Tag Archives: events

Join Me for Innovation Day 2021 – October 15, 2021

Join Me for Innovation Day 2021 - October 15, 2021

Join me for the American Society for Quality’s (ASQ) Innovation Day 2021 on October 15,2021.

The theme for this year’s event is intersectional global value.

There will be an exciting line-up of innovation-oriented keynotes, in-depth topic speakers, practitioner and student lightning-talk sessions, panel discussions, workshops, round-tables, meet the author sessions, and a diversity-oriented networking experience.

I will be delivering the closing keynote to the event in my role as innovation speaker.

I hope you will join me for this live virtual event.

More details coming soon!
(including more details on the speakers and sessions)

Please register here: https://events.eply.com/ASQTCInnovationDay2021

All proceeds go to funding our inaugural ASQ Innovation Scholarship.

ASQ Innovation Day 2021 Page 1ASQ Innovation Day 2021 Page 2

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Join Me Online Now at the FREE Change and Innovation Summit

Change and Innovation Summit

I have exciting news!

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:

http://changeandinnovationsummit.com/?orid=39&opid=3 (link expired)

Join Braden Kelley at the Change and Innovation Summit


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Join Me at the Virtual Change Management Summit 2017

Virtual Change Management Conference

On July 12, 2017 I will be speaking at Change Management Review’s Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™, a curated collection of brand new pre-recorded global webinars bringing thought leaders and senior practitioners in the change management profession together.

The purpose of the event is to help participants discover, learn, and reinforce how change management practices and principles are applied in today’s business world.

Click here for more information and to register for this outstanding event

Why is the Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™ important to change management professionals today?

Our profession is currently fragmented and formalizing at different rates across the globe resulting in confusion about how to take part in professional development for those who have just joined the profession and for those who are in the mid-range of their career as a change management practitioner. Aside from formal certification training, there really isn’t a tangible mode to learn more about what is going on and what works unless one attends a conference or an in-person seminar.

The Virtual Change Management Summit 2017™ is an inexpensive means for change management professionals to learn, grow, and understand the business world around them from the perspective of well known experts and senior change management practitioners.

(from the Change Management Review web site)

In addition to myself, the rest of the speaking lineup will include:

  • Theresa Moulton, Editor-in-Chief, Change Management Review™
  • Dr. Dean Ackerman and Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson, Co-Founders, Being First Inc.
  • Tim Creasey, Chief Innovation Officer, Prosci
  • Jason Little, Agile Management Consultant, Coach and Trainer
  • Kimberlee Williams, President, Center for Strategy Realization
  • Linda Hoopes, President, Resilience Alliance

The title of my presentation will be:

The Future of Project Management is… Change!

… and I will be exploring the intersections and relationships between project management, innovation management, change management, lean, six sigma, agile, lean startup, and design thinking and how organizations can fundamentally transform how they plan and execute what matters most.

I hope you’ll join us on July 12th!
(or watch the sessions on demand after their scheduled times)

Click here for more information and to register for this outstanding event


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Let’s Start a Change Revolution

Start a Change Revolution

The pace of change is accelerating, and for many people (and companies) things are changing so fast that they feel overwhelmed and retreat to the familiar instead of embracing the change. In fact we are approaching a tipping point where what is becoming interesting to the young is not the new, but the old. Vintage Michael Jordan sneakers, vinyl albums, rotary telephones, and analog amplifiers all have growing numbers of fans. In fact, vinyl album sales are increasing as CD sales decrease.

People are becoming so overwhelmed by the speed of change that the next new thing doesn’t always feel so new, and so those seeking to be on the cutting edge are increasingly looking backward for inspiration. Beards and hats have made a comeback, and before you know it the tattoo craze will have run its course. But is it the accelerating pace of change that people feel overwhelmed by, in their work lives and their personal lives, or is it a lack of tools for successfully planning and executing change that leads to people feel overwhelmed and paralyzed by the constant need to change?

Some people would argue that the pace of change is outstripping our ability as humans to cope with all of the changes we are being expected to absorb. I would argue that 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 companies’ backs.

Digital Transformation is Being Forced Upon Us

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 company and every aspect of that company 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 company 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.

A Problem and A Solution Emerge

The problem is that in twenty years of research, travels around the world delivering keynote speeches and workshops interacting with countless audiences on the topics of innovation and change, I have not uncovered one set of tools that makes change seem less scary, that can make the change planning process more human, and change execution more successful. 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 wave of change thinking and a new set of tools are needed to displace the old guard. In short, I’ve decided to start a change revolution to free people from the tyranny of the blank word document and poorly planned change efforts. Who’s with me?

