Скачать или смотреть Sustaining Change After the Intervention

Interventions describe methods to achieve personal change, team change, and organizational change. Once people try out changes like these, they may find them exceedingly difficult to maintain. For example, the new team roles may not feel as comfortable as the old roles, and members may long for the past despite the fact that the old roles did not work well. In such cases, there is the likelihood of a relapse to how things used to be done before the intervention. Relapse is a possibility for several reasons.

First, we are often motivated to maintain a change when a change agent, manager, or external consultant is watching. When observers leave, we often slip back into the comfort of the old way. Second, the change is often a more difficult state, requiring more conscious energy, emotion, or attention, and we may have dedicated our attention to it when we were asked to. Daily struggles with workload and the psychological demands of maintaining conscious attention to the change can require enough dedication that the demands of personal, team, and organizational changes can be too much to maintain.

Third, organizational members may naturally be unskilled initially as they adapt to the new way. Education may be required, and it can take weeks or months to achieve results as people continue to learn. Fourth, systemic organizational forces such as rewards or cultural values, expectations, and beliefs may be too powerful to overcome, and they may inhibit members from fully adopting the change. What is required are methods for sustaining and stabilizing the gains that have been achieved, for working through the barriers to maintaining change, and for pushing through the difficult initial stages of change so that it lasts.