Tag Archives: Change Planning Canvas

Now Available – Charting Change™ Facilitated Change and Project Kickoffs

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Help Yourself to Successful Projects and Change Initiatives

Too often change management is seen as a subset of project management, causing the people side of change to be an afterthought. Stop it!

Architecting the Organization for Change

Successful organizations plan for change, and so I am extremely excited to announce that people can now get help powering their project or change initiative to a strong start with a facilitated Charting Change™ kickoff event requiring only a very small financial investment that will deliver a large return.

Charting Change™ Facilitated Change and Project Kickoffs include a package of products and services, valued at up to $460,600, for a deeply discounted introductory price:
(contact us for pricing)

  1. Change Readiness Audit (part of Day 1 of 3 on-site) – $5,000 value
  2. Change Saturation Heatmap (part of Day 1 of 3 on-site) – $5,000 value
  3. 20 autographed copies of Charting Change – $600 value

    4. Change Planning Toolkit

  4. Two-Day Guided Change Planning Session (Days 2&3 of 3) – $25,000 value
    • Day 1 – Introduction to the Change Planning Toolkit™
    • Day 1 – Set up the room
    • Day 2 – Conduct the change planning session
    • Day 2 – Change Planning Toolkit™ Q&A
    • Day 2 – Wrapup
  5. Certification of Change Planning Toolkit™ instructors (post-event certification exam)
  6. Change Planning Toolkit™ license (free for six months) – Up to a $425,000 value

TOTAL VALUE = Up to $460,600 for a deeply discounted introductory price
(contact us for pricing)

As part of the package I will fly to your location, work with you to facilitate a change planning or project planning session using the tools from the Change Planning Toolkit™ introduced in my latest book Charting Change, so that your next project or change initiative can be a roaring success and you and your team can become certified Change Planning Toolkit™ practitioners (if desired). If you’d like additional help with your project or change initiative beyond the Charting Change™ Facilitated Kickoff, we can stick with you to provide additional assistance via on-site or virtual support.

FOLLOW-UP SERVICE OFFERINGS

  1. Additional on-site support – by the week
  2. 100 virtual hour support package
    • Can choose a 1-day on-site for the equivalent of 30hrs
  3. Certification Exam

So invest a little in taking a more visual, more collaborative, and well, human, approach to planning your next successful project or change initiative and contact us.


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Empowering Every Resident with Tools for Change and Innovation

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Empowering Every Resident with Tools for ChangeWhat if you could empower every citizen with tools that will help your city, state or country innovate and change faster than the competition for a penny a person?

Well, now it’s possible…

A revolution is beginning, and the smart cities, states, countries, and even organizations, are arming themselves with the tools they need to win…

The Change Planning Toolkit™ has been designed to create a more visual, collaborative and agile method for getting everyone literally all on the same page for change. The Change Planning Toolkit™’s collection of tools, frameworks, and worksheets and the approach outlined in the book Charting Change operate together in a spirit built upon the standards created by the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the Association of Change Management Professionals (ACMP) and the interactive approaches that the Lean Canvas and Business Model Canvas have made comfortable for people.

ACMP Standard Visualization

The Change Planning Toolkit™ is anchored in the best practices of organizational change and project management. At its center is the Change Planning Canvas™, a powerful tool that will help you beat the 70% change failure rate by enabling you to quickly visualize, plan, and execute projects and change initiatives alike. The more than fifty (50) tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ will help you deliver projects and change efforts on time, while simultaneously accelerating implementation and adoption.

