With much excitement, I recently became a member of Change Agents WorldWide (CAWW). There’s a number of “tribes” that I belong to professionally – IABC, the Change Management Professionals (meetups) and the Organisational Change Practitioners (linkedin group) – and between contracting, coaching and consulting my discretionary time can be scarce. Why would I chose to join another?

Well, you see, I think Change Agents WorldWide is kinda special. The former three are very valuable to me in terms of generosity of spirit, great like minded souls who are passionate about their profession, and a strong local and international network. All three of the networks help me keep my practice strong and connected with what is “best practice”.

But sometimes, you need “next practice”. Next practice to me, is the emerging trends, insights, practice that are the outliers, and the potential future of work. If I am to remain relevant, and innovative in my change and communication practice I need a tribe that exposes me to the edge of how organisations might be. I think I have found that with the 44 members that make up CAWW (Solo Change Agents and Enterprise Change Agents). The community is a global network of thinkers and do-ers of change in the fields of leadership, change, business innovation, social business, and social architecture. And they’re pretty impressive ones – take a look here.

As I explained in an earlier post on the subject of change agents, Everett Rogers in his change bible The Diffusion of Innovations (1962) describes a change agent, as ‘an individual who influences client’s innovation –decisions in a direction deemed desirable by a change agency’. Critically, ‘the change agent not only seeks to obtain the adoption of new ideas, but may also attempt to slow down diffusion and prevent the adoption of undesirable innovations’. (p. 28). Further, in contrast to the ideas above of the change agent as part of the business, Rogers saw the change agent as being different to the client (eg. by experience, education and social system).

The Change Agents within the network are definitely different to the client. If you have been reading about wirearchy, holocracy, Working Out Loud, Responsive organisations then you’ll have a sense of what’s got them excited. And now me. It doesn’t mean that Conversations of Change is changing direction, far from it. Those who have worked with me and are regular readers know that I get antsy when I’m not exposed to “next practice”. And my core purpose – to help people through change does not change at all. I am still super enthusiastic about working with businesses to achieve their strategies through change programs. I’ll still be contracting, consulting and coaching. It’s just now, I’ll have exposure to new ideas on how to help those people and businesses with change. Maybe some of the clients will come via the network. And I’ll have 44 very smart colleagues to bounce ideas of. Cool huh?

But don’t take my word for it. Have a surf around. I’m particularly enamoured with the Green Room. In fact I’m delighted to be working with Simon Terry on how we create a CAWW presence in Asia Pac.

Perhaps we can help you?

The post Of Change Agents, Best Practice and Next Practice appeared first on Conversations of Change.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/duaneschoon/4530185934/

.

.. as I teach so do I learn

(Iyanla Vanzant)

Last week I had the pleasure of starting a change management subject with the Municipal Association of Victoria Grad Dip of Management students with Swinburne University.  It’s been a long held belief (of mine) that rarely can you “teach” much to adults who have been through several organisational changes. Give them a blank piece of paper and they’ll pretty much design the perfect change program. You can help them to think differently about their approaches and make more considered decisions about how they influence, introduce and sustain change. This belief was not challenged in the first class – the group are fab – articulate and well versed in organisational change management.

But we’re playing with the idea of a blank piece of paper online. We’re going to create a virtual learning journal / blog post to capture the insights, and challenges that exist based on the content covered.  This will help develop all of our thinking about change and also give the guys practice at using collaborative technology platforms eg google docs to create and wordpress to publish. It’s also a version of “Working Out Loud”   So on that note – over to the cohort of MAV!

In the first week:

One of my key learnings for the day was around the danger of perceived control. I felt that it was best to ensure that the approach to change is collaborative and engaging with the people involved. However I had not considered the impact of a situation which Jennifer called ‘pseudo collaboration” where you design a process which is highly collaborative in order to give people the perception that they have control when really they don’t.

Jennifer said “trust is the currency of change”. So if you go to your people with a process which gives the perception that they have ownership and they really don’t you have violated trust and you have lost the respect of those people.

So deciding early in the design of change whether you are going for the collaborative and engaging approach—or the brutal shock of here is your new role, here is the new leadership team and this is how we will now be operating—and not clouding the two, is crucial to the success of change implementation.

Quote of the day (Jennifer) “The foundation for me is respect, if respect is your bedrock of any change management program then you will be ok”

Josh Reynolds

The first thing I wrote down in my notes was “trust is the currency of change.”

Which was important to me going forward in a role as a change leader, change influencer, change manager. Trust is one of my key values, central to who I am. This gave me confidence.

Another insight for me from today is the notion of failure and degrees thereof in terms of change. Building on some previous work, knowing the right way to fail is imperative in good leadership. And failure is not actually a bad thing (ask Edison!) Change is not a pass/fail.

Building on that notion, it is important to recognise things that are working and don’t need changing…these are often overlooked and change is seen as a wholesale thing, where absolutely everything must change. No. It must not. People need anchors of stability in times of change and uncertainty. It is wise in any change process to offer some stable elements if you want people to embrace change.

The debate topic helped confirm my belief that strategy without respect to culture will end up gathering dust on a shelf. I liked the notion of “bridging culture.” Incremental change to culture is a more palatable way of moving from an undesirable cultural state to a desirable one.

 Sharon Buck

I’ve always assumed organisational change management is about restructure, new systems, new leaders etc etc…I realise though that organisational change management is also about the individuals who make up the organisation; their thoughts, beliefs and emotions in any given moment.

When people experience life changing events they see ‘life’ through a different lens, and this includes their work environment.  Since returning from the Camino I’ve been grappling with the change within and how the ‘new’ Kym fits in…fits in to her personal life and professional life.  And importantly, how do I use these inner changes to influence the organisation I work in because for me what was once important is no longer, or should I say priorities have shifted; personally and professionally.  The ‘organisational’ collective thought seems even more ludicrous to me than it did prior to the Camino, where much thinking comes from a place of lack and limitation, when I know there is no such thing; there is only abundance and limitlessness…

So how do I manage, or is it use, my internal changes within the context of a seemingly ‘static’ organisational environment that continues to hold on to the same old attitudes, beliefs and behaviours…do I fit into the mould as I once did, or do I take a courageous step and use the internal changes to influence broader organisational change?  As long as I do it with respect for the current culture and people who make up that culture, and trust that I can influence change, I guess I can do it.

Kym Murphy

Do we hate change? This a question posed in class. My initial answer is yes, who hasn’t been through a change process and felt disappointed, angry or frustrated with the lack of investment, understanding or compassion by the change manager. I have seen my share of downsizing, amalgamation, contracting out services, restructuring, process, policy, and technology and system changes. I have seen it done poorly, without consideration for the people with skin in the game.

Thankfully, I have also seen it done well, where the outcome feels like utopia and team are united and high performing. Given deeper consideration, I don’t hate change! I just hate it being done to me and feeling like I have no control over the outcome. My worst experiences are because of the change manager not respecting the people involved and seeing it as a project rather than a complex system involving people.

My observation has been; people that have always benefited from change are the ones that are engaged in the process and have seized the opportunity and got involved. When I have got involved in change I have always benefited somehow – career, new positions, job satisfaction, development opportunity, learning skills, gaining experience.

Grant Jack

“Respect is the foundation of any change management process” (Jennifer) this quote was the one thing that resonated with me most during our first class. Having been through a change process at a previous organisation and in hindsight, respect for those who were most effected was sadly lacking.

