Surviving the Valley of Despair

As I have mentioned throughout this chapter, it's not realistic to expect that everyone will have a smooth journey along the change curve. In fact, most change managers will warn you that you should expect to experience a performance dip as a result of the change.

This performance dip is often called the Valley of Despair and is shown on a graph like the following one. The dip occurs after the change is implemented when productivity falls as people try to adjust to the new way to do things. The horizontal purple line shows how long the performance dip lasts. The vertical line shows how severe the performance dip is. The length and severity of the dip can vary drastically from organization to organization, and even across different stakeholder groups within the same organization.

While I agree that the Valley of Despair occurs, I actually believe it should show two performance dips, as in the following graph. In this case, in addition to the performance dip that...