A lot happened in 1969. Neil Armstrong’s small step from the ladder of Apollo 11 marked a giant leap for mankind. Half a million music-lovers thronged Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for the Woodstock festival. Richard Nixon became America’s 37th President, Sesame Street premiered, and The Beatles crossed a street in St John’s Wood for the cover of their final album, Abbey Road.
Late in the year, a hitherto unknown psychiatrist published her first book, initially to little fanfare. Still in print today, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ On Death and Dying: What the Dying have to teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and their own Families is arguably one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, the “five stages of grief” it articulated a now totally ubiquitous cultural phenomenon.
Indeed, the website of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Foundation lists hundreds of references to the five stages in songs, band names, books, movies, and TV shows. The idea that grief progresses in a straight line through the stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance is almost universally accepted across the western world. The concept is now casually applied to almost any mildly disappointing event, from the loss of a football match to Taylor Swift’s break-up.
Even more grave than a home defeat to Aston Villa (the horror!) or getting dumped by Joe Alwyn, however, is the serious business of organisational change. Here the five stages took on a whole new life, as the foundational model for a new discipline named “organisational change management”. Rebadged as “the change curve“, Kübler-Ross’ five stages are used as the basis for a multi-billion dollar global industry and referenced millions of times a day by change managers, HR practitioners, and organisational leaders alike.
Indeed, every popular n-step model of change management, including PROSCI’s ADKAR, Satir, and Bridges, borrows heavily from Kübler-Ross in assuming that humans consistently experience change as a linear series of stages.
What’s going on?
There’s just one problem, however. The change curve is total, unadulterated horseshit.
On Death and Dying catalogues Kübler-Ross’ observations from dozens of interviews with terminally ill patients at the University of Chicago’s medical school. Extending the “five stages” model to organisational change makes a rather large and deeply questionable assumption.
Does anyone seriously believe that enduring a difficult technology implementation or process change at work is equivalent to learning you have a terminal illness? Is an SAP implementation really comparable to finding out you have weeks to live?
Even in its original context of grief studies, however, Kübler-Ross’ model has been totally discredited. This critique is typical of many:
“The stages are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.”
The author of that rather devastating rebuttal? Elisabeth Kübler-Ross herself.
Wait, what?
If the stages aren’t stages then what are they? If not everyone goes through them in the same way – or at all – what use are they?
Based on Kübler-Ross’ observations during her interviews with terminally ill patients, she grouped their emotional states into broad categories. Five of those are famous and each has its own chapter in the book. Elsewhere, however, Kübler-Ross lists ten, even thirteen stages.
By her own admission then, the famed “five stages of grief” aren’t stages, there aren’t five of them, not everyone goes through all of them, or even any of them. They’re nothing more than some ways that some people might be perceived to feel when they find out they’re dying. In the words of the foreword to the 1970 edition: “This book describes how some American individuals have coped with death”.
Astonishingly, the five stages are just vague categories of observations, based purely on the subjective judgement of one person.
Keep the lights on
As it turns out, there’s some pretty good evidence to question the judgement of that one person, as an absolutely devastating Time magazine article from 1979 makes clear. (That a publication as avowedly establishment as Time risked publishing something so utterly libellous while Kübler-Ross was alive and at the height of her fame suggests they were very confident of their facts.)
To be fair to Kübler-Ross, she did play a major role in changing the medical profession’s attitude to the dying, championing the hospice movement and becoming a leading advocate for the previously ignored concept of palliative care. Kübler-Ross also bravely supported AIDS patients at a time when respectable public opinion cast them as pariahs.
However, Kübler-Ross’ fascination with death and grief took her down some very questionable paths. She became obsessed with near death experiences and the paranormal, claiming that death itself was just a stage: “when people die they very simply shed their body, much as a butterfly comes out of a cocoon”.
Around this time, the clearly deluded Kübler-Ross proclaimed:
“I am an immortal visionary and modern cartographer of the River Styx”
and began offering residential workshops to help the dying process their “unfinished business”. Many of these workshops were held at the Shanti Nilaya Healing Centre, a sprawling ranch Kübler-Ross owned in California. Here, she worked in partnership with Jay Barham, a self-professed medium and healer, who founded and led a cult named “The Church of the Facet of the Divinity”.
Barham claimed to be able to conjure spirits from beyond the grave. While ostensibly separated from their earthly bodies, these spirits had apparently lost none of their taste for the pleasures of the flesh and Barham enthusiastically encouraged seance attendees to engage in sexual intercourse with the “spirits”.
Any doubt about the true identity of these “spirits” should have disappeared when one participant accidentally turned on the lights during a seance, to reveal preacher Barham stark naked, save for a turban on his head.
Kübler-Ross was undeterred, however, proclaiming that Barham “is probably the greatest healer that this country has. Many attempts have been made to discredit us. To respond to them would be like casting pearls to swine.” Kübler-Ross continued to double down on her support for Barham even when a ten year old girl accused him of sexual assault.
Time for a change
To say the least, it’s puzzling and troubling to learn that the author of so influential a concept as the five stages of grief was a death-obsessed sex cult leader.
How many of those confidently citing the Change Curve are aware that it has been so comprehensively debunked or that Kübler-Ross was so dangerously delusional?
Even putting aside the quite incredible back story, how many stop to consider, even for a moment, whether organisational change is really analogous to a death sentence?
Surely, nearly sixty years on from the publication of On Death and Dying, it’s time for Change Management to move onto slightly firmer foundations?
Surely we can do better than this kooky nonsense?
