Surviving in altered states! Have you ever walked into a room or situation and wondered why you are there? It happens to us all from time to time and it last happened to me in a significant way on a visit to New York in October 2001, less than a month after the attack on the World Trade Centre.

As the flight approached JFK, the pilot announced that hostilities had broken out in Afghanistan and that we would not be allowed off the aircraft without extensive security checks. On what seemed to be every street corner, bridge and tunnel around Manhattan, the National Guard were patrolling, checking vehicles and looking nervous and very out of place. As incongruous as the Army fighting the Daleks in the early Dr Who TV programmes. Olive green on black and white; what were we all doing there and why?

The trip to New York was to help a client's HR department enhance the company's performance. No small task given the personal difficulties created by recent events. The meetings and seminars had been arranged a couple of months beforehand and at the client's insistence had gone ahead despite the trauma of September 11th, which had affected everyone I met. Each had a story to tell - where they had been, what they had seen, whom they had rung, whom they knew who had now gone, how it was affecting them and how their behaviour had changed. They were all coping with changes to their own lives, which would never be the same again.

One of the most striking effects of the disaster at the World Trade Centre seemed to be people's heightened emotional awareness and this was not just the New Yorkers' natural ebullience. Clearly, people's potential for learning how to cope with this change was in top gear - their antennae were definitely up and out! What happens next? What do we need to do? What if it happens again? How does this change how we operate?

Fear of the unknown

Hopefully the events in New York in September 2001 will never be repeated, but the fear of the unknown was real and tangible and it affected everyone.

It occurred to me at the time that we know virtually everything there is to know about managing and leading people through change, individually and collectively, in steady state organisations and those in transition. Over the last 100 years theories have been proposed, tested, amended, enhanced and developed to provide managers with insights that enable them to predict effectively the behaviours of those they are responsible for, given a set of definable circumstances.

In many minor ways fear is created daily by changes in the workplace - loss of customers, failure to generate work, new technologies, mergers, takeovers, reorganisations, cost reductions, etc. Change whether global or personal, whether evolutionary or dramatic, affects the individual. It is individuals who have to cope with the fear of changes both to themselves and to their organisations.

And the fear of change is entirely understandable, focusing as it does on issues such as security, safety and personal well-being. It is human nature for people to try to make their personal situation as safe as possible and to deal with their concerns first. It is when people don't know where the change is taking them that change is seen as threatening. What am I doing here? Not we, not this business, but what am I doing here?

Attention to the detail of individual concerns is what ultimately makes the difference between acceptance and rejection of broader changes. We talk about aligning the individual and organisational agendas, which is another way of describing how we focus upon the concerns and fears of the individual within the context of the broader organisational issues.

Taking control

Helping individuals and teams to design what their and their organisation's new reality will look like is the most potent way of gaining commitment to change. Designing the 'operating vision', or what success looks like and their role within it, addresses both the personal and organisational agendas and can start to remove the fear of the unknown.

It also helps to understand the stages through which people must pass in coming to terms with change. Those stages are resistance, confusion, integration and commitment. The journey can be slow and painful. People can be helped through it but it cannot be avoided.

It was clear that in the early days of October 2001 the people of New York were understandably confused by and resistant to the change that was thrust into their lives. They had a very real expectation that a similar outrage would happen again and that nothing could protect them from the consequences. Nothing could have prepared them or those watching the newscasts for the horrors of September 11th, but we do know that the visible and attentive leadership of Mayor Guilliani gave reassurance in confusion. We also know that offers of support provided a sense of wider community and a feeling of shared cause in difficult times.

Three lessons

From the vantage point of an outsider close to the aftermath of those dreadful events there are a number of clear lessons for all of us who wish to help others cope with change.
First, people's capacity to deal with the awful and the unexpected is much greater than we give them credit for. On September 11th the truth was there for all to see, but in organisations managers often try to make bad news more palatable. In doing so they underestimate people's capacity to face reality. 'Tell it how it is' seems to be the lesson.

Second, the underlying values that have sustained an individual, a team or a community thus far are the values that will see them through the change. These values need to be recognised and celebrated. In crisis situations the natural inclination is always to default to action first, but the experience in the immediate aftermath of New York seems to suggest otherwise. The reaction of the City leadership was to emphasise the values of courage, get up and go, and the New Yorkers' natural toughness in the face of the daily trials of big city living. The reaction of 'we can do this' seems to be a perfect metaphor for business change. In other words 'what made us great in the good times', will see us through the difficult times.

Thirdly, how leaders behave will be critical to success - people recognise and respond positively to clarity of purpose, integrity of action and open communications. This is as true in the world of work as it was for those dealing with the tragedy and after effects of September 11th.

© John Bolan, 2001

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