Charting ChangeToday I am excited to announce the availability of the Change Planning Toolkit™, a Quickstart Guide to help explain what each of the more than fifty (50+) frameworks, worksheets and other tools are for, and most importantly, my latest book Charting Change to introduce you to the concepts behind the toolkit and its proper use. What I did find in my travels and my research referenced above were some good theories on behavior change and change leadership, and those, along with a couple of great case studies from Qualcomm and Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) and guest expert pieces from nearly a dozen hand-picked contributors, you will find in Charting Change. For my part, I’ve created a lot of great new theories and frameworks that you can put into practical use with the accompanying Change Planning Toolkit™. People who purchase a copy of the book will get access to an educational license for 26 of the 50+ frameworks, worksheets and other tools contained in the toolkit, including the Change Planning Canvas™ to pull your plan all together on one page (a $500 value). Individual and site licenses for the full version of the toolkit are available.

But I can’t do it alone.

Come Join the Change Revolution

I’m seeding the clouds with Charting Change and with the Change Planning Toolkit™, but I need you to make it rain.

The first 50+ tools in the toolkit are my own, the result of thousands of hours of work and years of effort. But I know once you download the 10 Free Downloads, or buy a copy of the book and get access to the first 26 of the 50+ tools in toolkit, or upgrade to the full toolkit and unlock all 50+ tools, that some of you may want to:

  1. Contribute a new tool to the Change Planning Toolkit™ (with full credit of course) to help accelerate change capabilities in organizations around the world
  2. Use the Change Planning Toolkit™ in your consulting business to help your clients and increase your revenue
  3. Become a preferred provider by translating the Change Planning Toolkit™ into additional languages, and earn a portion of any revenue from your translation at the same time
  4. Attend a train the trainer session to become a certified Change Planning Toolkit™ professional in order to spread the knowledge across your organization, or if you’re a consultant, to offer training sessions as an additional business offering

The reason I’m not trying to hold everything dear is that I have a full-time job transforming the insurance business and can’t be running around the world doing consulting work for clients. Instead I thought it made more sense to empower as many consultants and practitioners as possible to properly use the intellectual property I’ve created (and the additional intellectual property that others are likely to contribute) to help your organizations (or your clients’ organizations) cope with the accelerating pace of change.

I know that together we can change how we plan and execute changes big and small all around the world. And for those of you who think that the toolkit and methods are designed to only help plan and execute large changes (‘Capital C’ changes like mergers, acquisitions, transformations, etc.), I would like to remind you that small changes (‘lowercase c’ changes like projects and campaigns) can use the toolkit too. The fact is that every project changes something, and so every project is a change effort. That is why in my Architecting for Change framework, project management is shown as a subset of change management, not the other way around. So, whether you are a consultant, a professor, a teacher, a project manager, a vice president or a CIO, I hope you’ll join the change revolution, get your copy of Charting Change today and check out the Change Planning Toolkit™!

¡Viva la Revolución!

Contact me about doing a Change Planning Toolkit™ translation

Get information about Change Planning Toolkit™ public training sessions

Get information about Change Planning Toolkit™ private training sessions

Image credit: freevector.com


SPECIAL BONUS:

Click here to hear Tanveer Naseer interview me about my new book Charting Change on his Leadership Biz Cafe podcast.
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13th Annual Change Management Conference Wrapup

13th Annual Change Management Conference WrapupRecently I had the opportunity to attend the 13th Annual Change Management Conference in New York, NY, hosted by The Conference Board. The event represented a convening of 200+ change management professionals from around the United States.

200+ attendees is a pretty decent size, but this larger number of attendees is quite small when you consider the number of people serving in official or unofficial change management roles around the world (either as employees or consultants), or when compared to the number of project managers (estimated at 16.5 million people around the world) and potentially as many as 1.5 million six sigma black belts and green belts sprinkled around the world.

Meanwhile, a couple of the leading training organizations in the change management space have trained just short of 100,000 people in the principles of change management.

If you agree that proactively managing change in organizations is at least as important as the practice of Six Sigma, and potentially as important as project management, that means that as the pace and importance of change continues to gather steam, there could be the need to train between 1.4 million and 16.4 million change management professionals in the next few years.

