Change: In the Minds of People

Dr. Jim Bohn has served in a variety of roles in the corporate world since 1973, personally leading the transformation of multiple under-performing teams to achieve award-winning levels of success. After several decades with a Fortune 100 company, Dr. Bohn launched his own Change Management and Organizational Transformation Practice. Dr. Bohn has a unique blend of hands-on, in-the-trenches experience in addition to a rich pedigree of research.

  Change Management  

There are two vectors of all effective organizational action: project management and change management. PM is the critical skillset for managing details, budgets, project items, data transfers and so forth. Great project managers are essential to success of all organizational initiatives. CM is the vector of managing the change in the minds of people. Great change managers are essential to organizational change effectiveness, because great change managers know the psychology of change.

To create new behavior, we begin with the mind. Change happens in the minds of people. Behavior will change as a person reframes the way they think about things, but all change starts and ends in the mind. In fact, change happens in several areas of the mind. Once we understand that important fact, we can help people adjust to change.

Many change management theorists develop complicated and sophisticated models of management to address behavior--without considering the mind. Yet we learn from James O. Prochaska and Carlo C. DiClemente that individual change starts in the mind. (They identify it as the Transtheoretical Model, meaning it encompasses many theories of individual change). They talk about five stages of individual change, three of which are strictly in the mind:

1. Precontemplation (not ready to take action, and often avoiding change)
2. Contemplation (getting ready to take …

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