The other key learning that stood out to me is the need to focus on the ‘process’ that is changing not the ‘people’ and that not all the processes will change. From experience belief that everything is going to change is very strong amongst those faced with change and worry that they will no longer be able to perform their roles breeds resistance to change. Probably one of the reasons that we believe that ‘people hate change’.

These learnings have given me new insight into how I can assist my small team to handle the impending changes that our organisation is facing.

Student # 5

What did I tell you? Some clever clogs here…

The post As I learn so do I teach: 1 appeared first on Conversations of Change.

The right change tool for the job.

by Kate Siebert and Sharon Buck

This week’s post is the second in a series of collaborative learning reflections from Grad Dip of Management that I am teaching at the moment. In this post two of the students get creative with the metaphor of DIY and renovations to create well, a Bunnings model of change! N.B for the US/UK readers – Bunnings is the Australian equivalent of Lowes/B&Q

Have you ever walked into your local Bunning’s store on your Saturday, with the aim of completing that DIY task? You’re finally getting around to updating the shelving in the walk in robe, or updating the bathroom. You’ve thought this through, measured it all up and you’re sure of the task ahead. With a list in hand, and the saved images on your phone, you’re pretty sure to get in and out of Bunnings in a breeze.

I recently walked into my local green behemoth, months after completing the task of manually stripping varnish from wood panelling walls of my deco home. I’d used a chemical stripper and steel wool for around six weeks to take the wall back to the wood. It was a horrible job. Months later, while walking through the aisles of Bunnings, I discovered a purpose designed tool for that very job. ‘Wow, Imagine the time I could get back if I knew this tool was around when I did my renovations?’ I thought to myself. ‘Was this even here when I brought by trusty list and Google images in that Saturday morning?’

DIY shares many similarities with undertaking organisational change. The DIY is the change you need to make, and the world of change management is your local Bunnings Superstore. There are tools in Bunnings for every task imaginable; big or small. The same rule applies for Change Management.

There are three step change processes, five step models for change and schematic change formulas and recipes. There are change tools for big jobs and change models for small tasks. Each of the tools will ultimately complete the task, but it will be the degree of wasted time, effort and personal pain that will vary.

So often when we get those tools home from Bunnings, tools that we’ve spent hours selecting, talked to countless red t-shirt clad shop assistants, spent a king’s ransom on…we find that the situation we thought we had has changed and our tools are no longer the right ones.

We used the plaster removing tool, yep, that one worked! But our original plan was to then install some insulation with our special installation-installing tool. But oh-oh, termites, dry rot, rodent activity, asbestos, a random unexpected game-changer confronts us. We no longer have the right tool for the job and our plans have to radically change. We couldn’t have known about these hidden elements when we first made our DIY project plans. The perfect-choice tools for the job we designed are no longer the ones we need. And it can be incredibly frustrating and time-consuming (time wasting?)

With any linear change process, like DIY, if we go into it really expecting everything to go perfectly to plan and in the right order, I think we’ve got our blinkers on. Perhaps it is multi-function tools that we need to consider when we do our planning and shopping. Understanding that random unexpected redirectors happen will help minimise the frustration factor. Of course, it’s always going to be frustrating, we’re only human. But if we factor in the potential, use the plan as a guide and re-focus our efforts when the termites show up, our DIY project will eventually come together.

Oh, those termites…what do you think? Can you relate to the metaphor?

Related: As I teach so do I learn: 1

The post As I teach, so do I learn: 2 appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Inspired by Simon Terry’s Orderly Processions are Over, the MAV Grad Dip Cohort crafted their own post on the tension between change and stability.

Change makes me nervous and anxious, stability makes me happy and safe

Change excites and energises, stability can make me bored

Change is constant. Stability is static.

Change is the ocean. Stability is the bay.

Change encourages innovation – stability keeps innovation honest.

Change tries to krump, and attempts interpretive dance. Stability choreographs the Viennese Waltz.

Change rides a mountain bike, stability circles the velodrome.

Change is a smartphone, stability the surety of a handshake.

Change loops, and tangles, reckless and furious. Stability boasts of clean linear incremental progress.

If stability is the freeway, change is the roundabout.

Change has options, but stability offers wisdom

With each we see contradictory forces that complement each other. Can’t have one without the other.

Embrace the interdependence

Engage the duality

Flux.

Related posts: As I teach, so do I learn: 1  and As I teach, so do I learn: 2

The post As I teach, so do I learn: Flux appeared first on Conversations of Change.

http://simonterry.tumblr.com/post/88422472634/value-is-a-fractal

I experimented with #wolweek this year. It was kinda cool. It feels like a useful “tool” in the kitbag, perhaps not one I will use all the time, but a handy one.

#wolweek is the hashtag assigned to Working Out Loud week. Initiated by Bryce Williams and championed by the brave thought leaders who explore the frontiers of the future of work John Stepper and Simon Terry. “Working Out Loud” draws attention to the practice of working publicly and collaboratively in order to amplify connections, networks, innovation and understanding. WOLweek came from a conversation between Simon Terry, Jonathon Anthony and Austen Hunter. One of the posts that really resonated for on the potential for Working Out Loud is Simon’s “Value is Fractal”. While this post is more focussed on the value of Enterprise Social Networks, I could see how this represented the value of WOL with the Connect > Share > Solve > Innovate value chain.

I had heard of it last year, but in thinking about getting on board this year, I was struck by how many WOL posts that felt to me like twitter did in 2008. That self conscious public declaration on what was on being had for breakfast (or now, what I am doing in my workday). People trying to WOL but somehow missing the mark ever so slightly, or not sharing anything of interest, a narcissistic work diary entry if you will. And so I struggled with the concept. If I was to WOL how would I ensure that the noise to signal ratio did not get worse? Don’t get me wrong, we all have to start some-where – but I wanted to fast track! How could I make it a practice that would add value to the organisation rather than just position me as another clever clogs trying something new… and how would do it in such a way that it added value to my practice?

It came together when I read some of the contributions to Simon Terry’s WOL in action and following conversations of fellow Change Agents within the Change Agents World Wide organisation.

Take a risk

Pick a project which people can contribute

Have a genuine invitation to make it better

Make yourself discoverable

Gold. I knew what I could do. It so happened at the same time I was working on an enterprise strategic and operational change plan to be delivered in rather complex conditions and in an accelerated fashion (read crazy deadlines). At the same time I was meant to be doing tactical stakeholder engagement, issues management and reactive project communications. The change in the organisation is rather high profile.

So I decided to run an open house on the change and communication planning. Set up for two days in a row in a meeting room from 12 pm – 4 pm and have all of my work on display for comment and discussion. I shared it on the internal yammer platform and positioned it honestly – I could do with the help – big task, executing at speed, with wide reaching impacts. Come along and work with me, regardless of your experience in the change industry. If you are just curious about the project, come along and find out more.

It was risky – there were no formal communications about the project out in the organisation, so my draft messaging technically could be seen by anyone. This is not the norm for organisations where there needs to be many levels of sign-off before the comms are shared. But, positioned as “these are our starting point, how do the messages resonate with you” those that visited gave great feedback.