Insights from The Conference Board’s Council on Change Management

The tweet stream kicked off with a tweet from Joe Rafter of PG&E (@jrafter65) capturing the essence of what was to come:

“Investing in better change & transformation today. Change is in everyone’s role.”

The first session highlighted the Council’s Five Guiding Principles for Changing How We Change:

  1. Agile, Conitnuous and Iterative
  2. Future Focused
  3. Dynamic Conversation & Engagement
  4. Change Leadership From All Levels
  5. Adoption & Behavior Change

Kinthi Sturtevant of IBM highlighted that they are rarely seeing 2, 3 or 4 year projects. Now it’s 30-60-90 day change projects.

We heard John Horn of Prudential talking about their transformation to a focus on talent as a differentiator that is not hr led, but leader led. Interesting that Prudential has talent catalysts in the same way as Intuit has design catalysts.

We heard Barbara Mitchell of Mayo Clinic talking about the importance of embedding your change plan in your project plan. But I disagree with this strategy. The focus should be the reverse. Your project plan should be part of your change plan. In my estimation, project planning should be part of our change planning efforts, but to make this happen we need more change planning tools like my upcoming Change Planning Toolkit™.

Wendy Branche of Tyco spoke about how organizations must make change a capability not just a competency. Distributing and democratizing change must be a priority. At Tyco change is a business process and a leadership competency and positioning change in such a manner has accelerated participation in change.

People First in Change Management

Gisela Paulsen of Genentech spoke about leading people through a difficult transition, and her feelings were captured well in this quote:

“If you lead change with integrity and transparency you can’t go wrong.”

The company had to deal with a product that was dying in two years as a superior product came on the market from a competitor, and one of the ways they dealt with it was by allowing employees to start spending 40% of their time on career development activities.

She spoke about the importance of paying attention to the community and its well-being during the change process, and how leading on the way down is a lot harder and you learn more about leadership than learning during a growth phase.

One other key message from Gisela was that as a change leader, you must be courageous, and not be afraid to ask for things. Who knows? Leadership might say yes!

The Innovation Accelerator

Roberto Masiero and Dr. Eric Hieger of ADP spoke about their efforts to accelerate innovation, and it was funny that they intentionally dressed different to highlight the difference between the old ADP and the new ADP. There

One key question they asked was:

Do we intentionally accelerate pace amplitude scale and complexity in a VUCA environment?
(VUCA being Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous)

How Do You Measure Change Success?

Tim Creasey of ProSci spoke a lot about the importance of metrics and scorecards. Here are a couple of the key takeaways:

Tim Creasey’s definition of Change Management is “catalyzing individual transitions to deliver organizational results.”

  1. Most of the people at the conference feel they do a poor job of measuring change management performance
  2. My big takeaway was that many times the ROI of change mgmt activities are likely baked into the overall ROI for systems projects especially, but the investment and the commitment is not. You need to highlight this for people. Vendors are going to highlight their most successful projects in helping calculate ROI, but those projects are also most likely to have invested in change management.

Rethinking Change

Lior Arussy of Strativity spoke about rethinking change including the following question:

What would happen if your scorecard was stories you collected instead?

Change is not an island.

The talk prompted this question in my mind:

Does everyone agree that transformation is used for change with a capital c?

Most organizations still don’t recognize need for a sustainable change management practice. This must change.

The $1 Billion Wakeup Call

Melanie Francis spoke about her observations of how as organizations approach $1 Billion in revenue that change management begins to become formalized into the organization.

Do You Speak Digital?

Sheila Chavda of McDonald’s spoke about some of the changes they’ve undergone in building a stronger digital focus at the company, including some of their focus areas:

  1. Direction and Leadership
  2. Culture, Climate, and Accountability
  3. Coordination and Control
  4. Capabilities, Motivation and External Orientation
  5. Innovation and Learning

Sheila shared a great story about an ophthalmologist who created an application called Peek that is capable of turning a smartphone into an eye exam tool (without the corresponding usual expense), making eye care more accessible worldwide.

Here is a great quote from Sheila:

“Game changing insights aren’t enough, without repeatable processes they become hallucinations of a really smart guy.”

Meanwhile, in the other session Chris Gray of Bridge Consulting shared this gem – “A butterfly is not a better caterpillar.”

Korn Ferry Research Results

Scott Stevenson of Korn Ferry shared some of their findings from research focusing on learning agility and change leadership. Their findings included:

  • People must decide to learn something new for change success to occur
  • Change management requires accurately predicting how a group will learn what is needed and managing to their individual/collective learning styles
  • Innovation strategies require more mental agility and change agility

Finally, Scott shared how he was always surprised by how little organizations invest in understanding employee drivers.