Change Planning Wall

If the benefits are not clear, be sure and get your 10 Free Change Planning Tools and you’ll get a better sense of the power of the Change Planning Toolkit™ (it is visual after all) and check out the additional benefits in the image below:

Change Planning Toolkit Benefits

The Change Planning Toolkit™ is breaking away from the business model where people traditionally license intellectual property in the innovation and management information space by the named user, where fees for example are:

1. Gartner — $20,000-30,000 per year for a single user
2. Forrester — ~$20,000 per year for a single user
3. BeingFirst — $975 per year for a single user
4. ProSci — $350-400 per download (for a single user) or $4,000+ per user for training
5. MarketingProfs.com — $279 per year for a single user
6. Skillsoft — $150 per year for business skills training for a single user

… or you can hire a top consultant to do some knowledge transfer to your organization for $400-$1,000 per hour (or more).

Change Planning Toolkit Valuable Tools

Now, what is Change Planning Toolkit™ offering that is different?

First, the Change Planning Toolkit™ provides an integrated system of tools far more powerful and far more capable of increasing organizational agility than any other.

Second, the Change Planning Toolkit™ is now available using two business model variations not usually offered in the intellectual property space, which include:

1. Access for Every Employee (aka the Site License option)

  • Access for EVERY employee in your organization, priced at a very affordable $2/yr per employee plus a $299.99 annual fee
  • Includes access to a QuickStart Guide to get you up and running quickly
  • Includes access to POSTER SIZE versions of key tools, including the Change Planning Canvas™ and Visual Project Charter™
  • SPECIAL OFFER – The next three (3) firms to purchase a full-day training session (which includes train-the-trainer) will receive a free* Change Planning Toolkit™ site license

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Book a Training Session and get a free* site license
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2. Access for Every Resident (aka the City/State/Country License option)

  • Access for EVERY resident of your city, state, or country. Priced at a very affordable $0.01/yr per resident ($1,000/yr minimum)
  • Yes, that is right. Cities, states and countries are all eligible for a license that makes these tools available to all residents for just a PENNY per year per resident!
  • SPECIAL OFFER #1 – Purchase a city, state, or country license worth more than $25,000 and get up to 50 people trained to use the toolkit and how to train others to use it (training fees waived for one session, expenses still to be reimbursed)
  • SPECIAL OFFER #2 – Purchase a city, state, or country license worth more than $100,000 and get up to 200 people trained to use the toolkit and how to train others to use it (training fees waived for four (4) sessions in up to two (2) locations with two adjacent days per location, expenses still to be reimbursed)
  • SPECIAL OFFER #3 – Purchase a city, state, or country license worth more than $1,000,000 and get up to 1,000 people trained to use the toolkit and how to train others to use it (training fees waived for twenty (20) sessions in up to ten (10) locations with two adjacent days per location, expenses still to be reimbursed)

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CONTACT ME to get access for all of your residents
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Some educational institutions may be able to apply for grants from the government to cover the cost of the license and training as part of their efforts to raise the skills of their local residents. Central Wyoming College is an example of an educational institution that won a Federal grant to do just that. It’s possible.

And these licenses are available for both the:

  1. Change Planning Toolkit™
  2. Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ (coming soon)

Become a Human-Centered 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.

SPECIAL BUNDLE DISCOUNT:

— Get instant access for both the Change Planning Toolkit™ and the Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ (coming soon) for all of your residents for a low bundle price of $0.014/yr per resident ($1,000/yr minimum) – that’s less than a penny-and-a-half per resident (a full 60% discount off the second license).

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CONTACT ME to get a jump on the competition
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Empower Your Residents and Employees to Cope with the Accelerating Pace of Change

So don’t wait, act today and get access for all of your employees or all of your residents to these powerful, intuitive and beautifully visual and collaborative tools that will help increase the speed of innovation and change in your organizations to cope with the accelerating pace of change in the world all around us. Countries all around the world are fighting to be the destination of choice of aspiring entrepreneurs and bold innovators and to rise in comparative rankings like the:

World’s 50 Most Innovative Countries (license cost based on population)

  1. Switzerland ($84,541)
  2. Sweden ($99,206)
  3. Netherlands ($170,328)
  4. United States ($3,264,740)
  5. United Kingdom ($655,111)
  6. Denmark ($57,118)
  7. Singapore ($57,845)
  8. Finland ($55,413)
  9. Germany ($806,361)
  10. Ireland ($47,492)

