Introduction
by Nigel Nicholson

The subject of this book is change, a topic it is easy today to conceive of as universal. We are forever being told not only to expect change to be a constant aspect of business life, but also to expect it to accelerate as innovation and technology gallop faster along an exponential growth trajectory. This is quite scary. Indeed, increasingly, one hears of 'burnout', 'change fatigue', 'overwork', 'crises of confidence' and 'cultures of cynicism'. These are real twenty-first-century phenomena. How will another book on change help?

A first consideration is that any truly helpful book on the topic will be as much about stability and preservation as it is about change and revolution. It is futile just to try to chase the whirligig of change at ever-faster speeds. Rather, we need to gain mastery over its motion and to understand the seasons of change, so that we can drive change when we want or need to, and so that we know when it is necessary and desirable to put the brakes on. In an ideal world we should seek change for what it brings us, not because we feel it is intrinsically necessary. We need to be able to embrace change without the fearful feeling that it brings all costs and no gain. But the reality is that people have good reason to be fearful, cynical and disillusioned. On all sides business changes are disappointing people, because:

• what is promised is not delivered
• the pain outweighs the gain
• long-term interests are sacrificed to short-term objectives
• cosmetic change substitutes for dealing with fundamentals
• people make sacrifices and are then cast aside
• change is driven by executive ego not business need
• loyal, hard-working employees bear all the costs
• changes don't last
• leaders disengage when things go wrong
• change agents don't walk the talk.

One could add to this list but it would serve no purpose. The point here is that all of these are avoidable through good management, far-sightedness and a strategic orientation to change. This book sets out how to achieve this, drawing on the latest management thinking, academic theory and observed best practice.

Some themes are worth noting.

First is that change has always been a constant in human life. We humans are highly change-adaptable animals, used to pulling together to face crises, accommodating elemental forces and following the rhythm of the seasons. We are also creative creatures, continually seeking improvements to our way of life, implementing innovations and seeking novelty. It is a myth that people hate change. It is not hard to encourage people to embrace change, but they have to believe that it promises an improvement in the status quo, and that no change is the undesirable option.

But people do resist change. The list above supplies ample reason. It boils down to a lack of trust and belief. People are wary of change that asks them to accept uncertainty and possible loss in exchange for abandoning comfort, adjustment and their familiar network of relationships and operations. It is not that most of us are entirely contented with the status quo. Most people's work situations are full of imperfections but their inner voice reasons 'better the devil you know…'

Trust is also undermined by poor or absent relationships with the people who are driving change, mistrust of their motives, and negative memories of past experiences with them. Put these together and it becomes clear that resistance to change is the rational response to change proposals, until and unless they can be proved to be trustworthy. The burden of proof is with the prosecution, not the defence.

Yet the pressures for change are indeed inexorable. Globalisation is the principal force shaping many businesses, with barriers to entry and to competition falling away sharply in almost all sectors. Even in the not-for-profit area, the knock-on effects of the sweeping social and technological changes that characterise our era are altering and often increasing the demands faced by staff and their leaders. Under these circumstances the challenge is to gain mastery over change and to avoid being its victims, so that we shape the future rather than it bending us out of shape.

How can we do this? Where do change leaders go wrong? How can we do better?

A chief source of difficulty and failure is that executives approach change management as if it were a technical project. Their reasoning runs: if you know where you need to get to, you have only to plot the route and start the engine. This no-nonsense approach appeals to many of today's business leaders. These are mainly people (men mainly) with a single-minded, driven approach to leadership, a determination not to get left behind, and a simple faith that good ideas and strategies will be accepted by any reasonable person. The people who resist are, thus, by definition unreasonable and must either be dumped or converted.

The reality, as savvy change agents know, is that we have to deal with change as a matter of the heart as much as of the head. People's anxieties have to be surfaced and addressed, which may be difficult in organisational cultures characterised by rationality and emotional inhibition, as is the case in many firms. Change management is also about what is going on in people's heads - especially the prevalence of false beliefs. As the sociologist W.I. Thomas noted, 'what is taken to be real is real in its consequences'.

This means that change agents have not only to plot a realistic path, but they also have to mobilise hearts and minds through effective communication strategies. There are three elements to communication, each of which can fatally break down:

• encoder quality: how the message is framed
• decoder receptivity: the willingness and ability of people to receive the message
• channel quality: the appropriateness of the medium and its freedom from noise.

Change leaders tend to focus mostly on encoding - honing their messages - and secondly on channels - creating the most attractive delivery mechanisms. What they tend to ignore is receptivity - the interests, expectations and prior beliefs of their audience, and the fact that the most attended-to communications come from networks of gossip.

It is for this reason that much of this volume is concerned with issues of culture, since it is the norms, values, practices and language of relationships in organisations that makes change possible, successful and beneficial.

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