It genuinely was a project which people could contribute to. And it was a sincere invitation. I had people come in and share their experiences of similar initiatives in other organisations, practitioners shared other enterprise artefacts so I didn’t need to re-invent the wheel. Weeks later, I am still being contacted by people who couldn’t make the open house but want to know more or share what’s going on their world (interdependencies). These people I could not have known about in my initial stakeholder scans – so a big tick to navigating the complex networks that we have in organisations.

There were many hours when I didn’t have anyone visit, so my Working Out Loud was well, weird… but I had all my team work in the same room so it gave us some really solid time to work through stuff together. It certainly wasn’t wasted time.

Would I do it again? I think there’s merit in this practice on a regular basis eg monthly, or quarterly, depending on the stage of the change project. I can see it being abused though – a highly scripted and controlled roadshow. I tend to think I work out loud (publically, transparently and collaboratively) as a default practice, so it did not feel all that risky. But the sharing it via the ESN definitely did amplify the benefits. As did the tonality of the invitation. I genuinely wanted help from my peers. I think simply sharing what you are doing probably lacks in value – the humility and openness to exposing where people can work with you is what makes the value-add. Food for thought!

The post #wolweek14 appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Recently I asked the question on the Organizational Change Practitioners Linkedin Group about what the quality professional development opportunities are for experienced change managers in 2015.

When some contributors challenged whether you can get Return On Investment from a conference, I clarified what my criteria were for ROI in conferences.

1. I walk a way with one new idea (outside of traditional OCM knowledge – what I call horizontal learning)
2. There is one session that makes me reflect on my practice critically
3. I meet one person who would be cool to have at a dinner party
4. I meet one person who would be useful to me in developing ideas and bouncing off things, either virtually or in person from time to time.
5. I meet one person who I can help out in some-way (connections or knowledge)
6. It’s in a great location – worth sitting on a plane from Melbourne Australia to get to.

In the first criterion I made reference to “horizontal learning”. I don’t know what the proper term for it is — but if I think about vertical learning in the Organisational Change field representing depth of knowledge (experience, academic, and or self study of core texts and the classics of organisational change management), then horizontal learning is gained through exposure to knowledge that adds value to my practice as a change manager, but is not necessarily about change management.

And right on cue – Gail Severini over at the Change Whisperer has published her 2015 version of the Change Management Conferences to go to – these are what I would call “vertical knowledge”. Bookmark this one and if you know of others of this type do let Gail know.

So this post offers up some of the opportunities available for those working in change management who want to be challenged by ideas and concepts slightly broader than those in the vertical. A big thanks to the hive mind of the Organisational Change Practitioners Group for offering up quite a few of these options. Got any to add? Leave it in the comments and I’ll update!

March

17 – 18 Future of Work, World at Work, Nashville, Tennessee, USA

23-25 Creative Innovation CI2015, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

April

15-19 Creativity and Innovation – CREA Europe, Sestri Levante Italy

21 – 23 Organizational Design , ODF Annual Conference, Silicon Valley, California, USA

23 – 25 Creativity and Spirituality – Edgewalkers, Barcelona, Spain

29 – 30 Future of Work, Centre for Workplace Leadership, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

May

5-7 Social Business – CeBIT Australia, Sydney, NSW, Australia

17-20 Learning and Development – International Conference and Exposition , Orlando, Florida, USA

June

14- 17 Communication, IABC World Conference, San Francisco, California, USA

17 – 18 Agile – AgileAustralia, Sydney, NSW, Australia

17-21 Creative Problem Solving – Creative Problem Solving Institute, Buffalo, New York, USA

27 – 1 HR – Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

October

14 – 16 Organization Health – Better Workplace Conference, Gatineau, QC, Canada

20-21 Social networking and platforms – Enterprise 2.0 Summit, London, UK

17 – 20 – OD, International Association of Organisational Development, Portland, Oregon, USA

November

3-5 Neuroscience – Neuroscience Leadership Summit, New York, New York, USA

The post 2015 Conferences – on the horizon of change appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Change Management continues to be a profession that attracts people from many diverse fields for either unintended or deliberate career changes. I am often asked “how do I get into change management” or “where can I learn more”. Clients also ask “how do I know if some-one is a real change manager”.

All of these questions are really valid and equally really hard to answer. Change management (thankfully) continues to be a space where diversity is valuable. It doesn’t matter what your background is, you can usually add immediate value if you have the right attitude and personality attributes. This “good thing” about change management is also what makes it so hard for clients to work out who to hire. There is little uniformity in those that present to the decision makers in consulting pitches or interviews. It is additionally complicated when you see project managers positioning as “slashies” or Project – slash – change managers. The client gets excited at the prospect of a “toofer” (two for one). The end result does not usually warrant the initial enthusiasm. And yes, I do believe that CMs can do Project Manager roles, and PMs can do Change Management. Just not both at the same time well.

I’ve attempted to answer these kind of questions in blog posts before. Prompted by a valued reader, it occurred to me recently that another way to provide some value to others on the topic is look at it from the lens of:

“if you are being moved into the role not at your discretion, or the opportunity has arisen that you can grab with both hands, what would be the immediate resources to turn to get your head around the discipline?

Professional Associations

The first place to look at would be the professional associations and associated resources. That means the Change Management Institute and The Association of Change Management Professionals.  CMI has some great resources with their maturity model white paper and their articulation of the skills and competences required by change management resources.  The both groups have produced a Body of Knowledge document – between the two of them you would get a good sense of the industry.

 Linkedin Groups

Join a number of linkedin groups and spend some time digesting their discussions. You can start with  CMI, The Change Source, Organisational Change Practitioners, Allegra, Change Management Professionals. There are of course others.

Popular methodologies

The major change frameworks in use in organisations today include: Kotter’s 8 Steps, PROSCI, PCI, and Appreciative Inquiry. Some of the books that will help you get up to speed quickly on these are:

• Kotter’s Leading Change (the 8 step process)
• Dan Cohen’s  Heart of Change Field Guide
• Jeff Hiatt’s ADKAR: A Model for Change in Business, Government and Community (Prosci)
• PCI’s white paper
• Cooperrider and Whitney’s Appreciative Inquiry: A positive revolution in change

Bloggers

I’ve blogged about them before, but seriously, there are some tremendous  thought leaders that continue to give to the profession – Gail Severini, Daryl Conner, Garrett Gitchell and 16 others that just keep giving.  Book mark them and read up.

Accreditation?

There are also accreditations associated with PROSCI, PCI, and CMI. I remain uncomfortable with the false assurance that they may give an organisation about a person who has one. Accreditations are part of a larger portfolio of value in conjunction with personal attributes, experience, and disciplinary study (either formal or informal). If your company will pay the big dollars for it, then terrific, grab the opportunity.

There are of course more – but that’s the breadcrumbs that you need to follow on your own initiative. What I can’t give you: a quick course in change management, or a good online course that I recommend. It is a unicorn. Change management is too important to the overall health of an organisation and its employees to dip into it quickly and be able to position yourself as a useful change manager. You’ve got to put in the effort.

PS. If you thought this was useful you may appreciate my change and communication e-books: The Transformation Treasure Trove Series I & II

The post Help! I’ve been made a change manager, where do I start… appeared first on Conversations of Change.

I’ve been working recently in an organisation where the new CEO is speaking a lot about the importance of Design Thinking.