    11. ————————————–
    State of California ($392,500)
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  11. South Korea ($507,050)
  12. Luxembourg ($5,841)
  13. Iceland ($3,343)
  14. Japan ($1,260,452)
  15. France ($649,387)
  16. Hong Kong ($74,019)
  17. Israel ($83,232)
  18. Canada ($366,261)
  19. Norway ($53,308)
  20. Austria ($85,924)

    21. ————————————–
    State of Texas ($278,625)
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  21. New Zealand ($46,049)
  22. China ($13,882,327)
  23. Australia ($246,417)
  24. Czech Republic ($105,551)
  25. Estonia ($13,058)
  26. Malta ($4,205)
  27. Belgium ($114,438)
  28. Spain ($460,701)
  29. Italy ($597,980)
  30. Cyprus ($11,876)

    31. ————————————–
    New York City ($85,504)
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  31. Portugal ($102,648)
  32. Slovenia ($20,713)
  33. Latvia ($19,446)
  34. Slovakia ($54,322)
  35. UAE ($93,976)
  36. Bulgaria ($70,453)
  37. Malaysia ($311,642)
  38. Poland ($385,636)
  39. Hungary ($97,879)
  40. Lithuania ($28,306)

    41. —————————————
    Chicago ($27,205)
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  41. Croatia ($42,098)
  42. Romania ($192,375)
  43. Turkey ($804,175)
  44. Greece ($108,929)
  45. Russia ($1,433,750)
  46. Chile ($183,135)
  47. Vietnam ($954,146)
  48. Montenegro ($6,263)
  49. Qatar ($23,381)
  50. Ukraine ($444,051)

Are you happy with your country’s position on the World’s 50 Most Innovative Countries list?

Are you happy with your company’s level of organizational agility or level of innovation success?

Is your organization or country keeping up with the accelerating pace of change?

If not, then you need these tools. And if you are satisfied with your competitive position, then you need these tools to maintain your current position…

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CONTACT ME to get access for all of your residents or employees
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Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Latest Interview with the Everyday Innovator Podcast

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Everyday Innovator Podcast

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Chad McAllister of The Everyday Innovator Podcast, 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 Change Planning Toolkit™ and my book Charting Change, including what’s hard about change, and how the visual, collaborative approach of the Change Planning Toolkit™ can revolutionize how we plan our projects and change initiatives.

Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS

1. Click here to visit the Everyday Innovator Podcast interview page

2. Click here to get your copy of Charting Change

3. Click here for more information on the Change Planning Toolkit™


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Ask Me Anything About the Change Planning Toolkit™

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Ask Me Anything About the Change Planning Toolkit™

On Thursday, June 8th in the United States I will be answering any and all questions about the Change Planning Toolkit™ on TWITTER at the following local times:

9am PDT (West Coast USA)
Noon EDT (East Coast USA)
5pm GMT (UK)
6pm Western Europe
8pm Dubai
9:30 Mumbai
2am Sydney

I will be monitoring the hashtag #cptoolkit so be sure and include that in your tweet. Alternatively you can submit your questions using the contact form and I will answer them by email and in the tweet stream.

On Twitter I am @innovate if you aren’t already following me

Look for more AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions on the Change Planning Toolkit™ and The Experiment Canvas™ in future weeks!


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Failing Fast Leads to More Failure

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Most Companies Fail at Innovation Because...One scary statistic is that 70% of change initiatives fail. An overwhelming proportion of new product launches fail. Most new businesses fail.

The sad fact is that failure is all around us.

Is this why so many organizations talk about a fear of failure being one of their major innovation stumbling blocks?

And, so what mantra do many innovation and growth gurus expound as a solution?

“We need to fail fast.”

“We need to fail forward.”

“We need to fail smart.”