Leading Through Change

Shannon Wallace of GM shared stories of their transition in HR from executive HR to shared services model and the unexpected resistance they faced from HR employees.The resistance came from people being used to being the person people depended on. People were used to being firefighters. They decided to use pie charts to show difference in how people will spent their time before the change and how they will spend it post change. They also developed a “What would you do?” set of scenarios based on all of the different questions they got from people. They also created ~50 different modules to help people understand how different scenarios were going to change in the new model.

Creating the Future Together

Kelley Kurtzman of Verizon Wireless spoke about how as technology shifts, peoples expectations shift, and how their approach to employees and change focuses on three stages:

  1. Engage
  2. Educate
  3. Empower

Kelley also mentioned that any great employee engagement program has to be grounded in employee concerns.

One thing Verizon Wireless did to increase employee engagement and cooperation was to create ride-along video snippets so people can see what different tasks look like. Kelley talked about the power of involving employees in designing the solutions that will make them more productive. One result was to provide front line call center supervisors at Verizon Wireless with tablets with call metrics on them so they can be on the floor instead of off in a separate cubicle.

Finally, Kelley shared a great metaphor about the interaction between EQ and IQ as it relates to Emotional Intelligence:

“EQ is the front wheel of bicycle (Direction) while IQ is the back wheel (Power).”

Is Your Change Management Agile?

Paul O’Keeffe and Randy Wandmacher of Accenture Strategy spoke first about how in the digital age, expectations are different. We’ve heard people say at the conference that if they can’t see results this quarter, it’s too slow.

They continued on by discussing how research shows that change doesn’t cause organizations to go off track, it exposes organizational dysfunction. Too much change too fast is not destructive, high performing organizations go at a pace slightly faster than that of ordinary ones. The reason this is true is that people don’t have to go through the prototypical change ‘valley of despair’. High performing organizations have the agility to skip the ‘valley of despair’. One way they do is by building and maintaining a high level of trust in the organization.

People’s acceptance of #change is not a smooth curve, but a step function, increasing where intellectual understanding intersects with emotional agreement. The best organizations realize the benefits of change, build people’s change capabilities, end in good place with each change effort, so there is an appetite to do more change and to continue to improve business performance.

Becoming change agile means building a capability to successfully manage change on a daily basis. The steps in our change model to enable agility include:

  1. Clearly define the intended business performance and desired benefits
  2. Understand the organizational context/health
  3. Vision
  4. Leadership
  5. Resources
  6. Discipline
  7. Energy

The insights from Vision, Leadership, Resources, Discipline and Energy are used to master the dynamics occurring in the organization.

Poor performing organizations have a disconnect in perceived performance on Leadership and Teamwork. Poor performing organizations have a higher level of fear and frustration. Organizations that attain the highest levels of performance are those that truly thrive on change.

Most organizations would like to be more agile according to votes here at the conference, but few have it as C-suite priority. In fact, most organizations miss an opportunity during big projects like ERP to build capabilities for the future in change and agility.

The future of change agility should be to focus on insight-driven change, building capabilities and being change navigators.

Finally, it’s crazy that @innovate has more Twitter followers than @AccentureStrat. 😉

Closing Session with The Conference Board’s Council on Change Management

In the closing session Molly Breazeale shared this quote to keep in mind about relationships as you think through your change efforts:

“The conversation is the relationship.” – Susan Scott

Kent Greenes of The Conference Board spoke about co-creation and the difference between involvement and inclusion and the importance of organizing management and non-management input together in a common group to help move people from ‘I’ to ‘We’. “Imagine the look you’re going to get from your CEO when you say that leading change from the top is not enough.”

Isabelle Suares of Cisco spoke about how the speed of market changes requires greater speed internally in order to realize an ROI on our products. Increasingly shorter windows of opportunity to monetize intellectual property before newer technology supplants it. Co-Design embedded in all initiatives at Cisco, in all phases, in an iterative process with full participation.

Lauren Chesley of Verizon Communications spoke about how they wanted leaders to drive transformation, deliver on priorities, and be strong people managers for culture.