Design thinking is a human-centered, prototype-driven process for innovation that can be applied to product, service, and business design (Cohen, 2014)

My exposure to design thinking is through User Experience (UX) teams on projects where customer centricity is key and independent reading

It’s even been said before that if all organisations adopted design thinking there would be no need for change management. I’m sympathetic to this view – but skeptical of how long it would be before I would be running out of work.

I’d actually argue that design thinking represents best practice change management. I think we have moved a long way from the earlier view that change management was all about implementing top down planned change. Best practice change management increasingly recognises that organisations are complex systems and we do our best work when we create semi structures and leave room for emergent change.

In their book “Design thinking: understand, improve, apply. Understanding innovation” Christoph Meinel and Larry Leifer propose four rules to design thinking.

•  The human rule – all design activity is ultimately social in nature
• The ambiguity rule – design thinkers must preserve ambiguity
• The re-design rule – all design is re-design
• The tangibility rule – making ideas tangible always facilitates communication

All of these rules that are congruent with good organisational change management. Admittedly, the desire to preserve ambiguity is not often without a fight. But this is the need to create semi-structures – enough control to protect the organisation from damage, and enough flexibility to allow the serendipitous discovery and emergent ideas.

Some of the key tools in design thinking are:

• Understanding your audiences thoughts, desires, beliefs and actions
• Co-creating outcomes with that audience
• Creating early versions or prototypes and testing for fit / relevance / acceptability
• Root cause analysis, five whys, mindmapping

Again, all of these tools should be part of the change manager’s tool kit. If you don’t know the humans at the centre of the changes you are introducing, you will falter. The changes will have much better adoption if the audience or recipients of change have been involved in the creation of them. Testing is a key phase of the change processes and we build in time to make amendments (or prototypes) if the solution is not working. And we often describe a lot of our efforts as “lifting up rocks to see what’s under them”. This activity could also be described as root cause analysis. Good change management occurs with diligent discovery.

Now having said this, I make no claim to be an expert in design thinking. I’ve worked with design thinking practitioners, I’ve attended a couple of conferences, read a book or two. What would be really cool is to find a design thinking practitioner who wants to write a post on how good change management if really just design thinking… think about it, if all companies had great change capability you wouldn’t need design thinking…

The post Design Thinking appeared first on Conversations of Change.

So one of my most “popular” posts is the “70% change fails: Bollocks” – in it I argue that change is way too complex to measure by simple binary “did it succeed? – yes / no at a single point in time.

So this post follows that one with hopefully a more thoughtful exploration of what change success metrics we should use. When I talk to leaders and steering committees about change success I use three categories to understand change which can lumped in to camps – installation, benefits realisation and process of change.

Measuring the success of the “installation” of a change can occur pretty shortly after “go-live”, whereas the other two can occur prior to go live and at periodic intervals post go-live. But a consideration first of project success.

Project Success

Most of the change projects we work are deemed successful by Project Success measure (IFOTOB). But this in of itself is not sufficient, I think we can all think of projects where it looked good from a delivery perspective but user adoption was low and the benefits limited. From a change management perspective I tend to be interested in this but not ruled by it. Ultimately change in scope, time delays and cost blow outs create a lot more stakeholder engagement and expectation management. You want to contribute to a strong result here, but it really does not measure success of the change.

User Adoption

User Adoption tends to be used in technology / systems implementation, you can also consider employee compliance in the same bucket. Does anything actually change? Are people using the new system, are they behaving in a new way? Are they using new processes? Successful installation is dependent on something actually changing!

I know this sounds obvious – but it’s a real oversight in the change success discussions. Often the discussions focus on benefits realisation – and if the benefits are not achieved it is argued that the change management team did not do a good enough job and need to improve their practice! But the reasons behind low benefits realisation are many and varied –  for example, the change team may have got great installation results, but the original logic for the change was flawed.

It’s this category that traditional change readiness surveys / polls come in handy. Being able to poll for “will they [make the change] and can they [make the change] pre-go live puts you in a much stronger place at time of installation. You can target your efforts with remediation or intervention to ensure a good user adoption / employee compliance measurement.

Ultimately you are looking for metrics on log ins, new processes being followed, calls to support structures decreasing (or increasing). Common sense tells you 100% adoption on day one is unlikely, but with some careful thought you can identify a baseline metric for current state and expected usage or compliance over time.

Benefits Realisation.

It is a rare change initiative that you can measure benefits realisation immediately after go live. If you can, then you were working on something that was pretty broken to start with. Benefits often take some time to start to become apparent. This can be because it takes time for new habits to form with behavioural change, proficiency to increase with systems usage, or business cycles to play out.

The time of things you are looking to measure here are tangible measures – speed to market, cost of transaction, cycle time, FTE release, speed of processes, employee engagement increase.

Change process success

Measuring how effective the change process was is critical. Nothing kills a future change faster than the legacy of poorly executed change. Some of the things that we can consider here along the way are periodic assessments of where people are at on the change curve (awareness, understanding, buy-in, commitment). Do the people feel empowered? And then the one that really makes a difference is the “campsite rule” – so for Australian readers and children of the 70/80’s, do you remember Harry Butler – In the Wild?, the wildlife conservationist?  He always implored us to leave the campsite in a better state than when you got there. The same goes for change management. Really successful change management means that you have built change capability and considered sustainable change. Your organisation has a higher state of change maturity than when you got there.

Personally, I don’t think it matters as much what the metrics are that you decide on, as much as that you have this conversation with those that matter. It can be incredibly powerful to have a rich discussion on what does success look like with organisational leaders, steering committee and project teams to align expectations and education about change management. Only then when we start to move away from the puffery of “70% of change projects fail” and start to have conversations that yield better results of change. What about you? What do you use to measure successful change?

Related reading: Daryl Conner – The Leader’s Dilemma, Installation or Realization.

The post How do you measure change success? appeared first on Conversations of Change.

What do change managers do who work agile principles?

So I’m at Agile Australia* at the moment. Agile continues to be a growth trend for organisational change practitioners with companies and clients wanting to know what your Agile chops are. Not having done any agile training or certification, I think that I work with Agile principles, but wasn’t too sure.

A couple of years ago, I asked Jenny VanDyke to guest blog a post on the difference between change management in waterfall projects and agile projects and her analogy of cooking is worth a read. I certainly resonated with that.

After Day 1 of the conference, I’m pretty comfortable that what I do is very aligned with Agile practice, and having worked in Business Improvement teams and companies that use Lean and Kaizen, I have obviously been influenced in this regard.

I’ve just sat through the second day keynote – the noted Linda Rising on the Myths and Patterns of Organisational Change. She was very good. The content reflected traditional organisational change practice, not necessarily applied to Agile (or anything different or new in organisational change management). If you are new to projects or change, then definitely do put her on your reading list!

But this presentation and the other presentations and conversations from yesterday prompted me to articulate what it is that I do these days that I consider “agile” in my change management practice – and I’d invite Agile practitioners and other change practitioners to chime in in the comments and share your thoughts on what agile change management is.

1) It’s International Work Out Loud Week (#WOLWeek) and increasingly I look for opportunities to Work Out Loud. Working out loud requires a commitment to transparency and taking risks. In a previous post I shared a change strategy developed through #wol. Working out loud amplifies the opportunity for collaboration, communication and buy in.

2) I live by the practice of get the artifact / idea to 70% complete and share and ask for others to make it better. At this point there is shared ownership in the artifact (change communications, training material, presentations, plans). Done is better than perfect.