So, the solution most innovation consultancies put forward to organizations already coping with the wide ranging effects of failure, is to tell their employees that they need to fail more.

Say what?

If you can’t tell already, I really hate the whole fail fast mantra. Can we kill it yet?

You don’t want to fail fast, you want to learn fast.

And so, if you switch to learning fast instead, the efforts of your employees should then become laser focused on identifying what you need to learn with each iteration, or each experiment.

And your focus should also then become all about how well you are instrumenting for the learning you are trying to achieve.

This is more consistent with failing forward, but WE ARE NOT FOCUSED ON FAILURE.

Focusing on failure, leads to failure. Failure becomes the expected outcome.

Instead, we are focused on learning fast, and we can learn equally well from success as we can from failure – if our learning instrumentation is good.

The way that you achieve success in change AND in innovation, is by working hard to move the potential causes of failure farther forward in the innovation or change project lifecycle so that you have an opportunity to either design the flaws or obstacles out, or communicate them out by forcing the tough conversations during your planning process (for change or innovation) — this comes before you even begin executing your plan.

You’ve got to surface the sources of resistance, the faulty assumptions, and the barriers to be overcome — early.

Then we build a plan focused not on quick wins, but on maintaining transparency and momentum throughout the change implementation.

You may have noticed that I use the terms innovation and change almost interchangeably (often in the same sentence). This is because innovation is all about change, and because many of the barriers to change inside organizations are the same barriers that innovators face.

As an answer to these challenges, I created the Change Planning Toolkit™ to help organizations beat the 70% change failure rate by providing a suite of tools that allow change leaders to make a more visual, collaborative approach to change efforts. At the center of the approach sits the Change Planning Canvas™, very visual, very collaborative ala Lean Startup to help you prototype and evolve your change approach before you ever begin. The toolkit comes with a QuickStart Guide and my latest book Charting Change was designed to ground people in the philosophies that will help them succeed with both little C change efforts (projects) and big C change efforts (digital transformations, mergers, acquisitions, INNOVATION, etc.).

So, stop bringing more failure into your organization, and instead bring the tools into your organization that will help you achieve more success!

SPECIAL UPDATE

The Experiment Canvas

To help everyone accelerate their learning and to achieve better success in their human-centered innovation efforts, I will be creating and licensing a Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ to innovation consultants and practitioners around the world. I have been sharing early elements with my clients and I’m proud to be able to give you all a valuable taste of the kinds of tools that will be in this toolkit when it launches later this year by providing advance access to the first free download – The Experiment Canvas™. Designed to be used iteratively, and to quickly capture in a visual, collaborative way (in similar fashion the Change Planning Toolkit™).

Download The Experiment Canvas™ as a 35″x56″ scalable FREE PDF poster download

If you’re not clear on what the Change Planning Toolkit™ can do for you, please join me Thursday, June 8th at 9am PDT on Twitter for an Ask Me Anything (aka #AMA) session on the Change Planning Toolkit™ using the hashtag #cptoolkit and well, ask me anything!

A future #AMA on the Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ is coming soon too!

Innovation Audit from Braden Kelley

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What’s Next – The Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™

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What's Next - The Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™… and a new Innovation Intervention service.

People have been asking me recently – What’s next?

I think managers and leaders are wondering now that I’ve written two popular books (Charting Change and Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire) and a chapter in a third (A Guide to Open Innovation and Crowdsourcing), if I’ll ever write another book.

But, they’re also curious given all the great tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ that can fundamentally transform how we plan our projects and change initiatives, helping individuals and organizations move beyond theory to practice, whether I’ll ever create anything similar to help companies increase their innovation success.

The answer to both questions is a resounding YES!

I am pursuing, in parallel, the Define, Design, and Develop phases on a number of different tools to form the basis of a Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ for organizations to leverage in pursuit of my evolution of value innovation.

