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Cycle of Change – Prochaska and Diclemente – and Enterprise

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  • When we are encouraging individuals to become more enterprising we are encouraging them to consider the merits of changing.
  • To consider replacing one pattern of attitudes and behaviours with another.
  • So if we are going to succeed in helping people to change in this way what can we learn from other professions and professionals who have been working overtly on changing behaviour for years?

This was one of the questions that we set out to explore when we asked Vicky Sinclair from the substance misuse unit in Leeds Prison to work with a group of enterprise professionals in Leeds as part of the Sharing the Success Capacity Building programme. Vicky shared with us the Cycle of Change model developed in 1982 by Prochaska and Diclemente – which seems to have tons of relevance to enterprise professionals.

The cycle of change has 6 phases:

Cycle of Change - Prochaska and Diclemente

  1. In ‘pre-contemplation’, the person does not see any problem in their current behaviours and has not considered there might be some better alternatives.
  2. In ‘contemplation’ the person is ambivalent – they are in two minds about what they want to do – should they stay with their existing behaviours and attitudes or should they try changing to something new?
  3. In ‘preparation’, the person is taking steps to change usually in the next month or so.
  4. In ‘action’, they have made the change and living the new set of behaviours is an all-consuming activity.
  5. In ‘maintenance’, the change has been integrated into the person’s life – they are now more ‘enterprising’.
  6. Relapse is a full return to the old behaviour. This is not inevitable – but is likely – and should not be seen as failure. Often people will Relapse several times before they finally succeed in making a (more or less) permanent to a new set of behaviours.

A couple of things require thinking about when we look at this model in relation to encouraging people to change to more enterprising behaviours.

Firstly, most enterprise professionals think that the path to entrepreneurship is (or should be) a fairly linear one if the client has a half decent business idea. We just need to give them the right training at the right time and bingo! This model suggests that there are a whole range of factors that are liable to lead to lapses – if not relapses – on the enterprise journey and we should be aware of this. Lapse or Relapse does not mean failure – and should not be taken as indicators that the person is not capable of making the change. Indeed they should be EXPECTED as a normal part of the cycle of change in relation to new behaviours.

Secondly, the change cycle will often operate over a timescale of years rather than months. When we are designing enterprise services we need to take account of the fact that different individuals move at a different pace. Any attempt to group people into cohorts and move them at the same pace through a change process needs to take this challenge very seriously.

Thirdly, and perhaps MOST IMPORTANTLY, enterprise services generally seem to market themselves at those that are already contemplating or have already decided that ‘enterprise’ is for them. They recruit those who are already at Stages 2, 3 or 4. If we are serious about really changing the enterprise culture then we also need to find ways to engage and work with those who are at Stage 1 – Precontemplation. This stage requires a very different approach to marketing in terms of both the message and the media. It also requires a different type of service.

What do we want Enterprise to do for us?

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This is an important question and one that is rarely given serious consideration. Of course more entrepreneurs means more wealth means better communities. Right?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

In the current context most enterprise programmes focus on finding individual entrepreneurs and helping them to find ways of making their business ideas work. There is a good chance that as soon as this happens the entrepreneur will find their new found success gives them the option of leaving the community for a more prosperous one. This is because their success has been in spite of the local community and not because of it. The community is something to be escaped from. This approach to enterprise in the community plays up the role of the entrepreneur as individualistic hero(ine) fighting against the odds. If it succeeds then the community is actually weakened as successful people are able to leave.

So if we want enterprise to enable individuals to succeed and escape ‘deprived communities’ then this sort of individualistic approach to enterprise can work.

However if our goal is to transform communities through enterprise then we need to adopt very different models of enterprise development. We need to develop a context in which enterprise can succeed BECAUSE of the community context and not in spite of it. Where success ties enterprise into the community rather than provides a spring board out of it. Only when we learn how to nurture this type of enterprise development will it become a tool to really transform communities as well as individuals.

