Change is Hard

Guest Post by Julieanne DimitriosI know why people don’t like change… it’s hard. It means you have to stop doing something you are familiar with, move to something that’s different; and in the process of changing, you have to make sure that everything is aligned with the new world.I recently dropped a perfume bottle in my bathroom sink, leaving a nasty hole in my shiny, white porcelain. As I looked at it aghast, I thought, ‘this isn’t going to be easy to change’. I’ve got a double vanity, semi-recessed sink, cut out beautifully into a stone bench top. I was right, it wasn’t easy to change.Here’s a few reasons I think change is hard:1)    End-to-end thinking: In order to change, you need to understand the way the entire situation currently operates. This may mean you get distracted by analysing several ‘tentacles’ of the current situation – so you may have thought the change is isolated to one particular thing, but when you look at it, there are several other things that also need to be changed to effect the new situation.In my bathroom renovation, I soon discovered that I couldn’t match the sink, so both sinks had to go. Then, the style of taps had changed; so while my old taps were on the bench, the new sinks had the taps on the sink itself. And then the taps could only be a certain height because there was limited clearance for the cupboard above.Assessing the end-to-end situation meant new things needed to change that weren’t obvious at the outset. In many organisations, most staff may not understand the entire end-to-end situation, so it can be difficult for a change practitioner to find all the ‘tentacles’.2)    Desire to change: Mostly, people don’t want to change. They like the familiar (because it’s easy), and don’t want to think about all the things that will need to change to effect the new situation.In my bathroom renovation, I didn’t want to fix my sink; I still liked the old one. But I had no choice. The change was forced on me; so my desire to change was low.This happens regularly in organisations where the change is forced on the organisation, for example as a result of a regulatory change. The organisation would prefer not to change, but they have no choice but to be compliant.3)     Effort is needed to make the change work: To make the new situation take effect, there is work involved. In organisations, this may translate to recruiting new staff and training them; writing new policies, procedures, or work practices; communicating and more communicating; changing systems, reports, financials, or data storage; and generally just plain work!In my bathroom renovation, it translated to five visits to my house, being ‘sink-less’ for a couple of weeks, and several tradesmen traipsing dust and water through my house. But am I happy with the change? Yes, I am.Have you found change hard lately?