Positives, Neutrals & Negatives

I was reading in the IOD Magazine this month about a piece of research undertaken by a consultancy called Changefirst which states that only 37% of employees will be committed to a change process, 25% will resist it and 38% will accept it but will need further support.

My own expertise of transformational change programmes suggests that there are three groups of people within any change process, namely the 'Positives' (those who adopt the change willingly as they see the benefits), 'Negatives' (those who are against the change process and look for reasons for it to fail) and the 'Neutrals' (those who either don't have enough information to make a decision either way or who have no strong feelings about the activity). Instinctly, based on some hundreds of Lean/Six Sigma events, I would say that the numbers are 20% each for Positives and Negatives and the remaining 60% for Neutrals, but as the change process goes forward (and assuming it is effective) the mix changes to a point where the numbers are closer to 50-60% Positives, 30-40% Neutrals and 5-10% Negatives.

However, the exact mix of which individuals are positives, negatives and neutrals will change - some negatives will become positives, some neutrals will become negatives etc - so it is difficult to predict at the start of the change process who is in which category.

All of this correlates with the work of Changefirst, although the article is not clear at what point in the change cycle the respondents were on, which is probably why there is a dispartity with my own research - what do you think?

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