Andrea Tennyson of Cargill spoke about how they focus on nine key stakeholders including: customers, suppliers, consumers, employees, communities, governments, and three more. Some of their key focus areas sometimes conflict and from a change standpoint this can be difficult as they look to co-create. For transformation they leveraged their Leadership Forum (1,575 participants – 1,325 virtual & 250 local), and their Change Leader Network, Change Community of Practice, Leadership Academy Alumni, and Corporate Center. They made a shift in decision making away from Change Leadership Team and pushed the ability farther down into the organization.

Finally, a closing thought from Twitter from Tim Creasey of ProSci, and I’m not sure who to attribute it to, but I definitely heard it at the event:

“Go where the bright spots are in your organization – on gaining sponsorship for change management.”

The conference definitely was a whirlwind, and I’d like to thank The Conference Board for putting on a great 13th Annual Change Management Conference and to the organizers for inviting me to cover the event for the Innovation Excellence audience. Hopefully they’ll have me back as a speaker next year at their 14th annual event.

In 2016 my new change management content site will be in full swing and my second book for Palgrave Macmillan (@PalgraveBiz) comes out in January 2016 to highlight the best practices and next practices of organizational change and introduces my new collaborative, visual Change Planning Toolkit™. I’ve got some great guest experts and case studies to include in the book, so stay tuned!


Accelerate your change and transformation success

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Conference Wrapup – Change Management 2015

Change Management 2015

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the Association of Change Management Professionals’ (ACMP®) annual conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, titled appropriately Change Management 2015. The event represented a convening of nearly 1,000 change management professionals from around the globe, including countries as geographically dispersed as Qatar and Australia, but with the bulk of the attendees being from the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Nearly 1,000 attendees is a pretty decent size, much bigger than any innovation event that I’ve ever been to, but this larger number of attendees is quite small when you consider the number of people serving in official or unofficial change management roles around the world (either as employees or consultants), or when compared to the number of project managers (estimated at 16.5 million people around the world) and potentially as many as 1.5 million six sigma black belts and green belts sprinkled around the world.

Meanwhile, a couple of the leading training organizations in the change management space have trained just short of 100,000 people in the principles of change management.

If you agree that proactively managing change in organizations is at least as important as the practice of Six Sigma, and potentially as important as project management, that means that as the pace and importance of change continues to gather steam, there could be the need to train between 1.4 million and 16.4 million change management professionals in the next few years.

Professionalizing the Change Management Profession

One of the things that occured at the conference was the highlighting of the ACMP Standard for Change Management™ and the new ACMP Qualified Education Provider™ (QEP™) program. Both of these are steps along the way to building momentum for a change management certification that the ACMP® hopes will become the gold standard for people worldwide to highlight that they have the skills knoweldge, and experience to be recognized as a Certified Change Management Professional™ (CCMP™).

Kicking it off with Dan Pink

The opening keynote at the event was delivered by Dan Pink, author of ‘Drive’ and several other books. Much of his speech was about the societal impacts of the greater availability of information that we enjoy today, and how that will also affect our ability to sell, to influence, and to affect change. In sales, it used to be that the seller nearly always had more information than the buyer, that is rarely the case any more. Because of this shift in information availability, experts are being called on more to be a curator of information than as a way to access information. Dan highlighted how nearly everything that we do in business involves sales and change, yet business schools and MBA programs teach neither sales nor change (they might teach a course on leadership if you’re lucky). And if the ABC’s of sales used to be “Always Be Closing” then the new ABC’s of sales are Attunement, Buoyancy and Clarity.

One interesting personal productivity insight that Dan shared was the idea that asking yourself questions before doing something is a better preparation method than positive self talk. Another was how by reducing your feelings of personal power before going into a conversation can actually increase your effectiveness at getting people to do something. And finally, consider these points related to change:

  • Context is more important than the individual
  • When engaging people for change, it’s very important to use the audience’s language not yours
  • Instead of focusing on changing people’s minds, focus on making it easy for people to do something
  • When information goes down easier it is more likely to stick (rhyming, distillation, etc.)

The IBM Research Perspective

There was a great quote from Hilary Bland of IBM at the conference that illustrates the necessary future direction and importance of change management:

“The ability to anticipate, manage and capitalize on pervasive change is often the difference between market leadership and extinction.”

Between IBM’s research study in 2008 and their followup study in 2014, they’ve seen a shift from organizations managing change on projects to organizations increasingly focusing on enterprise transformation. While the 2008 study examined how organizations manage change and gained practical knowledge, the 2014 study gained insights into the new environment of continuous transformation & the attributes of organizations that are highly successful in managing change.