These transformational approaches emphasise enterprise as a social phenomenon. They bring people together to collaborate on possibilities and to develop stories of hope and change. They emphasise the role of the local community in supporting enterprise with patronage but also with advice, support, guidance and introductions. They build enterprise services where local people can succeed in making progress because of their communities rather than in spite of them.

If we want to succeed in transforming communities through enterprise then this needs to be given some serious consideration.

The ability of projects to build social capital and to raise the collective understanding of enterprise and the role of the community in supporting it, as well raising the ability and potential of individual entrepreneurs will be key.

So what do we want enterprise to do for us?

Minding the Assets

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It is deeply ingrained in most enterprise professionals to try to fix things. Business plans, cash flows, products and people.

We listen to our clients for signs of weakness or difficulty and then we try and fix the problem, usually by referring them to a course or another expert.

Much of our work is biased towards exposing and managing deficiencies rather than uncovering and celebrating strengths. This has become a deeply embedded part of our work – an almost medical approach to helping.

Think ‘Inform, Diagnose, Broker’. Think ‘Best Practice Business Diagnostic’.

We become just another part of the system that has for years highlighted and exposed weaknesses.

How would our work be changed if instead of this focus on the weaknesses we spent our time helping our clients to recognise what they have done, what they can do and what they can do to use these strengths to make progress?

The Development Trust Association exists to help communities to take control of the physical assets in their community and use them for public good.

Is there a similar service that helps individuals to uncover their assets (skills, passion, energy, talent, anger) and reclaim them in pursuit of progress?

So why not spend some time trying to avoid highlighting the problems – and instead accentuate the positive.

Developing a healthy pre-occupation with what is right, rather than re-emphasising all of the things that are wrong is likely to hold the key to building really constructive relationships in support of more enterprising individuals and communities.

Triple bottom lines, social enteprise, localism and sustainability

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  1. Triple bottom lines
  2. Social enterprise
  3. Localism and
  4. Sustainability

Four hot topics.

Four inter-related topics

Four topics that get a lot of people very fired up to make change happen (definition of enterprise?).

Yet when I surveyed over 100 enterprise professionals recently this was one of their lowest priorities for personal and professional development?

Are missing a trick in really understanding what motivates many contemporary entrepreneurs – because in many cases money is only seen as a by product of success, a way of keeping score, and not as an end in itself.

A few relevant websites:

http://www.greenbiz.com/

http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/social-entrepreneurship/

and Leeds very own: http://www.ppp-online.co.uk/

Enterprise Problems are Multi-Dimensional

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There is a school of though that says that enterprise professionals just need to be experts on helping clients with the business planning process. However in my experience the enterprise dimension is just one several that need to be addressed if the client is to be helped to make real progress. If the enterprise professional is to work effectively it maybe necessary to help the client to acknowledge and work on some of these other dimensions. As Iain Scott says about one of his clients (and I paraphrase) – ‘she realised that she had to divorce the xxxx before she would be able to make progress on her business idea‘.

Work on ‘other dimensions’ is not always this radical but it is often present and necessary! Some of the possible dimensions that may have an effect on your ability to make progress with a client include:

  • their lack of experience in enterprise and entrepreneurship
  • low socio-economic status
  • poor quality of relationships with significant others (persistent negativity from friends and family)
  • history of educational failure
  • poor mental health
  • chronic illness
  • history of anti-social behaviour
  • intimate partner abuse
  • substance misuse
  • poor accommodation (poor quality, frequent moves, homelessness)
  • lack of social capital
  • ambivalence about the future
  • ethnic, cultural and linguistic barriers
  • refugees
  • illegal immigrants
  • asylum seekers

And I am sure there are more.

My point here is that unless we are able to help the client to recognise and address the multi-dimensional nature of their barriers to successful entrepreneurship then we should expect high levels of frustration and drop out.

So when we talk about ‘referring the client to specialist support’ we need to extend our referral network beyond the marketing and financial specialists to those who can provide a more holistic support service to real people with real multi-dimensional challenges.  Once we have accepted that our clients require this multi-dimensional type of support it provides us with a range of further challenges in managing the boundaries of our own professional competence and practice.