Organizational change is a necessary part of the modern business world, and it can bring both positive and negative results. Organizations need to be aware of the potential impacts of change and be prepared to manage them appropriately in order to ensure a successful transition.
One of the key elements of successful organizational change is effective communication. Organizations must ensure that all employees understand the change and its implications. It is important to clearly communicate the goals and objectives of the change and provide employees with the necessary tools and resources to succeed. Leaders should also be prepared to answer questions and address any concerns that employees may have.
Another important factor to consider when implementing organizational change is the impact it may have on existing processes and procedures. It is important to evaluate current practices and assess their relevance in the new environment. It may also be necessary to make adjustments to existing systems to ensure they are aligned with the new goals and objectives.
In addition, organizations should understand the potential risks associated with organizational change. It is important to identify potential problems and develop strategies to mitigate them. Organizations should also consider the potential impact of change on employee morale and morale.
Finally, organizations should recognize that the process of change can be difficult and complex. It is important to provide adequate training and support to employees to ensure they are equipped to handle the new environment. It is also important to ensure that the change is managed in a way that maximizes its positive benefits for the organization.
Organizational change can be a difficult but necessary process. Organizations should ensure that they are prepared to manage the process effectively in order to maximize its positive impacts. By understanding the potential risks and benefits of change, organizations can ensure a successful transition.
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Organizational change management is the process of managing and guiding an organization’s journey from its current state to its desired future state. It involves a set of activities, processes, and tools that help an organization successfully adopt and implement changes.
The process of organizational change management involves creating a vision of the desired future state of the organization, analyzing the current state, mapping out the steps and processes needed to transition to the desired future state, and implementing the changes. It also involves communicating the changes to stakeholders, building a team to support the implementation of the changes, and providing training and support to ensure successful implementation.
Organizational change management requires strong leadership and clear communication. Leaders must be able to articulate the vision for the future state of the organization and ensure that everyone is on board with the changes. They must also build a team of people who have the skills and knowledge to effectively implement the changes.
Communication is key in the process of organizational change management. Stakeholders must be kept informed of the changes and their opinions must be taken into consideration. It is also important to provide training and support to employees throughout the change process to ensure successful implementation of the changes.
Organizational change management is an important process that can help an organization move towards its desired future state. It requires strong leadership, clear communication, and a team of people with the right skills and knowledge to effectively implement the changes. With the right approach, an organization can successfully adopt and implement changes that will benefit the organization in the long run.
Image credit: Pexels
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I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Douglas Ferguson of Voltage Control, to speak with him for their Innovation Series about my work as a popular keynote speaker, workshop facilitator, and thought leader on the topics of continuous innovation and change, and some of my work with clients to create innovative strategies, digital transformations, and increased organizational agility.
But mostly in this information-packed interview, I reveal key lessons from the Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ and my books Charting Change and Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, including what’s hard about making innovation sustainable, the difference between invention and innovation and how the human elements are the key to successful innovation.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Start with the end in mind
Measurement provides a good starting point for establishing a strong foundation. “No innovation idea emerges fully formed. What people come up with are idea fragments and you have to collect and connect those dots to create a fully formed idea.” Based on those ideas, begin by identifying the value you want to create.
In order to make sure an initiative creates all the value it intends to, Braden advocates for the use of experiments with checkpoints. “You can have checkpoints that you establish along the way in terms of getting from what you’re able to do now versus your vision for the full value that you hope to create.” When thinking through experiments to validate assumptions about feasibility, viability, and desirability, also consider the flaws that might be present in your experimentation process.
“Start plotting out all the different experiments that you plan to run and the learning that you hope to get from each one. Those are the things that you can measure against to show that you’re making progress, to show that you’re going to get to the end and that you’re on track.”
Planning with the end in mind also includes consideration for scaling the invention. “Make sure you’re laying out checkpoints around your ability to scale it, because if you can’t get to that [wide] adoption point, then most likely you’re not going to get your investment back.” Think through what you’ll have to work against in order to scale so that profitability is part of the long-term plan from the beginning. Braden looks to companies like Tesla as an example of the potentially disastrous effects an inability to profitably scale can have on a product and a company’s viability despite having strong ideas and exploration practices.