One of the findings from IBM’s 2014 study was that 74% of respondents are concerned employees are not fully prepared to adapt to an increasingly digital work environment. This sentiment also manifests in the finding that only 20% of organizations successfully deliver on more than 75% of their projects.

And while the digital revolution provides new opportunities to lead change – bottom-up, top-down, sideways – the fact is that 87% of the IBM study respondents stated that not enough focus is currently placed on change management in critical projects and that only 44% of high performance change organizations understand change benefits – Scary!

On final interesting tidbit from the 2014 IBM Research findings – In 2008 only 20% of surveyed companies were using internal resources to manage change projects, but this number is 84% now – highlighting a perceived need for companies to build their own internal change management capability instead of relying on consultants.

Here is a link to the latest IBM study ‘Making Change Work 2014’ – https://ibm.biz/BdRV9y

Gearing Up for Change – A Case Study

Columbia Sportswear shared several learnings from the change management components of their SAP upgrade, including:

  • Success comes not from just saying things multiple times but doing things multiple times
  • We had to stress that company success is determined by the quality of and access to data
  • Initially we were given a tiny training budget, so we went out and got data to build support for an increase
  • We used learnings from a previous failure to build support for our new approach
  • Our first steps were to capture tribal knowledge, map processes, and write standard operating procedures (SOP’s)
  • We then trained execs in our change methodology and did monthly change surveys to
  • We won support from senior management to bring in long term temporary employees to free up our super users to participate in the project. This was a priority!
  • Focus was key! The company had to say “We’re going to do this upgrade, make/sell products, and nothing else!” – and then of course remind people…
  • We had to get creative in our communications, both in terms of building new communication channels and creative messaging, but also we had to work really hard not to talk about the system being changed, but instead focus on how this was a company evolution.

The Culture Question

There were several good culture questions and comments that came up from various sessions, including:

  • When it comes to culture change, you have to define which parts of the culture you’re going to retain too.
  • Findings from IBM’s study on making change work… 1. Lead at all levels 2. Make change matter 3. Build the muscle
  • People at IBM got social really fast around the topic of change because managers were looking at profiles and who was contributing
  • Engagement = Communication + Co-creation
  • Successful change efforts blend effective approaches to the task side and the people side
  • Pace of change is both a driver for change management and a resistor
  • Accountability key to embedding your change into normal operations
  • People hate being off plan. They will want to tell people about the green behind the red. Consider only allowing people time with the boss to discuss yellow/red projects and how the boss can help, instead of making people feel like they have to be green.
  • When change saturation exists, consider having cross-functional resource conversations to look for solutions.
  • “Change has to start by doing less” -Lisa Bodell
  • “Change Leaders should keep these three things in mind – Ask killer questions, Reverse assumptions, and Kill a stupid rule” – Lisa Bodell

Learning as it Relates to Change

There was a great session at the Conference with Christine Cox, PhD. looking at breakthroughs in organizational learning. Some of the key takeaways included:

  • People who multitask (or who sit next to multitaskers during lectures) exhibit lower comprehension
  • Memory can be improved by relating learning to yourself
  • To harness emotion for better learning you want to tap into people’s emotions without overactivating them
  • People strongly remember moments where they made connections and generated those connections or insight
  • Learning is also increased when the right social elements are added
  • Give people opportunity to share what they’ve learned and reflect on its self-relevance
  • Spacing is also important for learning. No cramming!
  • 12 hour learning spacing that includes a night’s sleep helps comprehension more than 12 hours of spacing during waking hours
  • Instructional design should perhaps shift from content delivery to creating the space for insight
  • Incorporating some forms of generation into the learning situation – like polls, guided reflection, writing answers, explaining to another, hearing from another – can increase retention

All Trains Change for Change

Carmen Bianco, the President of the Manhattan Transit Authority (MTA) discussed how our world is changing and how the MTA has to focus on technology, strategy and culture. One of the big questions the MTA is grapplin with is:

How can we get more technology underground so that we can get more train cars per hour moving through the system?

The MTA is ordering 1,000 new train cars and growth is causing them to explore how they can change their culture to be more customer-focused and how they can move more train cars per hour and how they can get more people into each train car. Carmen’s initial focus on culture change has been on top executives so that the middle of the organization knows they’re serious. For change to filter all of the way down, the alignment and commitment has to work its way down. Carmen feels that if he can get everyone on his team to be that good boss, that’s a home run because it effects countless numbers of people. Carmen has also instituted no meeting days at MTA where he requires managers to get out with their employees and then do a debrief with him at the end of the day.

