It's Just Grief - Get Over It!

Yesterday saw Russell Webster publish the first of a promised series of posts by what he describes as 'the first probation mutual to go live', LAURUS. Somewhat condescendingly, he billed it on twitter as 'helping probation through its grieving process.'  

"In the classic 5 stages of grief model developed by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, she explains that individuals experiencing major change, such as a loss through death or divorce, go through 5 stages of grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and finally, Acceptance.

The model was first published in the late sixties but it quickly became clear that this model didn’t just apply to individuals but also to organisations. This led to the development of the change curve which is a clear and graphic way to describe the stages.

When we examine what the Probation sector is experiencing at present and apply this model to Probation staff and Probation Trusts, we can see why there is so much denial, anger, depression and bargaining in our day to day business."

It generated the following comment on this blog by netnipper:-

This sophistry about how the five stages of grief, formulated to understand personal loss, is now allegedly applicable to organisational change – the 'spinning off of a mutual'. What absolute self-serving baloney. So the fault lies not in neoliberalism, not in zero-hours contracts, lower wages, not in fewer holidays and poorer protections in the event of sickness. No, none of these things matter – what matters most is the worker's ability to come to terms with the loss of all these conditions of service – getting over the anger and depression and reaching the hallowed ground of Acceptance. And those who fail to negotiate the five stages in a reasonable time frame, will be the morbid ones, pathologically unable to come to terms with change. This is Orwellian doublethink, not a process of grief – a process of self-indoctrination. By all means let those who want to climb greasy poles, climb; let those who see their future in Vichy, go there; let those who know the price of everything, pawn their birthrights...but save us from the lies and hypocrisy and crass justifications. The death of probation is not by natural causes. Reminds me of Shelley's Mask of Anarchy: 'I met murder on the way...'

Anyway the post goes on:- 

"LAURUS OD Solutions is a Joint Venture which was set up by the five North West Probation Trusts, Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Merseyside in order to develop and deliver training centrally for the Trusts. The longer term plan was for LAURUS to “spin out” and stand on its own feet as a private provider using scale and self management to make it a commercial success.

During this process and the laboured progression of the transforming rehabilitation agenda we at LAURUS have been through all five change stages but, in the last few months, have used the acceptance stage to become more focused on what we needed to do to make the new training company a commercial success that continues to serve the training requirements of staff delivering offender services.

A key part of this acceptance was the realisation that employee engagement was central to driving forward plans to transform ourselves from a service-based and passive organisation to a dynamic commercially focused one. We had to recognise that our future careers depended on us developing products, delivering great service, attracting and motivating the best staff and persuading potential customers that we are the best option for all their training needs in the sector.

It quickly became obvious that we wanted to turn ourselves into a mutual where employees have a stake in the business, where “profit” is used to grow and reinvest and where all decisions on business strategy come from “bottom-up”. This process of self renewal has helped us to speed up our progress through the change curve and has driven high levels of engagement in the process of renewal."

Over the coming months we're going to have to get used to a lot more of this upbeat motivational business-speak bollocks, so it's probably best we brace ourselves now. It all reminds me of a conversation I had once with an ACO. She said 'you know Jim, it's much easier to accept change than fight it' to which I replied 'since when did we do what was easiest, rather than what was right?'