1. Gotten the 10 Free Tools to sample the power the toolkit
2. Purchased my book Charting Change and gotten 16 more tools to use
3. Considered purchasing a license to all 50+ tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™
Previously there were three options for using the Change Planning Toolkit™ to make money:
Option 1 for companies — $99.99 per year per user Option 2 for companies — $299.99 + $2 per employee per year* Option 3 for cities/states/countries — $0.01 per resident per year ($1,000 minimum)*
* These special licenses give full access to every person in the company or in the region.
BUT,
Now I’m super excited to announce the availability of a fourth option for people – the Lifetime Commercial License!
First FIVE (5) people get a special price of $249.99 per user on a lifetime license
with coupon code 250LIFETIME
Next FIVE (5) people get a special price of $499.99 per user on a lifetime license
with coupon code 500LIFETIME
AND as a special bonus,
I will credit any educational license investment towards the purchase of a commercial or city/state/country license
If you refer a company or a city/state/country to me and they purchase a bulk license, I will share 20% of the year one revenue with you
** NOTE: Lifetime refers to lifetime of the individual person or company
Thank you for continuing to support the change revolution!
SPECIAL OFFER: Become a Disruptive Innovation Toolkit™ Patron
The Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ will be coming soon, and you can become a Patron by helping to fund its completion through a site license or a city/state/country license and as a reward get instant access to the POSTER SIZE version of The Experiment Canvas™ and the many other tools I’ve already completed. You’ll then of course get access to the rest of the toolkit as I complete it. You’ll get this instant access at a permanent 50% discount off the normal $2/yr per employee or $0.01/yr per resident, meaning your cost will be a paltry $1/yr per employee or $0.005/yr per resident for the lifetime of the license. AND, we can negotiate a period of advance exclusivity, allowing you to get access to the tools as they are completed and get exclusive access to the complete toolkit for an exclusive period of time in advance of the general public (exclusive period TBD).
Please contact me if you are interested in accelerating your innovation efforts and getting a competitive edge over your competition.
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I was fortunate enough to join Tamara Ghandour of GoToLaunchStreet, a TED speaker and entrepreneur recently for an interview for her Launchstreet podcast. From building and running multi-million dollar businesses, advising Fortune 500 companies like Disney, Procter and Gamble and RICOH on fostering innovative ideas and people, Tamara’s life is about breaking through the status quo for game-changing results, and that’s what her keynotes, online programs and assessments can do for you. Obviously we’re kindred spirits so check out the lively conversation we had on her podcast!
Listen now to this episode on Inside LaunchStreet:
1. Gotten the 10 Free Tools to sample the power the toolkit
2. Purchased my book Charting Change and gotten 16 more tools to use
3. Considered purchasing a license to all 50+ tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™
Previously there were three options for using the Change Planning Toolkit™ to make money:
Option 1 for companies — $99.99 per year per user Option 2 for companies — $299.99 + $2 per employee per year* Option 3 for cities/states/countries — $0.01 per resident per year ($1,000 minimum)*
* These special licenses give full access to every person in the company or in the region.
BUT,
Now I’m super excited to announce the availability of a fourth option for people – the Lifetime Commercial License!
I was recently interviewed for the Change and Innovation Online Summit! As a featured guest I’m able to share FREE passes to the Summit.
Whether you are a leader who is experiencing change in your organization, an HR professional who is dealing with change, or someone looking to reinvent how you show up every day, you may benefit from conversations with some of the brightest thinkers in Change and Innovation around the world.
The Summit provides tools, strategies and concepts on how to best lead change and navigate the future of work. Whether you’re leading a Fortune 500 organization or looking to reinvent yourself, this Summit is packed with insights and practices to promote innovative ideas and successfully implement change.
Other speakers include:
Greg McKeown
Daryl Conner
Stephen Shapiro
Adrian Gostick
Chester Elton
Tim Creasey of ProSci
… and several other great speakers!
Click the link below for your FREE Pass and be sure to catch my session:
The business world is showing an increasing interest in the people side of change, and there is a very real reason for this…
Companies are spending an increasing amount of their budget on technology and working to transform their operations to be more digital in order to provide a better experience for customers, employees, partners and suppliers while simultaneously creating a more efficient and effective business.
Everyone knows that a lot of technology projects fail to achieve their intended objectives, timings, and budgets. This fact and the increasing investment levels are causing more executives to look for ways to de-risk these technology investments in digitizing the business.