Carmen spoke about the challenge they face with 44% of executives and 41% of operating supervisors becoming pension eligible soon. The potential retirement of 44% of managers next year is both a risk and an opportunity to culture change progress. He spoke about how just when it seemed like he wasn’t changing the culture, the super storm came and provided a galvanizing opportunity. He marveled as he watched the MTA perform with the customer in mind (even sacrificing sleep). He feels blessed to have a phenomenal group of employees who have come up with ideas like FastTrack, where we had 900 employees working in the same area. At first citizens and the media ridiculed the idea, but now people are asking ‘When are you bringing this to my neighborhood?’ The creation of FastTrack reminded me of that scene in the Apollo 13 movie. It’s a good idea to keep that Apollo 13 scene ‘What do you have?’ in mind for constraint-focused brainstorming.

A Whirlwind Tour of Change

The Nike and Peoplefirm session highlighted the importance of communication strategies and creativity in change. PG&E and BeingFirst highlighted how building a change capability within an organization takes time (within PG&E it has taken 2 1/2 years just to START). Year 1 at PG&E may have focused on a lot of change leadership training, but year 2 has to be more about demonstrating results. An internal change group can act as middleware translator between consultants and the organization on a range of projects. Change saturation was discussed many times at the conference, and PG&E talked about how they monitor it at a workgroup level, monitoring what initiatives are effecting different workgroups. In the Marriott session it was highlighted that the most used change tools at Marriott include change overview, stakeholder analysis and communication plan. Chris Churchill and Paul O’Keeffe of Accenture spoke about Agile Change Management and the importance of integrating your change process into your Aigle process, including your task wall or kanban wall process.

Finally, closing keynote speaker Lisa Bodell offered these Eight Statements for Change that she advises organizations work to answer in the affirmative:

  1. People in our organization actively think about pushing boundaries and use trends
  2. Our employees are comfortable asking provocative questions
  3. People think on their feet
  4. People see it through
  5. We are Looking forward 5-10 years
  6. We constantly push for continual improvement
  7. We purposefully hire diverse teams
  8. We look at adjacencies and distant companies and apply best practices

The conference definitely was a whirlwind, and I’d like to thank the Change Management 2015 conference organizers for inviting me to cover the event for the Innovation Excellence audience. Hopefully they’ll have me back as a speaker next year at Change Management 2016 in Grapevine, Texas.

In 2016 my new change management content site will be in full swing and my second book for Palgrave Macmillan (@PalgraveBiz) comes out in January 2016 to highlight the best practices and next practices of organizational change and introduces the new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit. I’ve got some great guest experts lined up as contributors and am finalizing the final few sponsors and contributors in the next couple of months (along with the manuscript), so stay tuned!


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Innovation is All About Change – Webinar Recording

Innovation is All About Change - Webinar RecordingThe hardest part of making any change is taking that first step. We may point our shoulders in the direction we want to travel, but planning our change journey and mapping the steps to get there can still feel overwhelming. This is true for co-creation and open innovation projects, change programs — even personal change.

Often it helps to be with others who are on a similar path. It also helps to have tools that simplify steps and offer motivation. I’m delighted to invite you to view an exclusive conversation/webinar with me and my friends at CoDev (including host Cheryl Perkins of Innovationedge) that we recorded on January 15, 2015.

Click here and use PASSCODE 1515 to access the FREE recording of this webinar (link expired)

In this interactive 60-minute session, I share key tools and guidelines from my new, not-yet-published book from Palgrave Macmillan and give you some insights into what is in my new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit.

I discuss:

  • How organizational change and project/ portfolio management tie together
  • Useful frameworks to move from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’
  • Best (and next) Innovation practices
  • Roles and responsibilities based on the Nine Innovation Roles (from his last book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.)
  • How innovation is all about change

I encourage you to view the webinar recording with other members of your senior management team, and anyone else you think might have interest in the intersection of change initiatives, project management, and innovation.

Click here and use PASSCODE 1515 to access the FREE recording of this webinar (link expired)


Build a common language of innovation on your team

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FREE Webinar – Innovation is All About Change

FREE Webinar - Innovation is All About Change

The hardest part of making any change is taking that first step. We may point our shoulders in the direction we want to travel, but planning our change journey and mapping the steps to get there can still feel overwhelming. This is true for co-creation and open innovation projects, change programs — even personal change.