3) I use simple visual management to generate conversations of understanding and influence. This image is of a simple change scorecard I am using at the moment. It’s A3, sits above my desk on my current engagement and see the creases? I pull it down and take it with me to meetings. See the red? Very effective for getting attention – your business unit is red because there is not demonstrable change leadership yet. It gets updated on a monthly basis before the steering committee and is purely subjective. It’s ok if some-one disagrees with me on how I have rated the elements – it creates a conversation on why and I can either learn more and change (see the scribbled red in the top right corner)  or share more information with the stakeholder as to why it is that way and how we can get it to amber or green. Some of these will be red by virtue of not started, but it communicates what has to be done.

4) Communicate, communicate, communicate – ironically (given my background) this is the hardest to do even with the disciplines of “scrums”. We get busy doing. We forget to catch our own teams up with the latest stakeholder issues. But do it we must.

5) I use change roadmaps over change plans – they are easier to change, and more suitable for A3 visual management. A stakeholder will look at a roadmap, they won’t look at a 400 line plan. It is easy for a stakeholder to “insert” themselves in the roadmap, the change plan can shut them out as it is too overwhelming.

6) I play the role of guardian – I guard the language of collaboration (call out non inclusive language), I guard the “personas” in design workshops (they are the people of change) and I guard the value proposition of the project, because this is the What’s In It For Me (WIIFM). It is the change managers role to protect these three attributes and not let the design of the change overlook these attributes.

7) I rely on active feedback loops (or the social architecture of the organisation) and testing (transparency) – we see our change activities as iterations. This is one of the trickiest, because we need to balance the need to include the feedback and the need to know what is the right thing to do from a change management perspective. One person’s co-creation can be another persons “tail wagging dog” or reluctance to embrace the change. Having said that, a true feedback loop permits you to find out why they are reluctant and iterate again consistent with the value proposition..

8) So much of agile change management is thinking on our feet – we are not wed to processes, frameworks and artifacts, but respectful of all. The time it takes us to write a 40 page change strategy and plan is time we could be having conversations of change with the leadership who need to champion the change. One of the speakers delivered the joke “Methodologies give people with no ideas something to do” . There is some truth in this, yesterday, I got asked many times do I follow [x] methodology and on saying no, was asked how do I know what to do? Agile change management is common sense – you need to be good at triaging, prioritising, nimble, use enough of a process or framework to get momentum, and know when to step away and do something completely different. In the previous post Jenny Vandyke notes that change managers need deep expertise. To a certain extent rigid application of processes is great for people with no expertise in change – in the absence of nothing, thank goodness for the methodology! But to know when to step away, you do need the expertise and learning.

So that’s my impression at this stage, still several presentations to go. For those change managers working agile – what are your unique practices that make you an “agile change manager”. And for the bona fide agile practitioners, what makes a good change manager to you?

* For the record , it is handsdown one of the best conferences I have been to internationally.  It is a lot like change management conferences though, the awkward clashes of newbies and experienced hands, the definitional dramas of what is Agile, along with argy bargy of which methodology to use. Good fun! Kudos to Slattery IT 

The post Agile change management? appeared first on Conversations of Change.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the temporality of change and wondering if we pay it enough attention.

When we look back, in hindsight, we can recognise the legacy of past change, and hopefully learn from the feedback – good and bad.

When we look forward, we identify our vision of the change, the future state we are working towards.

When we look at the now we identify our current state.

And we have opportunity to introduce more mindfulness – how are we feeling right now about this change. How are others feeling right now about this change.  What does that tell us about how we are going? Good and bad.

Where we chose to put our focus on the temporality of change can skew our path. Too much looking back blinds us to the now and future. Too much inattention to the past commits us to repeat errors and reduce confidence in our future attention. Too little looking at the now risks burnout, fatigue, and missing important feedback.

It’s like we need to do a “around the change clock scan”  for past, present and future to be integrated. A time lord on the team to ensure balance.

Time-travel and change.  Thoughts?

The post The temporality of change appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Does the uptake of cloud based systems change drive a continuous change culture…

Or do you need to have a culture of continuous change to see the true benefits of cloud based systems?

It’s curious chicken and egg I have been playing with of late owing to working on a global Workday implementation. Workday is my first SaaS implementation and it’s been a hellish amount of fun immersing in agile change methodology and a next practice HR Information Systems (HRIS).

From a change management perspective, SaaS implementations are really interesting. One of the organisational benefits of going to the cloud is that they are often much cheaper than “on premise” implementation of software, hardware and licensing eg SAP, Oracle. You effectively lease a software system, and it is the same version that all of their other customers use. This means you are unable to customise to varying business needs (that would reduce the economic benefit for the vendor and increase the costs to the organisation).

It’s effectively “one-way, same-way” and you put your trust in the vendor to be at the cutting edge of the discipline, so you are not one-way, same-waying into backwards business practice. You can configure for legislative variations, but with every configuration you need to weigh the cost / benefit ratio. More configurations means more maintenance and bigger system admin teams.

So whereas traditionally, good change management means engaging with all of the business stakeholders to understand their wants and needs, and addressing many of these as possible, traditional change consultation with cloud based change can be problematic. You have to manage expectations very carefully, least the stakeholder assumes they will see a solutions design document that reflects their business requirements before you move into production of the system.

It means that for many of the organisations that do this, the change challenge is to “harmonize” processes – so take 30 different processes, and make them one in order to fit with the SaaS process. For stakeholders this raises big conversations of acceptable loss. In order to gain the benefits of real time data, insights, time savings and efficiency, some will have to give up local ways of doing things that they are very attached to. Whether we look at change optimistically as a change slinky or the conventional change lifecycle where we take people through the valley of despair, there is big work to be done.

The other really interesting change opportunity / challenge is what happens after you go-live. Cloud based vendors push major changes to the system on a cyclical basis (eg every 3 months, 6 months etc). And while you will have notice of it, and can test it before it is live in your system you have limited ability to say no to it. Think about everytime Linkedin or Facebook push a change to you? And so this is what I am working on now – what does the continuous change governance model look like after we go live with Workday in the company I am working with (and more optimistically, what does continuous change governance look like more broadly).

It strikes me as a tremendous opportunity to build a culture of continuous change, agility and learning. In organisations where this is not the case – could it be that in working through how you manage future releases of SaaS software, you also design for sustainability? Or is it in organisations that do not have a culture of continuous change, agility and learning, the cloud based releases become a really painful process of scrambling to learn, adapt, communicate and deal with it as you would any system change release.

The key to navigating this chicken and egg seems to me to be in the “trust that the vendor to be at the cutting edge of the discipline”. These releases are meant to be of benefit to you and developed through customer consultation, feedback and innovation systems. They should challenge you to look at your strategy, your operations, your processes and question if you are heading in the right direction. But what happens when your business stakeholders do not recognise it as such – and / or thinks it is a backwards step?

A great example is the new Linkedin Whack-A-Mole strategy of managing groups. This was a cloud-based system, non-opt-out change release last week purportedly about improving the group experience and uniformly rejected by thousands of group managers. You can argue that the difference is if Workday, or Salesforce or any other cloud based software platform had that many ‘customers’ revolting, things would change. Linkedin makes no money from groups so the group managers customer voice is not important. But regardless, it speaks to the existing change culture of the recipients. It is not without ironic self-reflection, I note that I did not initially wear the hat of change adaptability when this change was forced upon me as a group manager.

