DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

How People React To Changes

This is probably one of the biggest questions for managers. How do people react if they change something?

Well, all managers who have done a change probably know that sometimes the change or parts of it will backfire immediately. This could be because of :

1. The change you made doesn’t really work.
2. Or the natural way of system reacting to change.

In the first case, it won’t work and you probably see it right away – it just doesn’t ‘feel right’. On the second case the system just does a normal reaction to change. It is natural that the system resists the change somehow as the thing you did is new and the system hasn’t adapted into it yet. Think for example cutting down a forest and building a town in there, what happens to animals living in there?

1. Animals either die or leave.
2. Animals first resist, but in a while they adapt and become ‘city animals’.

Simple example, but isn’t that the way the nature handles it? If it is true in nature why couldn’t the same rules apply to us also? We are part of the nature.

Manager needs to see the difference between these two. In the first case the reaction is probably so big that it stalls everything and manager needs to change things again. In the second case manager needs to see that the resist is just natural reaction and that it takes time from the system to adapt. The hardest part is to see the difference as it might take months or even years before full adaptation has happened, because of this the manager really needs to be committed to driving the change, otherwise he doesn’t have enough energy to run it through.

Driving changes requires continuous work, manager needs to be measuring the change all the time to :

• See if the status has changed to case 1.
• See if you can improve, continuous learning & improvements. The changes you make rarely/never are perfect immediately.

In order to successfully drive a change the manager needs to act as an example. He needs to be the one who has already adapted to the change and to show other people that it really works.