If you’ve attended one of my innovation keynotes or workshops you’ve seen how my innovation viewpoint (Innovation is All About Value) leads to all types of innovation, including disruptive innovation, and how it links to LEAN methodologies so that organizations can organize and execute across the entire spectrum of improvement and innovation possibilities.

Some of my most recent clients, including The Bank of Montreal and OSF Healthcare, have received an advance preview of some of the early components of the upcoming Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™.

At the same time, I am also finishing efforts to define a new Innovation Intervention service offering to help organizations who have started an innovation effort or built an innovation program, only to see it go off the rails. I will work with organizations in an Innovation Intervention to help them get back on track towards success and build a foundation capable of sustaining continuous innovation. Forward-thinking organizations that haven’t begun an innovation program or a focus on innovation and want to get off to a strong start will be able to leverage this upcoming Innovation Intervention service too.

Finally, when I do write a third book, it will probably dig deeper into how to build an organization wired for continuous change, including successfully executing a digital transformation and sustaining full spectrum innovation and improvement excellence.

So, this is what’s next.

If you’d like to find out more about my Innovation Intervention or Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit™ in advance of their launch, in order to get a jump on your competition, please contact me.

Stay tuned for more information on these efforts soon!

Innovation Audit from Braden Kelley

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10 Free Change Planning Tools

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Get Your 10 Free Change Planning ToolsHave you downloaded your ten free change planning tools?

NEWSFLASH: I’ve added sample QuickStart Guide content to the download package, so if you’ve already downloaded the 10 Free Change Planning Tools, you’ll want to download them again to get this bonus content.

Research shows that 70% of change efforts fail. There are many reasons why, including that many people find the planning of a change effort overwhelming and lack tools for making the process more visual, collaborative and human.

Following the successful launch of my latest book Charting Change and a suite of tools called the Change Planning Toolkit™, I have made several access levels available to spread the methodology and help get everyone literally on the same page for change:

Get 10 Free Downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™I am making 10 free change planning tools from the toolkit available as 11″x17″ downloads along with JUST ADDED sample content from the QuickStart Guide,
Get 26 of the 50+ Change Planning Toolkit™ toolsbut book buyers will get access to the Change Planning Toolkit™ Basic License (26 of 50 tools) at 11″x17″ size — a $500 value,
Get all 50+ tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™and buyers of the Change Planning Toolkit™ Bronze License will get access to all 50+ tools for individual educational use at an 11″x17″ size — a $1,200 value.

Change Planning Toolkit Levels and Free Downloads

I am very excited to share with you the Change Planning Toolkit™, including the popular Visual Project Charter™, Change Planning Canvas™ and many other great tools for increasing your change success!

Increase your consulting revenue or your organizational agility and get a jump on your competition!

Click here to get your 10 Free Change Planning Tools

Site licenses are available for professional or commercial use starting at $2/yr per employee*, and include access to poster size versions of many of the tools (35″x56″).

*Bronze Site Licenses have a one-time setup fee of $299. Site License fee based on total number of employees in the organization.

Below you’ll find a downloadable presentation that gives you five reasons to invest in the Change Planning Toolkit™:

Click here to get your 10 Free Change Planning Tools
Sign up for the latest news and alerts

Click on the tool name to read the article about each of the 10 Free Change Planning Tools:

  1. Five Keys to Successful Change
  2. Architecting the Organization for Change
  3. Building a Global Sensing Network
  4. Visual Project Charter™
  5. Motivation Ability Worksheet
  6. PCC Change Readiness Framework
  7. Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation™
  8. ACMP Standard for Change Management® (Visualization)
  9. Organizational Agility Framework
  10. The Eleven Change Roles™


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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The Eleven Change Roles

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Change is Hard

The Eleven Change RolesChange can be complicated, change can be confusing, and change can be difficult to successfully implement in any organization. This is why 70% of change initiatives have been found to fail.

To help make change less overwhelming, and instead more visual and more collaborative, I set out to create the Change Planning Toolkit™ for project managers, change managers, and leaders everywhere to pick up and use with their change leadership teams to better plan and execute their organizational change initiatives, and even projects.

