you during times of change is your ideas, your energy, your solutions. And your advocacy." It strikes me how often the "change leaders" in the "consultation process" do not allow for ideas, energy and solutions because they reduce the feedback process to something written, avoiding opportunities for people to have the kind of discussions that result in new ideas, energy and solutions. They provide a written proposal and ask for written feedback, which is considered (or not) behind a closed door and then the final decisions are announced.

Change leaders in my experience, do want the ideas, energy and solutions of their people. But they are often anxious about whether they will be able to deal with the responses. A lack of experience or expertise in this area leads to over-engineering of the feedback process, resulting in severe restrictions to the scope and benefit of the ideas, energy and solutions of the people.

To summarise, so far you have talked to trusted others to work out what the change means, found something positive about the change, talked about the change with others in a positive way and now can choose your own change.

This means choosing either to stay the same and get swept away by the current of change, or choosing to remain in your organisation and, by implication, allowing the change to shape you. In other words, you have to choose how you will let the organisation’s change shape you. In doing this you can make it your own change, and your own opportunity.

I guess if you can’t follow the above steps then you have to leave and will not survive the change.

This approach speaks to how you have to be to have the greatest chance of surviving change – on the face of it, it seems to be good advice – how to be a good change recipient in a middle management position. If you are in the position of managing other staff then you have to represent the change to those staff in ways that support the organisation even while at the same time wondering if you will have a job yourself. So these steps really reflect that organisational reality in times of change.

Basically, Tiffany is pointing out that to be a good recipient of change you have to be in favour of the change, regardless of any qualms you may have. You cannot afford to express those qualms in open company – rather you have to work through your concerns behind closed doors with trusted others, so that you can emerge and find some way of supporting the change without compromising your ethics.

Underlying this approach is the recognition that those senior people initiating the change have more power than the recipients of change. The most imortant conversations in relation to the change occur behind closed doors with trusted others – these are the conversations in which managers work out what they think the change means and how they will respond – by resigning, by "going through the motions," by "passive resistance," by compliance or by being enthusiastic.

As a person who is often on the project team implementing change, I recognise that these conversations occur outside of the project team’s purview and yet are all important. That is why I think it is important to make the opportunity to have these conversations in the legitimate space rather than driving them into the shadows. For example, providing opportunities for people to talk in small groups with each other and with the senior people about the change and what it entails.