Let's think about how change happens in the real world, the cycle of change, if you will. And often, as far as you're aware, change happens with a seemingly random incident, something happens that you hadn't expected. With the benefit of hindsight, it was entirely predictable, but at the time it happens, it's seems random. Or, for example, the payroll system produces a lot of errors. The second step then, is that that leads to a moment of insight, a light bulb goes on in your brain, and you think, aha, something needs to be done. So the next step is to investigate what's going on.

This is where we gather together a team. We look at what we've got, we look at the options for change. We look at that. This In this case for making the change, and we build a plan for what might happen. We present our business case, it gets accepted. And then we move to the next stage implementation.

This is where we make change happens. And it's a combination of project management at one end of the spectrum at change management. The other the project management, of course, deals largely with getting things done aspects, whereas the change management deals with preparing people for the change. And once we've implemented the change, in our case, a new financial system, your payroll system, then we can step back. We can integrate this new process, this new way of working into our existing procedures, and we can relax. Now, the reality is that things change over time.

New employment legislation It affects the way that our payroll system needs to work. So we make small changes to it. And over time, that series of small incremental changes, means the payroll system is no longer quite as effective and efficient as it was originally designed to be in this state is known as inevitable decline. But what if one or two payments get made wrong? The people who run the system understand it, they know how to patch it, they know how to fix it. And therefore, it's still perfectly fit for purpose until a seemingly random incident occurs.

And it's not just any member of staff whose payment is wrong. It's the finance director or the chief executive. Or maybe this time, it's a lot of stuff, a whole factories worth of stuff. And that seemingly random instant, although in retrospect, entirely predictable, triggers a light bulb To go on, and so we go around the cycle again, perhaps five, perhaps, perhaps 15 years later. You recognize that cycle. It happens in your private life.

And it certainly happens in work life. This is the cycle of change. And it starts to explain why some people who resist change because if the lightbulb hasn't gone on, because you're part of the organization that hasn't been affected by the seemingly random incident, then when people start implementing a new payroll system, you're wondering, why are we spending money on a new payroll system, there's lots more we could invest in. It's crazy. If it ain't broke, why fix it? But of course, some people know that it is broken, and therefore we do need to fix it.

So that ignorance of the need for change is the first reason why people resist change. This change cycle helps us to start to understand Not only how change happens, but why some of the results of change happening. As we go through this course, we'll learn more about those results.