Change Planning Team Contributions

Creating a change planning team that can bring the information and influence to the table that you really need is one of the keys to the eventual success of your change planning sessions and the overall change effort as a whole. The information you need will obviously be driven by the topics that your team should cover as part of your change planning efforts. These include:

  • What is the current state?
  • What are the change drivers? (It is helpful to discuss history, context, and the main proponents.)
  • Is there a budget for both planning and executing this change?
  • What other change programs are in progress or about to begin?
  • How ready are we as an organization to make this change?
  • To see the rest of this list, please get yourself a copy of my book Charting Change

Who needs to be involved in change?

Nothing is more important for creating successful change in an organization than getting the right people in the room and engaged during the change planning process. And if you want to get your change effort off to a strong start and set it up for success, then I encourage you to focus more on knowledge than authority. Think about who knows the most about the key components of a holistic change plan.

Take a moment to consider which individuals in your organization will have the most knowledge and information on the intended change, and which individuals will provide the most considered viewpoints on the topics that you will focus on as you work through the series of worksheets and other tools in the Change Planning Toolkit™ on your way to creating your roadmap and series of fully populated change execution plans.

As we consider all of the data, personalities, ecosystem interactions and work items that must be considered, you’ll quickly see that change is a team sport and that there are many different roles for people to play.

With this in mind, I’ve created The Eleven Change Roles™ to identify the eleven roles that are important to the forming of a balanced and successful change leadership team, so start considering your candidates for:

1. Authority Figures/Sponsors

Somebody has to be in charge. This includes one main sponsor and a coalition of authority figures that can help push things forward when a push is required.

2. Designers

Designers are your big picture thinkers, people that can see how the pieces fit together, are skilled meeting facilitators, can quickly achieve mastery of new methodologies (like my Change Planning Toolkit™), and can help keep people on track as you build out the plans for your change effort.

3. Influencers

Influencers are well-respected and forceful people in the organization. They may lack the formal position power of a sponsor or authority figure, but they can help rally people to the cause with their words and actions.

4. Integrators

Integrators are good at bridging silos, building relationships that cut across geographies and hierarchies, and finding ways for different work teams and departments to work together to achieve a common goal.

The Eleven Change Roles

5. Connectors

Connectors are slightly different than Integrators, and the difference is that they know where the overt and hidden resources lie in the organization, and have the personal connections and influence necessary to open a dialogue that hopefully results in both needed connections AND access to resources.

6. Resource Controllers/Investors

These people have things that you need – human resources, information resources, physical resources, and human resources. You must convince them to invest those resources in helping you successfully achieve your desired change.

7. Troubleshooters

There are always going to be hiccups and problems that emerge along the way, some expected, and some not. Troubleshooters are really good at helping to identify those up front and enjoy the challenge of finding ways around, over, or under these potential barriers when they crop up. It is even better when the team can identify ways to avoid or overcome them before broader communications begin. Troubleshooters can help with this and often have the deep domain knowledge or the deep insight into the change target’s mindset necessary to also help move minds and resources to support the change program.

8. Evangelists/Storytellers

Every change effort has a story to tell about how the desired future state is better than the current state, and is worth the disruption of making the change. There is the building of a vision, the creation of themes that will weave together into your story, and symbols that will reinforce and show your commitment to realizing the goals you set out for the change effort. Without these, evangelism and storytelling will find it hard to help people understand or support the change goals. So, you need to have evangelists and storytellers at the ready.

9. Endorsers/Supporters

Getting people to agree to talk up the change effort, even if they are not taking an active role in pushing it forward towards completion, is incredibly powerful. Don’t be afraid to reach out and ask for this seemingly insignificant assistance, but be sure and arm these individuals with the themes, symbols and stories that will reinforce the change vision and sustain the change effort’s momentum.