But what say you? How are you finding the uptake of cloud based systems in your organisation. An enabler of continuous change, agility and innovation or more workload to manage the change releases? While I have worked with organisational leaders on the importance of embracing change and building change capability for a while, it kind of feels like I have a Trojan Horse at my side that can “sneak” it in.

This is new terrain for me and I’d love to hear from you. Giddyup!

The post Continuous change and the cloud appeared first on Conversations of Change.

It’s funny. Every-time I go to start a Professional Year in Review post, I wanted to start with “Wow, that was a big year”. And in reality, what year isn’t? When you abstract yourself to the higher view, 365 days is always going to seem like a big unit!

This year was a big year. Much less diversity and activity compared to other years. But it was also a seriously fun year professionally. Seriously fun. Yep, I get it… what can I say, paradoxical in prose and person.

Global and agile

In February I took my first global piece of work (28 countries) and my first cloud based change work, and with that my first “proper” agile project. It was the implementation of Workday, a SaaS HRIS and the associated change in global processes, operating model, and culture for an engineering firm. It’s a good reminder how much I like the new and novel, the learning and experimentation.  It meant that I really had to immerse myself in Agile methodology and attending Agile Australia 2015 was a real highlight.

I got to work with a terrific project team, where the alchemy was just brilliant and the capability as good. My change and comms team recently ran a Lessons Learned on the first phase, and that will probably show up in a blog post in the future but some of the standouts for me in terms of our success were:

• A deep understanding of each team member’s strengths and “overplayed” strengths thanks to a Strengths Deployment Inventory (SDI)  kick-off team building workshop
• A high trust environment with the Sponsor and the Steering Committee – they acknowledged early that change management is not something the company does well and were willing to learn and be led
• Lots of cool tools to be able to manage globally, virtually, and nimbly (e.g. Campaign Monitor, Trello, Office Mix, Yammer)

A steady constant in Communities of Practice

The communities of practice ticked along with the Organisational Change Practitioners (OCP), the Change Management Professionals (CMP) and Change Agents WorldWide (CAWW). OCP hit a major hurdle this year just after inducting some new energy in the leadership team, with the changes to LinkedIn. It was really disappointing, after several years of much work in creating a strong community, the platform changes mean that most have walked away or spend less time in groups. CMP met less frequently but had two terrific meetups on the topic of Agile and OCM, and the role of the Coach / Counsellor / Mentor in change. We also tried a dinner party format – which meant that people left with new stronger connections and the sense of professional isolation reduced. CAWW maintained a quiet presence with quality ideas sharing from good people and the invitation to chat employee engagement with Vin Jones, another CAWW colleague.

Boredom sets in?

Creatively, I continued to struggle with discipline of blogging and change nuggets. In reflection, I suspect that I am bored with the platform. The creative inclination is there there, but… I’ve been blogging for 7 years now, the change nuggets going for 5. It might be time for a change

Change manager, change thyself.

And speaking of change, this year really underscored for me that when change managers want to make personal change, they do have the tools available to them. But often they take a less then generous approach to how they do it. It all seems to be very accelerated, with ambitious (unrealistic) vision and appreciative inquiry is not considered! Perhaps there was a reason why SDI and Agile was a big focus this year.  I also benefited greatly by engaging a coach for myself – uncomfortable at times, but worthy.

So what’s on for 2016?

I’m really looking forward to it! More so than other years, that’s for sure.

• I’m keen to do further cloud based / agile change and it appears the opportunity is there.
• I’m also keen to do more work with smaller sized companies (those under 20,000 employees). It feels like they are more receptive and able to embrace continuous change in a healthier way, and certainly in a cultural way.
• I’m off to Dent the Future in March and will catch up with some of the US change management cohort then and also keen to attend Agile Australia 2016, see if my team from this year can present a case study of Agile OCM.
• I didn’t find opportunity to present my ‘The Strength of Surrender in Change” TED style talk – but that’s ok, it will find it’s home when it is meant to.
• I’m keen to explore Conversations of Change podcasts as an alternative to the change nuggets and wait for it…
• There may be a book under development. !0 years post PhD thesis; I may have regained the desire to write beyond 800 words!! Yikes!

Probably the biggest change is I’m going to spend more time with me. Of the stillness type. It means I’m stepping away from the leadership roles in CMP, and OCP. I’ll also step down from a lot of the probono consulting with non-profits. Exposure to the SDI work and my coaching has meant I have recognised that I have a bit of internal team development to do. That requires space and stillness. And in the spirit of agile and appreciative inquiry, I like the qualities of my internal team very much, and I’m looking forward to the first sprint. We often talk of ourselves being a ‘work in progress’ – and it is said with a sense of disappointment (e.g. we haven’t got there yet). At this point though the ‘work in progress’ is seriously exciting me. Yep, paradox in person and prose again.

Anyway, if you are reading this, you have probably been a very valued part of the bigness of this year, the satisfaction of this year, and the support I am so very grateful for. Thank you.

Wishing you peace, happiness and and appreciative approach to your 2016 ; -)

The post 2015: A professional year in review appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Many of you know I have been working on how the concept of “Surrender” fits into workplace change.

My interest in the idea arose when I experienced “stuckness” or perhaps “resistance” when facing personal change on account of a physical injury.

The experience led me to wonder if we were missing a stage in Conner’s change commitment curve (contact – awareness – understanding –  positive perception – experimentation – adoption – institutionalisation – internalisation).

Conner’s Stages of Commitment (www.changethinking.net)

It is relatively easy to take people through stages of contact, awareness and understanding, but that doesn’t always lead to positive perception and experimentation. Could “surrender” be the stage in between? Or as Caroline Kealey of Ingenium Communications describes it “the hinge” that moves people from head (contact / awareness / understanding) to heart (positive perception) and hands (experimentation).

And if it was, what does that mean to us as managers of change, change agents and change leaders? Can we actually do anyting about it to help people through the curve?

It struck me last week we can.  Surrender in a change sense is three part concept.

Part 1: is mindfulness.

People need to be mindful of the experience of change – the stress, the excitement, the fear, the anxiety that leads to them to get bound up in a psychic prison of “what if” –  amplifying concerns and thinking through the implications to the point where no action occurs (trying the change, practicing the new steps, behaving in new ways, exploring the new system). Moments of meditation, breathing, relaxing muscles that have tensed during the day assist the employee to experience the sensory aspect of change.

Whereas a lot of the commentary about corporate mindfulness programs is about employee health and well-being, what if there is an additional bonus – organisations that encourage mindfulness, meditation, yoga and reflection in the workplace are just better at continuous change?

Part 2: is about faith.

Unless the employees have faith in the future state, it is unlikely they will surrender to “buy-in” And this becomes the role of the change practitioner and the change leader. Creating and communicating a vision that is believable, that resonates, that the employees can believe in. They may not be able to see it right now, but they have faith it will happen. They are willing to “surrender” to change.

Part 3 is about trust.

Inextricably linked with faith, only when you have faith AND trust do you actually surrender. And this one pretty much sits in the domain of the change leader. Only in this aspect it is not so much as what can be done as who the change leader is. Their character, the past behaviours, their current actions. Can the change leader be trusted?  Do they speak with authenticity, transparency and honesty? Do their actions align with their words.

