Life is filled with personal and professional situations that require us to make decisions that will result in change.
The change often impacts us personally and others as well, for example, our family, significant others, work groups and organisations. While these situations may be simple or complex, the new insights or revelations that they bring can feel seismic. Often one has the sensation that the earth has moved under one's feet or to use a more everyday expression, "this event has rocked my world."
And while these situations are nothing more than challenges that life has thrown in our path, it is essential that we find a way to remain calm and find the strength in our spine to stand upright and look objectively at an event. We must find our footing or orientation and then answer four crucial questions: 1) Where am I or are we right now? 2) How do I or we feel about this situation? 3) What do I or we want to do about it? And 4) What happens if I or we choose to do something about it to make a change?
Can change be for good, and last, with no turning back or returning to the old?
I am honored to write for SenateSHJ on the theme Change for Good. However, when I read those three words, Change for Good, I stopped and asked myself what could this innocent-reading phrase mean? Could it be a double entendre meaning:
- Change for good = Change for the better; or
- Change for good = Change that is permanent.
Even with my reflection I have questions and confusion, because a change, as we all know, is temporal or a temporary construct – there will always be an event, a circumstance, a force of nature, external threats or time that will bring change.
Whichever meaning you take away from the phrase, it is possible that you are wondering, how can the Four Rooms of Change® help you and your organisation navigate through change?
After twelve years of research, Dr. Claes Janssen, psychologist, researcher and author discovered two profound psychology truths. The first is that we all have a personality variable or trait that determines how we interpret, perceive, act or react to the world around us. On one hand, this personality variable, contentment and belonging, and on the other hand, inspiration and the Search for Truth – is so prevalent that these polarities are likely to be at the heart of all conflicts within us, in our interpersonal relationships, between individuals at home, in groups, teams, and organisations. It is the Four Rooms of Change®’s collective experience after working with hundreds of thousands of people in groups, work teams, organisations, and social systems.
The other psychology principle that Janssen discovered is the four psychology states that he named Contentment, Self-censorship, Confusion, and Inspiration. He further said that we all live in and have access to these states most of the time and in most of our situations. We use these spaces to help us understand and to cope with our lives, often without knowing. We often say that everyone knows the Four Rooms of Change®, but they don’t know that they know it until after they have had their own experience.
So how does this help a group, a team, or organisation to Change for Good? Once a group or work unit has been introduced to the Four Rooms of Change®, and have a better understanding of their individual Four Rooms, they can discover observable behaviour that presents itself in organisations. With this knowledge, they can examine or ask themselves, what are the levels of contentment and inspiration in our organisation and conversely, what are the levels of censorship and confusion? Once a group has examined their current position in real-time, they can also decide together what they would like to do about this knowledge and plan accordingly.
Four Rooms of Change® is used on every continent except Antarctica with real, concrete and often astounding results. The organisations using the Four Rooms of Change® include:
- Swedish Television
- UNICEF
- Deutche Telekom / T-Mobile
- Autoliv AB Electrolux
- The Red Cross of Sweden
- Scania
- Stockholm City
- Utah Transit Authority Tetra Pack
- JP Morgan Chase.
This article was written by guest author, Drusilla Copeland.