10. The Impacted (key groups of impacted individuals)

Who’s going to be affected by this change? Don’t be afraid to invite these people into your planning efforts early on to voice their concerns so that you can understand their otherwise unvoiced objections, identify solutions or mitigations, and potentially recruit them as impactful Evangelists or Endorsers/Supporters.

11. The External (perspectives from people not affected)

It’s easy to miss risks, assumptions, barriers, and points of potential resistance when you get too close to the effort. Inviting people from outside your organization into your planning process, or to provide feedback on your change effort, will prove enlightening through the additional perspectives they contribute.

Conclusion

When you take the time to thoughtfully recruit people into all of The Eleven Change Roles™ listed above you will have a richer set of inputs, a much livelier discussion, and a stronger set of outputs from your change planning process.

Getting the right people with the right knowledge in the room and engaged during the change planning process will get you off to a strong start and set your change effort up for success. Having people with a strong ability to verbalize meaningful, well intentioned and well informed contributions around the key components of the planning process will provide powerful content as you work through the series of worksheets and other tools contained in the Change Planning Toolkit™ and ultimately populate your Change Planning Canvas™ and your execution plans. The toolkit includes more than 50+ tools including an Eleven Change Roles Worksheet™ that you can use in your change planning meetings or off-site to make sure you have all eleven roles filled.

CLICK HERE to get an 11” x 17” version of The Eleven Change Roles™ shown above as a FREE DOWNLOAD

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Image credit: beaconinitiative.net and Charting Change by Braden Kelley (publisher: Palgrave Macmillan)

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Why Change is Accelerating

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Why Change is Accelerating

In previous articles I’ve spoken about how the pace of change is accelerating, and how for many people (and organizations) things are changing so fast that they feel overwhelmed and that things may be changing faster than some of us humans are able to absorb. I’ve spoken about how we are in the middle of a period of discontinuity thrust upon us by the rapid advances in computing and mobile connectivity that have put a supercomputer in everyone’s pocket and a target on most organizations’ backs.

Why are things changing so fast?

Is it that we’ve hit some sort of inflection point never achieved before in human history that is allowing us to innovate and displace the status quo faster than ever before?

Maybe.

Have we reached some sort of perfect storm where the innovation curve has gone vertical and the singularity will be here tomorrow?

Probably not.

So if we are not necessarily innovating faster than ever before or destined to reach the singularity tomorrow and become one with machines, then what is creating the feeling that things are changing more rapidly?

One word…

“Expectations”

Changing Customer Expectations

It feels as if the world is changing faster than ever before because the expectations of our customers and our expectations as customers are changing faster than ever before. Why?

Because we as consumers are seeing better customer experiences enabled by digital technologies in parts of our personal lives and more efficient and effective business processes in parts of our business lives, we are now expecting every organization (not just companies) and every aspect of that organization to deliver an efficient, effective experience and information exchange in whatever channel we choose, whenever we want to experience it.

This incredible change in expectations is being thrust upon all organizations simultaneously and threatening the very existence of entities that have existed for dozens or even hundreds of years. This discontinuity has created immense technical debt for organizations large and small to overcome and the only way for an incumbent organization to recover and to survive in this new digital age will be to undergo a complete digital transformation.

This doesn’t mean creating a digital strategy to address one part of the organization or a single constituency, but a path to a complete transformation that brings digital approaches to both every part of the organization and its operations, but also to all of its constituencies, at the same time. This means re-imagining every system, every policy, every procedure, and every process as a digital native organization looking to enter and disrupt your industry might, and then make a plan for transforming yourself. This will require IMMENSE amounts of change, and is no small task given the 70% change failure rate, but it is the key to your organization’s survival.

The problem is that the organizational change thought leadership status quo isn’t up to the task of planning and executing the scope and scale of change required for existing organizations to survive the digital evolution underway. A new set of tools is needed. My new book Charting Change and the accompanying Change Planning Toolkit™ were designed to inspire a change revolution to free people from the tyranny of the blank word document and poorly planned change efforts.