That’s why we’re seeing an uptick in the hiring and certification of change management professionals, which is great, but companies are still thinking about the relationship between project management and change management backwards.
In most cases change management is brought to bear as an afterthought, a bolt on to project management when the reverse should be true. Managing a change is a bigger endeavor than managing a project, and in fact you could say that because every project changes something, that every project is a change initiative.
It is thinking about managing projects in this way that I sat down to begin managing a new project several years ago and like many project managers, I found myself sitting at my computer by myself starting at an empty Microsoft Word template for a project charter knowing the uphill battle I’m going to face trying to route this document around via email and succeeding at both getting any responses at all and at getting meaningful input and a diversity of perspectives to make my project charter a really strong document that anyone will actually look at after week two of the project. I also found myself thinking that there has to be a better to plan and execute change initiatives and projects.
And sure people like pull ADKAR (a modified version of AIDA from the marketing world) and the ACMP Standard for Change Management (see the visualization I created above and download it for free here) and John Kotter’s change leadership approach, but they all fall short of making the planning and execution of change initiatives and projects a more visual and collaborative process, so I found myself starting to create new tools to help people (intended to link up with the PMBOK and ACMP Standard for Change Management).
These tools started to collect until they formed a comprehensive and new visual, collaborative approach to planning and executing change initiatives, and yes projects. This collection of tools became known as the Change Planning Toolkit™ and was first introduced in my latest book Charting Change which pairs nicely with my first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. Both are designed to pack more insights into each chapter than most books contain in the entirety of their pages. Two of the most important frameworks introduced in the book are the Five Keys to Successful Change:
And the Architecting the Organization for Change framework:
Both frameworks are designed to help people challenge the way they think about organizational change. They are designed to help people think about more than change management and to think differently about how organizations are transformed and how change management and project management relate to each other.
To help people begin their participation in changing change I’ve made ten free tools available for download from the 50+ tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™, and people who buy a copy of Charting Change get access to 26 of the 50+ tools (including the Visual Project Charter™ and the Change Planning Canvas™). The book does a great job of helping to explain the philosophy behind the toolkit and how to get started with the tools, but people who purchase access to all 50+ tools (including tools to help people think through their Digital Transformation) also get a QuickStart Guide to explain each tool.
But if we are going to truly work together to change how change is planned and executed I thought it would make sense to give people a more in depth sneak preview into what’s inside the toolkit and so I’ve created the following Introduction to the Change Planning Toolkit™ webinar recording:
I encourage you to reflect upon your own experiences planning and executing both projects and change initiatives and what you’ve found lacking in the tools you call upon from ProSci, PMI, ACMP or others and then check out the book and the webinar and then let me know if there are any tools that you feel are still missing – and if it makes sense, I’ll create them!
My goal in creating all of these tools for you after all is to help you beat the 70% change failure rate, so let’s work together at changing change so our organizations are capable with more capably transforming themselves as the environment changes around them.
You can let me know if there are any change tools that you still need (or if you’d like me to come show you and your team personally how to use them) via the contact form.
Let’s change change together!
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When it comes to business, many people would say it is outcomes that truly matter, especially investors on wall street. Investors don’t care what kind of software you’re running or what your stack looks like, or how you do what you do, as long as you deliver the financial outcomes they are looking for in order to earn a return on their investment.
Doctors also focus on outcomes and insurance companies are becoming obsessed with them, forcing doctors and customers into Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). In healthcare, the outcomes obsession is called Outcomes-Based Management or Outcomes-Based Healthcare. In education, the outcomes obsession has led to an obsession with standardized testing and a practice called Outcomes-Based Education (OBE).
And in the innovation space, Tony Ulwick and Strategyn created Outcomes-Driven Innovation (ODI). In the innovation space this approach can be very beneficial as it helps companies move away from asking questions like “What can this technology do?” to questions that create better outcomes and more value, questions like “What is the customer trying to do?” or “What is the job to be done (JTBD)?”
Whether it is healthcare, education, business, or innovation, a focus on outcomes can be very helpful, but in these contexts we are looking at managing to a certain set of outcomes, or improving a certain set of outcomes, at a fixed point in time.
