Using change to grow yourself In the April 2014 Harvard Business Review I found a paper about creating a very open culture to encourage personal learning by Robert Kegan, Lisa Lahey, Andy Fleming, and Matthew Miller called “Making Business Personal“. The starting premise of the paper is that ’employees do a second job that no …
Tag archives: psychology
Reporting bias and failure: lessons for sponsors
How do you know what’s going on? Some recent research into bias in reporting about project status has implications for change governance. Two recent examples of poor reporting have surfaced recently: the fiasco on the launch of the IT to support the US Government Health Care programme (Obamacare) and the under-performance of the Universal Credit …
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Avoiding Blunders
Blunder: a spectacular change failure A book I have just finished reading contains some excellent ideas for avoiding a complete failure in a change. The book, The Blunders of our Governments by Prof. Anthony King and Sir Ivor Crewe describes a series of major blunders by our governments. In each case a government minister set …
New Year, New Behaviour
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 — …
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 …
Change saturation – change centres on stakeholders
Its the stakeholders that decide if a change is a success or failure. No matter how hard the change team plan a change, nor how creatively the team designs a change; if the stakeholders don’t buy in the change will not happen. Prosci are collecting data for their next research survey of organisations. To promote …
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A change in performance or the Hawthorne effect?
I have been reviewing some work this week and found the authors promoting a concept known as the Hawthorne Effect (of which more later). I read an article in the Economist in 2009 which pulled the rug from the whole concept of the Hawthorne Effect and underlined the danger of extrapolating a generic concept from …
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