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Good enough decisionsMaking 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 decision making and thus produce better decisions.
click here to find out how
Persuasion skills for a Change ManagerThere 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 I received the badge of being a manager, it is not the same as doing management) the first question I had for my manager was: ‘how do I get people to do things?’ to which his simple answer was ‘just tell them’; it was my first lesson in effective communication! Unfortunately, a change manager is not a line manager so the tell option is not so effective and the ask option is much more likely to be used. How can a change manager ask people to change? The answer must be in the change manager’s ability to persuade people to change. Based on an article in the HBR by Robert Cialdini here are six Principles of Persuasion that can extend the persuasive powers of a change manager.
The communications challengeOn 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 why a lot of change initiatives fail for a lack of good communication! The question is: what can we do about it?
Click here to find the answer
Internal strategic change for fast growthI 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 which are just as powerful. This is particularly relevant for Fast Growing businesses.
McGrath identifies 5 stages of growth and decline that an entrepreneurial business goes through to seek and exploit a competitive advantage. She argues that a sustainable advantage (one that once secured is there for ever) is a fallacy and that competitive advantage comes and goes as markets and technology change. To continue to be successful a business should cycle through a number of competitive advantages by repeating her stages of growth and decline.
Click here to find out what this means for you
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 Economist author took away two interesting lessons from this article:
These have a powerful message for the way we do change.
Click here to read about the implications
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.
Click here to find out how
Depressing News: change saturation increasesRecent 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 done.
Continue reading “Rate of Change and Change Saturation increase”
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.
Click here to see what I found
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: Click here to find out what we are thinking
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 to be good at change. Michael Porter points out that operational excellence is necessary to have a profitable business but not sufficient. A strategy is necessary to fit the business into its competitive framework. However, having a strategy is no good if you can’t execute it effectively.
Click here to see what that means