In the area of organizational change however, the focus often is not on outcomes, but on behaviors. Far too much of the literature and practice focuses on behavior change, which could also be described as “what people do.” And this focus on behaviors instead of aligning thoughts, feelings, behaviors and outcomes is part of why up to 70% of change efforts fail.
Too many people are jumping in head first and not approaching organizational change holistically, having the tough conversations around not only around how behaviors (doing) need to change but also how the how the outcomes need to change, along with how people’s thoughts and feelings need to change.
And when it comes to organizational change, we are not trying to achieve a certain set of outcomes or optimize a certain set of outcomes, but instead to ascertain what the relevant outcomes are in the current state and what we want them to become in the future state.
To help change leaders work though these incredibly necessary conversations and to help change managers achieve alignment within the organization around how all four components need to change (outcomes, thinking, feeling, doing) as part of a planned and coordinated effort, I have created the Outcome-Driven Change (ODC) Framework and worksheet to add to the Change Planning Toolkit™ v7 for existing subscribers and new subscribers alike.
Thinking, feeling, doing…
People have been linking these terms together since at least 1895 when E.W. Scripture released an interesting book titled Thinking, Feeling, Doing on how scientists conduct research affecting these three parts of our humanity. Many people have added to the conversation since then speaking about how we are of three minds (Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions below), which are the:
1. Cognitive
Of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (such as thinking, reasoning, or remembering)
2. Affective
Relating to, arising from, or influencing feelings or emotions
3. Conative
An inclination (such as an instinct, a drive, a wish, or a craving) to act purposefully
Not coincidentally, these match up with the three domains of learning, defined as early as 1956 by educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom.
Others like to ascribe these three elements of humanity into Mind, Body, and Soul.
The key thing to remember from all of this discussion is that we are speaking about three very distinct things:
Thinking
Feeling
Doing
IT IS possible, and happens with surprising frequency, that all three are not in agreement when you are dealing with human beings. Which the obvious truth of course is that in any change effort, or project for that matter, you are. People are fully capable of thinking one thing, feeling another, and end up doing something totally incongruent with either OR both whatever they are thinking and feeling. Confused yet?
Author F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said:
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
This is one reason why change of any kind, organizational or personal, is so hard. Because, in order to be successful you must achieve alignment between all three elements of human reaction to the change in order to achieve the outcomes you seek.
Hopefully I’ve captured all of this in this single image of the Outcome-Driven Change Framework and this single quote from it:
“When what people do aligns with what they think and feel, then and only then, will you achieve the outcomes you’re looking for.”
In the Change Planning Toolkit™ v7 paying subscribers will find 11″x17″versions of this framework and the Outcome-Driven Change™ Worksheet to help your change planning team guide the conversations with change leaders that will help you surface the outcomes you’re currently achieving and what people in the organization are thinking, feeling, and doing to create the current outcomes and what members of the organization will need to think, feel, and do in order to achieve the new set of outcomes that you determine are necessary for the change to be successful.
This is just a taste of the kinds of frameworks, worksheets, and other tools you will find in the Change Planning Toolkit™ that I introduced in my latest book Charting Change along with a lot of great case studies and other next practices shared by some of the leading minds in the areas of organizational change and innovation.
So what are you waiting for?
Get started using the Outcome-Driven Change Framework to spark dialogue among your change planning and leadership teams
Download the 10 free tools from the Change Planning Toolkit™
Grab your copy of Charting Change and get access to even more tools for free from the Change Planning Toolkit™ (including the Change Planning Canvas™)
And then when you’re ready, get a license to all the rest of the 50+ frameworks, worksheets and other tools, and beat the 70% change failure rate!
Still have questions about how the Change Planning Toolkit™ can help your organization get better at change?
I’m planning on recording a webinar in the next couple of days titled An Introduction to the Change Planning Toolkit™ and before I do I would throw out an open call for questions:
What have you always been curious about when it comes to organizational change?
Where do you get stuck when it comes to achieving successful organizational change, adoption, or project completion?
What do you think should be in the Change Planning Toolkit™?
What have you always been curious about when it comes to the Change Planning Toolkit™ and how it helps you beat the 70% change failure rate?
What have you always been curious about when it comes to digital transformation?
So, let me know what questions you have related to any of these five questions by Midnight (PDT) on Monday, April 9, 2018 in Seattle, WA (GMT -8:00) and I will do my best to answer them when I record the webinar.
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