New ways of thinking The new year party is over and everyone turns to wonder what the new year will be like. And then you start to think about what are you going to do to make it better and different. Of course there are plenty of articles and blogs to suggest some ideas — …
Category archives: Change Capability
Where does change management fit?
Inside, outside, alongside In a recent tutorial, Prosci proposed some models for organising a change team with a project team. They came up with four models described below. I think they missed the most important model. Read through the article and see if you agree with me.
Three supports to successful change
Is Managing Change the same as Project Management? A recent tutorial from Prosci identifies three critical areas of activity needed for change success. The model is both simple and elegant. However, it opens the question about where should change management professionals go for their support. The three areas are: project management; sponsorship; and change management. …
Quick, effective decision making
Good enough decisions Making decisions in a fast moving change initiative with deadlines and issues is very hard. Making the best decisions is impossible. Yet most managers in a change are hung out to dry for their bad decisions (with hindsight). A re-think about decision making and the culture around it is needed to improve …
How to persuade people to change
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 …
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 …
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 …
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: