We have all heard
the clever detective say, “To get to
the bottom of this mystery, we must
follow the money.” Consultants often
use a similar rule of thumb: “To
discover the cause of the business
problem, find the pain that
management is feeling.” Sometimes
that’s a good idea … but sometimes
it is not. Sometimes the pain point
may not be the problem; it may be a
case of “referred pain.”
Wikipedia defines
referred pain as “an unpleasant
sensation localized to an area
separate from the site of the
causative injury.” In other words,
you hurt one part of your body but
feel the pain in another part. For
example, heart attack victims
frequently feel the pain in the left
arm.
The concept of
referred pain can be used to
describe an organizational
phenomenon that is quite common in
our business of “managing change.”
That is, it is common for “pain and
bitterness” to break out among a
management team causing a diagnosis
of “interpersonal or even
personality problems” when in fact
the real cause of the pain is an
unexpressed business difference.
For example, we
witnessed one situation in which a
very senior management became more
and more “abusive” over a six months
period when dealing with other
mangers. While this senior
guy had never been the most tactful
person in dealing with fellow
employees, clearly the last six
months was an escalation of
intensity. After several doses of
consultation and counseling, the
situation was no better. Delving
deeper, however, the CEO finally
identified the senior manager’s
basic (but unconscious) disagreement
with the CEO’s new business
strategy. The senior manager knew in
his gut that the new strategy wasn’t
going to work, so he began to “hold
up the train” by becoming more
argumentative and abusive. This was
his way of saying, “This is not the
best direction for the company.”
As
managers leading change initiatives,
we might all be aware of the
referred pain of change. We can’t
always take the “organizational
pain” that we see or hear at face
value but must instead look deeper
to find what might be the real
cause(s). How do you do that? Well,
actually that’s a trade secret, but
a clue is “check all the business
assumptions by writing them down and
evaluating each one for validity!”
Want
our latest thinking on key issues and lessons learned?