Are all three equal in weighting? Perhaps not. If you have low trust and faith, the need for mindfulness is higher (as the physical and psychological effects of the lack of trust and faith are higher). Strong mindfulness and strong faith in the future may offset a leader who is not trusted. Not ideal though. I’m not sure you get “ surrender” without all three. What do you think?  Would love to hear.

For more on “the hinge” from head to heart and hands, have a read of this excellent white paper from Caroline : Best Practices in Change Communication

The post The Surrender Trinity appeared first on Conversations of Change.

What change role do you fill?

Role clarity is so important. Earlier this month an article appeared in Forbes magazine provocatively titled “Don’t be a change agent, and don’t hire one”, by Liz Ryan. I wrote about it at the time on LinkedIn, and one of the things I noted was the author appeared very confused about the difference between a change leader, a change sponsor, a change agent and a change manager.

And while I have posted previously on “Who are your change communities” and covered SMEs, Super Users, Change Enablers, Change Champions and Change Leaders; this post offers some clarity on how I define the different roles that have a key role in the success of an organizational change.

Change leader

These are line managers and senior managers who are prepared to actively and vocally sponsor, support and role model the changes associated with the system or process or behaviours you are introducing. Ideally, they should work alongside a change champion to ensure that the change champion is supported. In many companies, change leaders end up having the key success criteria of the change project built into their performance review. They are also integral in determining consequence management of the change – e.g. what happens when people work around the change or deliberately subvert the change.

Change sponsor

The change sponsor is a formal role assigned to  a steering committee (often known as a ‘steerco’). If your organization is using a formal project methodology you will most likely have a project sponsor (and in this case, this person is also the sponsor of the change). The change sponsor is ultimately accountable for change and keeps a close eye on the issues at hand and what it will take to remove barriers. A change sponsor should not be particularly involved in the day to day running of the change, but their attention will ramp up when things are getting tricky or challenging. A change sponsor should be seen as support and a facilitator, not some-one to please. Sometimes there is a lot of overlap between change sponsors and change leaders, but it is not uncommon to have one change sponsor and multiple change leaders in the business.

Change agent

If you have stuck your hand up to initiate, lead and execute change, there is a fair chance that you are indeed a Change Agent. The change agent is often the person who introduces and champions the new idea. Additionally, the change agent is responsible for taking the activity into Business as Usual (e.g. post change activity). Everett Rogers in his change bible The Diffusion of Innovations (1962) describes a change agent, as ‘an individual who influences client’s innovation –decisions in a direction deemed desirable by a change agency’. Critically, ‘the change agent not only seeks to obtain the adoption of new ideas, but may also attempt to slow down diffusion and prevent the adoption of undesirable innovations’. (p. 28). Further, in contrast to the ideas above of the change agent as part of the business, Rogers saw the change agent as being different to the client (e.g. by experience, education and social system). There is an argument for external change agents – when your organization is so wound up in inertia that it is impossible for anyone to initiate and champion change, you do want to hire in an external change agent (possibly a change consultant or a new leader who knows they are coming in to drive change).

Change champion

I’ve noted before that term “change champion” is getting increasingly out of favour. It’s often viewed as the kiss of death, or associated with previous initiatives where they were not used so well. These employees are identified as having strong influencing and communication skills and a passion for new ways of doing things. This community will be identified, recruited, inducted and provided early education and opportunity to “play” with the technology (e.g. sandpit). They will be equipped with three domains of knowledge – project timing and activity, technical knowledge of the system or process, and change management knowledge to encourage user adoption. In some cases, the change champions may be used to conduct local briefings and training. Ideally you want geographically located champions – although with more companies becoming comfortable with Enterprise Social Networks we are starting to see more e-change champions. More contemporary views of organizational change favour developing change agents across the business and building change capability at an enterprise level so that “everyone” is a change agent / champion and we do not need to take people out of the business to specifically fill that role. But regardless of what we call the role, if you do not have people prepared to champion your change, you will be struggling.

Change consultant

A change consultant is usually some-one who is external to the organization who can come in perform a diagnostic phase and produce recommendations on the way forward. They usually keep themselves to the high level activity – diagnosis, strategy, planning, and evaluation. In general, they don’t tend to do the “doing” side of change, although they may have team associated who can go in and execute the change (e.g. change managers, change communicators, change analysts, training people). Ideally, they have a background in strategic and operational change in organisations (so can provide examples and cases of past experience), deep knowledge of organizational change, and a consulting background. They establish rapport quickly and can draw upon a wide and varied network for solutions when they themselves do not know the way forward. Change consultants usually have a dedicated change methodology that they use – either one they have developed themselves or one of the commercial methodologies.

Change manager

A change manager is the role assigned to the person who has responsibility for “managing” the successful implementation of a change and accelerating the benefits realization of the initiative. It can be project based or organizational in scope. They will most probably use a change methodology to inform their approach. A change manager develops a strategy (if one is not done), develops a change plan, designs the implementation of change and then executes on this design. They usually have a team to direct on this which consists of other change managers, change analysts, change communication consultants, and training managers and analysts, although you will find change managers who are very “hands on” and can do all of the work associated with a team. You get your best value when you bring them in at the beginning of the thinking about the change as it is much cheaper to design for a successful change than remediate a project that did not consider change management. A change manager is not the one who comes up with the change, nor are they expected to lead it. They make it happen and enlist the support of change leaders, change agents, change champions. They will often challenge and coach the leadership in what they intend doing on behalf of the people in the organization. It is a formal career path – and for more details on the attributes of a change manager see here.

What of the overlaps?

Where it can get confusing is when there are overlaps. Many people fill multiple roles – so if I think about my work at the moment and what I do with clients, I am 30% change consultant, 60% change manager and 10% change agent. And this mix changes depending on context and client work.  Other consultants may have a mix of change leader (from their past), change agent and change consultant. Change leaders can be change agents. Change agents can be change leaders. Change leaders, change agents and change champions may get so energized by change management they chose to pursue a career as a change manager or a change consultant.

What do you think ? Would you define these roles differently? I’m keen to hear how you see these roles. What’s missing?

Related reading:

Help! I’ve been made a change manager – where do I start? 

Reverse Engineering a Change Manager 

Change Agents v Change Managers 

Change Agents, Best Practice and Next Practice

Written by Dr Jen Frahm, Chief Conversation Starter – Conversations of Change

The post Offering role clarity in change management? appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Agile is a story of snowballing

“Corporate Australia wants you to know it’s agile” says the heading in yesterday’s Australian Financial Review (AFR). Such poetic timing – I read the article as I was heading to IABC Victoria’s Talk 55 event where I was speaking on “Translating Agile for Communicators”. It is a brilliant night – if you get the chance next year make sure you get a ticket.

The corporate world in general is undergoing a process of mimetic isomiorphism (otherwise known as “Corporate Me-tooism” with regards to “agile”. Mimetic Isomorphism is a term coined by organisational sociologists Paul Di Maggio and William Powell in a profoundly disruptive 1983 journal article (1). It describes how organisations copy each other’s strategy and structure because they think there will be beneficial outcomes. The AFR article lays it out beautifully – BHP Billiton, Qantas, Caltex, Coca-Cola Amatil, IAG, Suncorp, Seven West Media, Woodside Petroleum, Macquarie Group, corporate after corporate going agile …

But are they really? This was one of the points I was making in my talk – the world is going Agile often without any thought or recognition of its origins with the Agile Manifesto. So for the benefit of those who were not at IABC Victoria’s cracker of a night, here is the content of what I shared.