Why the Pace of Change is Accelerating

Economics 101

Because the challenge we face is not a static one. Organizations that focus on catching up to where the customer is today and wedging their efforts into existing budget constraints are those that will find themselves falling further behind the curve of changing customer expectations.

No longer is it a victory to be seen by customers as ‘best in class’. No, now customers are expecting every organization to be ‘world class’. This means that increasingly customer satisfaction will be achieved only by providing one of the best experiences in the world. Talk about changing expectations!

And so given the time to develop new technology solutions, you should be aiming not to incrementally improve your current experience to get closer to the leaders in your industry, but instead investing in a solution that will anticipate what the best customer experience allowed by technology 12-18 months from now and start building that instead.

It’s Economics 101 all over again. In today’s reality, as most organizations seek to move up the customer experience supply curve, the customer experience demand curve is constantly shifting outward, leading your share of the market to wither and die unless you make the strategic investment required to actually shift your customer experience (CX) supply curve outward as well.

I’ve tried to capture the scenario in the figure above titled ‘Why the Pace of Change is Accelerating’. Most organizations when they see at Time0 that their level of customer experience is below Customer Expectations0 they invest in projects to increase their CX Supply0 up the CX Supply curve to CX Supply1 thinking that they will then be meeting the customers’ level of expectations at Time1. But that’s not how it works in the digital world of today, as customer expectations are changing (shifting upward) just as fast as the technology used to create better customer experiences. So, organizations that invest in moving up the CX Supply curve to catch up with current customer expectations find themselves continuously falling short of future customer expectations.

Conclusion

The reason nearly every organization follows this approach of climbing the CX Supply curve to close the gap on customer expectations is usually financial. Most managers are forced (or compelled) to try and close the gap with existing budgetary resources and by creating a digital strategy as part of these efforts. Very few organizations have visionary leaders willing to invest in a digital transformation and fundamentally re-think the architecture and capabilities the organization needs to successfully compete in a digital age. Very few organizations see how to properly use technology to fulfill the mission of the organization and to exceed customer expectations, and as a result create a shift outwards in the CX Supply Curve itself.

Choosing not to digitally transform your organization, creates the space in the market for new digital native organizations to enter and establish a beachhead and attack the incumbents.

At the same time, as our world and organizations continue to digitize this will result in decreasing variable costs and increasing fixed costs, leading to increased consolidation in many fragmented industries. Those organizations bold enough to invest in shifting their customer experience supply curves outward by undergoing a true digital transformation will improve their position to be a buyer instead of a seller as this consolidation occurs. So the real question is…

If we are living in an era of survival of the digital fittest, which side of the digital evolution do you want to be on?

I hope you’ll join the change revolution, get your copy of Charting Change today and check out the Change Planning Toolkit™!

Image credit: Winggz.com

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First Interview about ‘Charting Change’

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Charting ChangeI was lucky enough to (a) get Tanveer Nasser to contribute some thought leadership to my new book Charting Change (launching March 9, 2016!) and (b) to be a guest recently on his leadership podcast.

Here is a quick snippet from Tanveer’s site about the content of our interview:

“In today’s faster paced, interconnected world, there’s little doubt that change is the new reality; the new standard by which we now have to operate. But if leaders recognize change as being a new constant in our organization’s field of view, why then are so many leaders struggling to effectively drive change in their organization? It’s the question that serves as the basis of my talk with innovation expert and author, Braden Kelley.”

Click here for more information and to listen to the interview

Tanveer NaseerTanveer Naseer is an award-winning and internationally-acclaimed leadership writer and keynote speaker. He is also the Principal and Founder of Tanveer Naseer Leadership, a leadership coaching firm that works with executives and managers to help them develop practical leadership and team-building competencies to guide organizational growth and development.

Accelerate your change and transformation success

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