Often it helps to be with others who are on a similar path. It also helps to have tools that simplify steps and offer motivation. I’m delighted to invite you to an exclusive conversation/webinar with me and my friends at CoDev (including host Cheryl Perkins of Innovationedge) on Thursday, January 15, 2015 at 12 pm ET.

Click here and use PASSCODE 1515 to access the FREE recording of this webinar (link expired)

In this interactive 60-minute session, I will share key tools and guidelines from my new, not-yet-published book from Palgrave Macmillan and give you some insights into what is in my new collaborative, visual change planning toolkit.

I will discuss:

  • How organizational change and project/ portfolio management tie together
  • Useful frameworks to move from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’
  • Best (and next) Innovation practices
  • Roles and responsibilities based on the Nine Innovation Roles (from his last book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.)
  • How innovation is all about change

I encourage your questions and look forward to dialogue with you, other members of your senior management team, and anyone else you think might have interest in the intersection of change initiatives, project management, and innovation.

Click here and use PASSCODE 1515 to access the FREE recording of this webinar (link expired)


Build a common language of innovation on your team

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Free Innovation Culture Keynote

Pipeline 2014 Conference

If your innovation culture leaves something to be desired and its your job to make it better, and you missed my virtual keynote at the June 6, 2014 Pipeline 2014 conference, then you can register now and watch my FREE keynote ON DEMAND and find out five actions you can take to change your innovation culture for the better.

Here is a description of the session:

When it comes to innovation, far too much emphasis is placed on creativity, ideas and products. Innovation requires more than ‘aha’ moments. Innovation is a team sport, not an individual one, and while it may be easier for our reptilian brain to understand a single innovation hero, the truth is that every innovation figurehead from Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison had a whole lab or team of people behind them making the real innovation happen. In this session we will investigate what it takes to build a successful team of capable innovation practitioners and contributors that will effectively form a strong and sustainable innovation culture to power success for the organization, not just for the moment, but for the lifetime of the organization.

And here is some information on this FREE virtual conference:

If you’re not familiar with the Pipeline Conference, it is a virtual conference with more than 4,000 participants from 95 countries over the past four years. PIPELINE offers product development practitioners access to experts as well as practical information they can use right away – all from the comfort of their desks. From idea to launch to end-of-life, the content will appeal to any professional involved in the end-to-end product development process. In addition, the newly designed PIPELINE virtual platform serves as a resource center for 12 months following the live event with new content each quarter.

Register now and get free access to the resource center. PIPELINE 2013 was named Event of the Year category in Best in Biz Awards for virtual conference on innovative product development. For more information and to register, visit:

http://www.pipelineconference.com

Please check out my keynote and Q&A session and let me know your thoughts!


Build a common language of innovation on your team

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Free Virtual Keynote on Innovation Culture – June 6, 2014

Pipeline 2014 Conference

If your innovation culture leaves something to be desired and its your job to make it better, then come join me online at Pipeline 2014 for my FREE keynote on June 6, 2014 and find out five actions you can take to change your innovation culture for the better.
Here is a description of the session:

When it comes to innovation, far too much emphasis is placed on creativity, ideas and products. Innovation requires more than ‘aha’ moments. Innovation is a team sport, not an individual one, and while it may be easier for our reptilian brain to understand a single innovation hero, the truth is that every innovation figurehead from Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison had a whole lab or team of people behind them making the real innovation happen. In this session we will investigate what it takes to build a successful team of capable innovation practitioners and contributors that will effectively form a strong and sustainable innovation culture to power success for the organization, not just for the moment, but for the lifetime of the organization.

And here is some information on this FREE virtual conference:

If you’re not familiar with the Pipeline Conference, it is a virtual conference with more than 4,000 participants from 95 countries over the past four years. PIPELINE offers product development practitioners access to experts as well as practical information they can use right away – all from the comfort of their desks. From idea to launch to end-of-life, the content will appeal to any professional involved in the end-to-end product development process. In addition, the newly designed PIPELINE virtual platform serves as a resource center for 12 months following the live event with new content each quarter.

People who register for the conference get a free access to the resource center. PIPELINE 2013 was named Event of the Year category in Best in Biz Awards for virtual conference on innovative product development. For more information and to register, visit:

http://www.pipelineconference.com

I hope to see you online on June 6th for my presentation and the Q&A session!


Build a common language of innovation on your team

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.