“Pain
management is the process of consciously surfacing, orchestrating and
communicating certain information in order to generate the appropriate
awareness of the pain associated with maintaining the status quo compared to
the pain resulting from implementing the change.
The “pain”
which the initiator is dealing with is
not actual physical pain. Rather, change -related pain refers to the level of
dissatisfaction a person experiences when his or her goals are not being met or
are not expected to be met because of
the status quo. This pain occurs when people are paying or will pay the
price for an unresolved problem or missing a key opportunity. Change-related
pain can fall into one of the two categories, “ current pain” and “anticipated
pain”.
Current pain
revolves around an organization’s reaction to an immediate crisis or
opportunity, while anticipated pain takes a look into the future, predicting
probable problems or opportunities. It is very crucial that management
understands where their organization is located on this continuum of current
versus anticipated pain. This understanding enables management to better time
the “resolve to change.” This resolve/
commitment, which must be built and sustained, can occur during either the
current or anticipated time frames. If
this attempt to build resolve is formed too early, it won’t be sustained. ; if
it’s formed too late, it won’t matter.
Management has a wide variety of pain management
techniques from which it can choose. Some of these techniques being used by
Fortune 500 companies include: analysis, industry benchmarking, industry trend
analysis, and force-field analysis, among many others. When this process has
been accepted by senior and middle
management, a critical mass of pain associated with status quo has been established , and the resolve to
sustain the change process has also been established . It is only then that
management can begin to manage change as a process, instead of an event.
