4 Stages of Any Change

Change comes to us in many forms in business. Usually it feels like just as we’ve got used to a way of working – something changes. New personnel, new roles, new management, new expectations, new clients, new equipment, new web sites, new applications, new policies; it can all become a whirl of chaos in which we wonder how we’re ever going to get anything done.

When Google released their new web browser Chrome a colleague of mine reeled with horror. ‘It has no home button!’ he shouted. ‘I hate change’. Being a developer, it only took him few seconds to add the missing feature himself. But his reaction was telling.

Google are trying to change the way that we browse the web, by integrating searching and surfing history into the browser itself. It’s a small jump to browsing more intuitively, one that could make home pages and search bars redundant.

But it’s still a jump.

And for one developer, it was the jump that he noticed first. Perhaps he really cared in the long run about having a home button (probably). Yet I wonder if his reaction was more about having to jump – having to change – than it was about the actual alteration.

In other words, his relationship to change itself.

If change is a problem for us then any change is inconvenient, however small. If change represents new possibilities and opportunities to us, then any change can bring delight.

Do we have any choice in our relationship to change?

Nearly all change – big or small – follows the same pattern in our emotional response to it. The change and our response comes in four stages.

1. Disruption and loss

The first stage is disruption and the first feeling is usually one of loss. Something is being taken away from us. Security, knowledge, position, or comfort can all be threatened at the beginning. Because this is the feeling that we experience first of all, we often resist the change as soon as we hear about it. After all, who wants to experience loss?

2. Disorder and chaos

It gets worse. The second stage is disorder. We enter personal chaos. Under threat, anxiety and fear can pop up. Sometimes we oscillate between stages one and two by refusing to live with the anxiety, and so denying that change needs to occur. But that just pushes us back towards having to accept that change is inevitable, and the loss kicks in all over again. Yet if we hang in there, the good news eventually arrives.

3. New order and hope

Stage three is where a new order is formed. Out of the confusion we begin to think about what we might need to thrive in our new environment. We begin to see how it might work, and surprisingly, this leads us on to thinking about what good things might come out of the change.

4. New relationship and confidence

And by stage four – when a new relationship is formed to things – we are confident that we can thrive with the change, and focus on what has improved and the new possibilities now available.

To simplify, feeling only the loss and fearing the disorder will make us hate change. But being able to look ahead and anticipate the confidence, improvements and new opportunities that will inevitably arrive will help us to embrace it.

And embrace it we must, because we all know what happens after stage four is complete. It’s back round to disruption and loss as something else shifts in the way that we work.

Now the browser home button has gone, nothing is sacred. At least we know how to surf the changes when they come.