The LeaderStrength System

Taking Charge of Change, Revised Edition, Video, 2004, CRM Learning, $995.
Other material: meeting opener and vignettes, leader guide and participant workbooks (10), PowerPoint slides.
Review by Deanne Bryce

When your organization is dealing with change, it makes sense to help employees understand and acknowledge the psychological aspects of change. Being proactive and working with employees leads to a healthier culture than just expecting that people should accept change as if it were a law of nature.

William Bridges, a pioneer in the field of transition, asserts a difference between change and transition. A change is an event or a situation, and a transition is the process people move through to accommodate the change. Bridges believes that people can learn how to move through the natural stages of transition.

There are several resources based on Bridges’ teachings. A revised edition of an earlier video of the same name, Taking Care of Change by CRM Learning, has been updated. It is accessible to almost any workplace audience encountering change. Both videos are based on Bridge’s model. You may already know the model that includes three phases of transition: Endings, Neutral Zone, and Beginnings.

Upgraded edition
The first edition contains only three scenarios instead of the five in the revised edition. In the revised edition, the scenarios include people working at a hospital, a sales department of a software company, a warehouse in a manufacturing plant, a city planning office, and a college admission office.

The variety makes the content acceptable to any workplace audience. The producers added a positive change, increasing staff size, as demonstrated in the first scenario at a healthcare facility. This scenario shows how this change created anxiety on the part of one of the staff members. It was a good way to make the point that it doesn’t matter if a change is positive—people still need to make a transition.

This edition is more than a video; it is a complete, off-the-shelf "change" workshop. It comes with a video and a chaptered DVD, a three-minute meeting opener on change, Jump!, five Booster Shots (training vignettes taken from the main film, but without narration and onscreen graphics), a leader guide, a PowerPoint CD-ROM, 10 participant workbooks, and 10 reminder cards. The 90-page leader guide features two training designs; one is a thorough half-day session, and one, lasting about an hour, is designed only for building awareness.

According to the publisher, this edition is more of a “how-to” program for dealing with change. The publisher must be referring to the “action points” that are listed in each of the three phases. If learners watch the DVD or video without the context of the workshop, it would not be as effective. That would be treating the intangible concept of change as if it were as simple as learning to do something tangible like changing a tire. Fortunately, the training materials are well designed and easy to follow, and the half-day workshop has exercises to support the action points in the DVD/video.

What’s wrong, then?
I respect the content and the logical design of the training materials. However, I am not overly excited about the treatment of Bridge’s work. If I were doing a workshop on change, I would evaluate other products with the same content before selecting this product. If, in the end, I did select this product, I would choose the half-day session to get the full benefit of the exercises.

Initially my lack of enthusiasm came from looking at the package. I was depressed by the dull color of the cover design. I was equally dissatisfied with the skydiving theme. The first part of the video/DVD called Jump! is a meeting opener where we observe a skydiver leaving the safety of a plane, falling into the air, and then finally landing on the target marked on the ground.

I am not sure this is the best analogy because workers dealing with change might be thinking that skydivers choose to leap from the safety of a plane, while workers don’t. Another reason for my dissatisfaction is that while the scenarios reflect work situations people might face, the software company example is difficult to follow. I had to watch the DVD/video several times before I understood that it was a continuation of the software company scenario.

Recommendation
The second edition of Taking Charge of Change makes some improvements over the original but suffers some losses as well. The product package provides good support, but the video has problems, including a master metaphor that might make many trainers and organizations wince.