Let's think about the impact of change or operational performance. Because people instinctively get it wrong, not because they're foolish, but because they're hugely optimistic. They assume that we're going along very nicely. Thank you very much until the change starts. And then performance starts to ramp up until it reaches the new plateau, that it's designed to reach because of the change. And now we can enjoy the benefits of improved performance levels and improved performance levels.

Maybe cost control, maybe revenue generation, maybe employee satisfaction or customer happiness, whatever. Of course, that's the change you see through rose tinted spectacles. It's not what happens in real life. What happens in real life is that as soon as changes in the air performance levels start to dip. And as the amount of work that the change generates increase, its performance continues to dip. And so in the midst of the change, performance reaches a low point.

At some point, however, it will turn around. But the dip in performance continues to persist beyond the point where change is fully implemented. Once it is fully implemented, though, then performance will start to rise again, it will almost certainly rise more slowly than you anticipated because you were optimistic. And if you've planned the change well, and you calibrated your performance expectations correctly, eventually, performance will rise to reach the new plateau level you'd expected. In reality, if you have been over optimal Stick, it'll never quite get there. Now, of course, that's what we expect to see if we think about in advance.

But why do changes often go wrong? Well, they don't go wrong because they've gone wrong. They go wrong, because they haven't yet started to go right. We haven't yet seen the performance levels we've anticipated. And frankly, people lose confidence. And this is particularly so in the political sphere.

But remember that politics doesn't always have a capital P. It can happen within the political sphere of your organization, too. So what happens is that senior people lose confidence in the change, they think we need to fix this. So they design another change. But of course, as soon as they start implementing the other change, the rise in performance turns down there's the new dip. And of course we get the effect that change upon change is chaos, frankly. So my advice is it You're planning anticipate, expect the performance dip.

Be conservative in your estimates of the new level of performance that you'll get when you leave the dip. And also anticipate that that dip may be longer than you'd ideally hope. That way with those expectations set far more realistically, people won't lose confidence too soon. And we'll give the change time to take hold and produce the new performance levels that you were expecting, or at least starting to hope for. So that's how change affects performance. And a chart very much like the one I've put up on the screen was first articulated by family therapist.

Virginia sits here in thinking about the way that people respond to change. Funny, isn't it? organizations respond in the same way that people do. Maybe that's because organizations are nothing more than a collection of people. And never is that more true than when they're going to change.