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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.

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.

Engaging Communities in Enterprise

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  • ‘I just wanted to say thank you very much for the workshop, I thought it was absolutely brilliant and made me think on a deeper level of what community is all about. The book is great and very inspiring so thanks for that too. I had a lot of fun and it wasn’t one of those meetings where we were talked at it was very interactive and I really look forward to the next one’
  • ‘good networking event’
  • ‘good style of delivery’
  • ‘good selection of talk and exercises – kept my attention’
  • ‘met new people; found out about other organisations; loved the opportunity to share and learn from others’
  • ‘excellent delivery and content’
  • ‘the whole day was very good :-)’
  • ‘liked the style and format; good exercises and examples’
  • ‘built rapport and gained more info on partners’
  • ‘opportunities to network and see the LEGI bigger picture’
  • ‘presentations very good.  re-assured about things I did in the past.  learned about innovative ways to deal with disaffected’
  • ‘good mix in terms of style and delivery – light hearted but meaningful tasks – theoretical and practical
  • ‘informative – with interesting ways of getting the points across’
  • ‘good networking, meeting other LEGI partners, more information about enterprise, the activities were educational’
  • ‘liked the interaction, presentations, venue, networking and the presenters’
  • ‘liked the mix of activities – fun and engaging’
  • ‘liked the process model and the stages, Boyatzis Model and the group work, the learning from the videos was good and the interaction with others’
  • ‘I liked the exercises that put us out of our comfort zones’
  • ‘I see that many people could really benefit from both you and Anne as I have to admit that I have been on so many workshops and training days but I have to say yours was the best by far’
  • ‘I liked Anne, I think she is very knowledgeable and is a great presenter. She thinks outside the box and  stretches other peoples thinking. I have just been sharing my day with [colleagues] and telling them how fantastic the workshop was. I would like to include the others from our team if possible onto your next planned workshop as its important that we can all learn as much as possible to benefit the people that we try and reach everyday within our jobs’

This was just some of the feedback from the first time we ran our ‘Engaging Communities in Enterprise’ workshop.

I am delighted to say that we  plan to run it again in London on September 26th.  You can find out more and book your place here.

I run the event with Anne Sherriff.  Anne has a strong background in regeneration, in particular community engagement, communications and marketing, and developing effective partnerships. She joined re’new in 1996, having previously worked for Bradford City Challenge and before that the Community Development Foundation.

Initially appointed to lead and co-ordinate Leeds’ SRB2 funded East Bank regeneration programme, Anne’s role with re’new has developed to now encompass overall responsibility for all of the company’s work throughout East Leeds as well as leading the development of renew’s neighbourhood management and community activity. Anne also coordinates re’new’s corporate marketing and communications activity, and leads on the development of new business across the Leeds city region.

The East Bank regeneration programme encompassed housing and environmental renewal, economic development and social and community development. Throughout, the ability to engage successfully with local residents was key to the success of the regeneration programme.

Forming and sustaining effective partnerships – between agencies and with local communities – is fundamental to successful intervention at neighbourhood level. Anne developed and led the East Bank partnership and has subsequently coordinated the formation of the to’gether Partnership. This is a unique multi-agency approach to solving inner-city problems in east Leeds based on shared responsibility among public agencies and buy-in by local residents, including developing a ‘residents network’ of local people who have endorsed the to’gether Partnership, currently numbering over 1000 and still growing.

Anne has been involved in community development and community engagement for nearly thirty years, as a practitioner, trainer and manager. Committed to developing innovative and effective solutions to local issues, and to ‘joining up the dots’ between disparate interventions and approaches, she is an effective and creative strategic leader whilst retaining a pragmatic approach to getting things done. Anne is an experienced Investment in Excellence facilitator committed to enhancing personal and professional development opportunities for those working in or with local communities.