One of the joys of working in the Waterloo region is being able to support the rapid growth of organizations—from tech giant RIM to smaller organizations including a local community health care organization.

A few years back we were called in to help a local community health centre that asked, “How can we help our employees fully embrace our new structure?”

After meeting with the management team, we learned that the fast growth and a new structure was causing unrest within the organization. In the past all employees worked in one building. There was a strong internal community built thanks to this close working environment and employees created rituals such as regular potluck lunches, etc. However, in response to the growing demand for health services, the organization received government funding and added a number of satellite offices. This expansion changed the working environment and some employees were not managing the change as well as others.

To help the organization, we led a half day session with all employees where we utilized a number of design thinking techniques including role playing and change mapping. We also used a culture indicator survey based on 12 archetypes as a framework to help individuals better understand their roles and why some were struggling with the change more than others.

Looking back on the success of the session, the most powerful aspect of our time with the organization was providing a safe environment that allowed employees to express how they felt about the changes taking place.

Change Mapping

This exercise was particularly useful. We drew three vertical lines on a flip chart representing three stages of change based on the work of internationally known speaker, author and consultant, William Bridges. The three stages are:

Endings – This stage involves high stress, shock and denial for many people.

Neutral Zone – This is a foggy place between the old way and the new way of being, a middle zone that’s often disorienting and confusing.

Beginnings – When clarity of the new way of being surfaces.

After explaining the model, we asked each employee to place a dot on the chart to represent what stage they were at. There was a fairly even distribution of dots with about a third of the employees still in the endings zone, another third in the neutral zone and the rest had made it to the beginnings stage of change.

This simple visualization exercise helped everyone realize where they were at as a group and assured them that, whatever stage they were in, it was completely normal. This new awareness sparked a rich discussion session by the management team, helping to identify solutions to move people forward.

Our work with the community health care centre reinforced the simple, but often forgotten need to find safe and playful ways to allow people to express themselves and work together to help each other through the fog—towards the bright, energizing new beginnings that await.