My favorite scene in the Wayne’s World movie is the part where Garth is working along on some kind of mechanical arm. Rob Lowe walks up to Garth and asks “How do you feel about change?”

Garth’s reply is in his normally skittish voice is a monotone “We fear change.”

I can’t tell you how many times I felt the same way. I fear change. Luckily so does almost everyone else. The quandary is that without change things stagnate and fall apart. So we must deal with change in a positive manner or else we too will fall apart.

So at the office the company is slowly upgrading us from the Office 2003 to Office 2007. Now when Microsoft created Office 2007, they apparently wanted to rethink how we interact with programs and came up with a new method. Gone are the pull-down menus we are all used to. Instead there are tabs chock full of icons, each one activating what was once a menu command. Along the way they reorganized things in a more logical fashion and tried to make formatting and other common tasks easier. Of course what this means for the majority of people out there is that they need to relearn how to do things in these programs.

Now I usually like to learn a new piece of software so this kind of change is challenging but not something that I get worked up about. Since I’m usually the go-to guy to answer questions about software, I worked pretty hard to get up to speed with the new version so I could help my co-workers out. Truth to tell, I actually taught a few classes on the new Office at the local Community College to help get up to speed. So overall the changes are different. Not better or worse, just different.

So the upgrades started rolling out to people in our department and it was interesting the different reactions. Many people rolled with the changes pretty well. They had to hunt around for what they wanted to do, but they were able to get up to speed pretty quickly. Some had a lot of difficulty with the changes and they continue to struggle with it. They end up doing things in a less efficient form because they do not want to learn how to better interact with the software. Oddly, no one embraced it and jumped in to find the new bells and whistles.

Another fascinating thing I discovered were people who thought that something had changed with the new software. In essence they used to be able to do something in Excel but now the new version prevents it. When they showed it to me, I knew that they could not do that in the old version or the new version. What I discovered was that when they had to think about the individual steps in performing a task, they discovered that some of the things they did previously, they did automatically. Now since the process had changed they needed to remember each actual step they did, not just the steps they thought they did.

All of this is to say that people handle change differently but ultimately the impact of that change is entirely dependant on them. There were those who thought this did nothing but slow them down. While that is true, these are the same people that just threw up their hands and refused to learn the more efficient ways to do things. Others struggle through it for a day or two and then rapidly found themselves back up to speed. It is all dependant on your attitude.

Truthfully, few people like change. Remember though, the attitude that you approach the change with will have a dramatic impact on how the change effects you. Some change is good, some is bad, and some is neutral. Prepping yourself emotionally for the change can go a long way into make the good change better, the bad change not so bad, and the neutral change fun. Try it.