Persuasion skills for a Change Manager There are two basic ways to get people to do what you want: tell them and ask them. Actually, telling people is incredibly effective and works more often that you might expect. Tell is really the tool of the manager. I remember when I first became a manager (actually …
Category archives: Change Management
Communications: urgent or important?
The communications challenge On a course recently a participant offered a throw-away comment during a discussion on stakeholder engagement: “I find there is so much stuff I have to do that I don’t have the time for communications”. This seemed to sum up for me the way projects and change teams deal with communications and …
Strategic change journey
Internal strategic change for fast growth I have written in the past about the need for change in an organisation being driven by strategic change outside. A recent article in the Harvard Business Review on Transient Advantage by Rita Gunther McGrath (one of my favourite management authors) shows that there are internal drivers for change …
Lessons from Big Science
A comment piece in a recent edition of the economist looked at lessons that the rest of the world can take from the collaborative projects in Big Science. Big Science is things like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN at which the existence of the famous Higgs Particle was demonstrated to world wide interest. The …
Demonstrating value for a PMO
How can a PMO use qualifications to demonstrate added value? A major problem that every Portfolio, Programme, or Project Office (PMO) has is demonstrating added value that justifies its existence. This note explores the role that professional qualifications can have in addressing this issue.
Rate of Change and Change Saturation increase
Depressing News: change saturation increases Recent data reported by Prosci show that both the amount of change expected by organisations and the number of organisations saturated by change have increased. This is a gloomy outlook given the problems most organisations have in doing change. Lets put these three ideas together and see what can be …
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Mid-Level Managers: the new superhero
Mid Level Managers as Superhero In a recent blog post on the Harvard Business Review web site Behnam Tabrizi reported on some research he had undertaken on why change and innovation (a pre-curser to change) didn’t work. The article is focused on Leadership but I found some powerful snippets about doing change.
Change Maturity – how do you tell?
Over the last couple of weeks we have been working hard to develop a questionnaire to help people identify their level of change maturity. That means writing incisive questions to identify behaviours typical of a particular maturity level which are not typical of another maturity level. This begs two questions:
Change is THE strategic capability
Making change a strategic capability I have been working on a capability model for change recently and then preparing to teach a course on strategy as part of a management qualification. Putting the two together brings me to a conclusion that the one thing an organisation has to be able to do to survive is …
Using a capability model for organisation change
Change Capability Model We have developed a simple capability model for organisation change. The purpose is to better understand the nature of organisation change and how people go about it. The model allows us to explain what sort of training is useful given the organisation’s capability maturity (i.e. the level they are at). It also …
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