Executives and senior leaders live in the Future State. That is what they are responsible for and compensated for—deciding how the organization should function in six months, one year, three years, etc. Project teams live in the Transition State. They investigate alternatives, decide on a path, and develop a solution to change the organization. Employees, managers and supervisors live in the Current State. They cannot simply stop their work to implement a change. They are responsible for keeping the organization functioning while a change is being implemented. The disconnect here can have significant ramifications when it comes to communicating about change. Senior leaders tend to focus on and speak about vision, almost detrimentally in some instances. Project teams tend to focus their communications on the details of their solution and the milestones and time frames when change will happen. Employees want to know why what they are doing now (the Current State) needs to be changed in the first place. Change management practitioners play a key role in bridging the gap between the three states of change.

Once you have started thinking about change not as a singular event but as a process, the question remains: how do you manage the process of change? Managing change as a process takes place on two levels:

Each individual employee or manager who is impacted by a change must go through their own personal process of change. If the change impacts five people, then each of those five must move from their Current State through their Transition State to their own Future State. If the project impacts 500 people, then there are 500 Current-Transition-Future processes that must occur. If the initiative impacts 5,000 people, then there are 5,000 individuals moving from a Current State to a Future State. This is the essence of change management: supporting individuals through the required personal transitions necessary for a project or initiative to improve the performance of the organization.

Whether it is a change at home, in the community, or at work, individuals are successful at change when they have awareness, desire, knowledge, ability and reinforcement. This results-oriented description of the individual change process gives change management practitioners a new focus. For example, instead of seeing their job as "creating a communications plan," an effective practitioner with a focus on the individual change process sees his or her job as "creating awareness" and so forth. Consider these two final observations about change as a process at the individual level. First, people will start the change process at different points in time. A team that is part of a pilot program may learn about a change and start the change process months before other, larger groups of employees. Second, individuals take different amounts of time to move through the process themselves. For instance, awareness of the need for change may only take a few hours where for another it may take days or weeks to arrive at the point of saying "I understand why the change is needed. Once we begin viewing and managing the individual change processes associated with a project or initiative, we will be more successful at enabling those individual transitions that together will result in successful organizational change.

When it comes to managing change at the organizational level, viewing change as a process helps determine the sequencing and content of the change management effort. First, organizational change management itself should follow a process that parallels the process of change associated with a project or initiative. Prosci's 3-Phase Process for organizational change management lays out specific activities for Phase 1 – Preparing for Change (occurring during the Current State), Phase 2 – Managing Change (occurring during the Transition State), and Phase 3 – Reinforcing Change (occurring during the Future State). Second, research shows that change management practitioners have five tools, or levers, they can use to help move individuals forward through the change process: communications plan, sponsor roadmap, coaching plan, training plan and resistance management plan. Depending on whether we are in the Current State, Transition State or Future State, different tools will be more effective, and the content will change. Two examples: 

• The Training Plan – a training plan is a key component of a change management effort. Employees typically need new skills and competencies when adopting a change to their day to-day work. But the training plan must be effectively sequenced based on where employees are in the change process. A training program that occurs right when employees learn about a change—when they are standing firmly in the Current State—will not be effective (this is an unfortunate reality in many cases, however, where the first response to a change is "send them to training"). Training should be delivered after employees have already started to move out of the Current State and into the Transition State.

1. Treat the changes you manage as a process, and not as a single event or series of events.2. Individuals experience change as a process. Evaluate and focus your change management activities based on where individuals are in the change process.3. No one experiences the change process the same.4. Your organizational change management efforts need to be tied to where you are in the change process.

Tim CreaseyTim Creasey is Prosci’s Chief Innovation Officer and a globally recognized leader in change management. His work forms the foundation of the largest body of knowledge in the world on managing the people side of change to deliver organizational results.