That Place is a Bad Venue

The process of entering a concert venue moves you from your day-to-day reality to the world of the band and music you came to listen to. The more seamless this transition, the more you enjoy the show. Similarly, the better an organization does at change management, the more staff and stakeholders enjoy the results of change initiatives.

By Kevin Turgeon

24 May 2024

I went to a concert at a new venue last night. When I say the venue is new, I do not mean it is just new to me – like I have never been there before. I mean it is new like it was just built and recently opened.

The show itself was pretty good. It was an old punk band that I had never seen play before, and it was cool to finally see them live – even if it was quite a few years after their and my punk rock prime.

Unfortunately, the show was overshadowed by a horrible venue. I have seen concerts in some pretty questionable places in the past (a parking lot in Iowa at an event called “Ribfest” comes readily to my mind), but this was different. This venue was almost brand new and supposedly custom-made for mid-sized shows like the one I attended. Nonetheless, it was very poorly set up.

The first issue was parking. Most of the parking for the venue was in a multi-story parking garage. The entrance to this garage allowed only one car to enter at a time and was positioned approximately 100-yards off of a major road. This resulted in cars significantly backing up into traffic, which was frustrating for both the people trying to park for the show and the other drivers just trying to drive by the venue.

The experience of getting into the actual venue was very similar to that of parking a car. There were only two doors open for people to walk through to gain access to the venue, which resulted in very long lines of people waiting to get in.

While the parking situation and the line to get into the venue were annoying, they are also a somewhat common experience at concerts – and I was not overly put out by it. What I did find pretty upsetting was the interior layout of the venue.

I had a general admission ticket to the show. So I was just trying to get to the main floor to find a place to stand and watch the band. At most venues, this is a really easy thing to do. At this venue, however, it proved exceptionally challenging. The only entrances into the actual auditorium part of the venue took you immediately into the high-dollar reserved seating areas. From there you could see the main floor, but it was not at all clear how to actually get there. After wandering around for a bit, I finally broke down and asked an attendant how to get down to the main floor. I was told I needed to go through one of the auditorium exit doors to a flight of stairs and take those down to the level below. So, to get to the main floor of the auditorium at this venue, I needed to enter the reserved seating part of the auditorium, walk through this area to an exit door (a different door than the ones that let you into the area), exit the auditorium, walk down a flight of stairs, and then re-enter the auditorium on the floor level. This, in my opinion, was a bit ridiculous.

As is often the case the day after I go to a concert, I found myself still thinking about last night’s show when I woke up this morning. But this morning I was not thinking about how good the band was or how much fun the crowd was; I was thinking about how horrible the venue was. And this got me thinking about the similarities between concert venues and organizational change management (stick with me on this one; I think this metaphor actually makes sense).

The entrance to a concert venue is a liminal space between realities. As you move through this space, you move from your day-to-day world to the world of the music and the band you are going to see. This opportunity to go to a different world is why many of us enjoy going to shows. For just a little while, you get to be somewhere else.

Ideally, the process of moving from your day-to-day life into the world of a concert should be as effortless as possible. For if the process is not effortless – if it is hard, confusing, and frustrating – then you bring negative residuals from the transfer process into the new world of the show, which makes the experience of this world much less enjoyable.

In so far as it helps people transition from one reality to another, organizational change management is like a concert venue. And just like a bad concert venue makes it hard to transition from your day-to-day life to the world of the band and music you came to hear, bad change management makes it hard for staff and stakeholders to move from their current organizational reality to the new one leadership is dreaming about. When done really badly, change management can even make people not want to stick around at an organization.

My experience navigating into last night’s concert venue was so bad that I did not stick around until the end of the show. I talked to the friend I went to the show with about it when the main act was about three-quarters of the way through their set, and we decided that getting into the venue was so bad that we did not want to stick around to see what getting out of it was like. So, we bailed before the end of the set.

Staff and stakeholders will also bail on organizations if they do a bad enough job at change management. And just like I plan to tell anyone who will listen that they should stay away from the venue I saw a show at last night, the people who leave an organization due to poor change management will tell everyone they can to stay as far away from their past organization as possible.