Keep in mind it is brief – the format was five slides in five minutes… and um, apologies to software developers…

Agile is a story of snowballing.

Once upon a time (2001) a bunch of software coding geeky people were playing at a conference in Utah, and lamented – if only we could just get on with our job and behave like real humans and work together, we would do everything so much faster and make real cool stuff. And they sat around created what is now known as the Agile Manifesto. It was in essence a statement of culture that creates quality stuff at speed.

The four values of Agile, snowballed to the 12 principles. The software companies that used this manifesto saw amazing results which led project management folk to think if coders can do things faster and better quality, then why can’t we use this on things other than software? And so they did.

Agile snowballed to generic project methodology and was so successful that senior management said well if coders and project teams of all kinds of types can use these principles and improve performance why can’t we use this culture for our organisations?

And the snowball got bigger and bigger. So now we come to a point where communications professionals are introduced to the term agile, often unaware there are four fundamental values that form the foundation of the movement. Let’s unpack them

Value 1: individuals and interactions over processes and tools

This value is lived through the rituals which essential help people to interact – daily stands ups called scrums, and retrospectives where you look back at a defined period of time to work through what worked, what didn’t and how to iterate with that learning.

Visual management is also an example of this value – You communicate ideas incomplete and in big A3 printouts where people walk by – this creates buy in and you encourage the discussion.

Value 2: working software over comprehensive documentation

When we value working software over comprehensive documentation we do away with 50 page communication strategies and plans. It forces us to think about the MVP. Minimal Viable Product – In agile your quality gate is what is the minimum viable product (or process) we can create and ship. How liberating them to think about how communication support in the same way – strip away the fancy stuff and the bells and whistles and critically examine what is the most effective and simple way of communicating this idea?

Another thing is to use collaborative communication tools to just do it, rather than write about it. Use yammer for real time FAQ rather than a perfect document that rarely gets opened. Use trello for fully visible stakeholder issues management to everyone on the team. Ultimately done is better than perfect. Ship it!

Value 3: Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

This value speaks to us of the power of transparency, vulnerability and trust in our communications. We lose the defensiveness of “that’s not our role” and Service Level Agreements and we focus on how can we collaborate with our customers (internal or external) to respond nimbly to issues with our customers, and anticipate what is to come with them.

It means as communicators we need to have the hard conversations about control and sign offs with our managers and sponsors in the organisation. There are great examples of brand teams being able to capitalise on news-jacking because they do not need to get legal / executive sign off – just google the term “news jacking’.

Value 4: Responding to change over following a plan

It has been observed more than once that communications professionals like control. Give it up. To be agile you need to let go of the plan. What makes this easy for us though is data. You must be using communication platforms that gives you real time data (readership, clicks, topics that engage, feedback) that enable you to see what is changing and how you need to respond, rather than ignore and follow your plan.

Perhaps the two biggest challenges for communicators when organisations move towards agile either in projects or at an organisational level 1) you need a supportive culture of trust and empowerment and 2) you need to be good at what you do. Very good. Time protects those who are not good at their game, and agile doesn’t give you that time!

1. Dimaggio, P. J., & Powell, W. W. (1983). The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147–160

Related reading:

http://conversationsofchange.com.au/2015/06/18/agile-change-management/

http://conversationsofchange.com.au/2013/06/30/keeping-agile-with-change-management/

Written by Dr Jen Frahm, Chief Conversation Starter – Conversations of Change

The post Translating ‘agile’ for communicators appeared first on Conversations of Change.

Of Myths, Babies and Bathwater

Back in September 2013 I wrote a myth busting post about the commonly used statement “70% of Change Management projects fail”. It received a strong positive response from readers and had good social reach. When I re-published a version of it on LinkedIn a year ago, the reach grew further and periodically some-one finds it and gets the viral reach moving again. It’s now had nearly 1000 views on LinkedIn which is big for my posts (they average about 300 views). As I noted at the time of first publishing, I was not the first to bust this myth, I was keeping good company.

We’re increasingly seeing more of the myth busting activity in management “science”. Paul Gibbons has about 20 myths busted in his book “The Science of Organisational Change” and some of the really popular myths I have read busted in the last three years  can include:

• The emotional lifecycle of change (modelled on Kubler Ross)
• The 70:20:10 best practice model of learning
• The LSI typologies
• The VAK learning preferences of people
• That all people resist change

And you know what? I’m increasingly getting uncomfortable with the myth busting for a couple of reasons. Primarily, I’m concerned we are throwing babies out with the bathwater.

Here’s what I am thinking.

Too many times I am seeing people refer to the myth with “well that’s just a myth and doesn’t mean anything any more” … with a casual indifference to the creative destruction cycle (e.g. once something is destroyed, something must be created in its place).

I ended my myth busting post with a call to action, and a subsequent post on how we should define success. In his book, Gibbon’s offers insights and challenges to how we think differently. Yet, I am not hearing the conversations evolve along this line. The myth busting is just a slap down. End of conversation.

The other thing that has me uncomfortable is the belief that if science can’t (hasn’t proved) it, it can’t be true. I just don’t buy that – I think there are many things in life that will never be proven scientifically but just feel right or true to us. There are many things that we do not yet know how to study scientifically. AND I know I use a scientific research argument in my 70% post…

An example of this if the emotional lifecycle of change – the Kubler-Ross version.  Those in the “anti” camp will tell you it was never empirically proven as a model of death and dying. They will tell you it paints an overly negative and pessimistic model of change. That it does not account for learning cycles, resilience, well designed change, and assumes that everyone goes through this cycle. Practitioners who use it with clients are frowned upon and whispered about in snarky tones (much like I use with those who use the 70% myth…)

But you know what – I use it frequently. One, because I believe that it is a very valid representation of what I see happening in many organisations. Believing that it is true, does not prevent me including appreciative inquiry approaches or designing for learning cycles and innovation. And two, because it has utility.  It helps me:

• explain what change management does (change management makes the curve skinnier and more shallow)
• and why I need leaders to step up and lead and resource change (you risk under performance while people move through the curve)
• and expectation set / sense making (don’t be alarmed if you see this, or this is great, you can see this group has moved through the curve to the point of experimenting)

And this is where I think we need to move the conversations of myths to – what is the utility of this myth? Why has it taken purchase? If it is so ingrained in our organisational life, what could (should) we retain and use.

I’d shared in an earlier post, that there is a trade-off in the development of good theory. Accuracy, simplicity and generalisability. If you want something that is simple and general (and thus memorable like the  the Kugler-Ross change cycle) it will lack in accuracy. Are myths born of theories that attempt to be general and memorable – a sticky story, ala Jonathan Champ’s comment below?

Last month I was really fortunate to meet up with fellow organisational change management practitioner and blogger Garrett Gitchell in San Francisco, and it was a debate with Garrett (who is anti) about this curve that made me realise we spend so little time on being curious – Really? You use that model or framework? How do you use it? In what way? Garrett is the curious kind, and his questions provoked some good thinking! Instead I fear we are quick to play out the myth busting smack down and dump and run… and throw babies out with the bathwater.

So. A new challenge. When some-one says “oh but that’s a myth”… grab them, hold them in conversation, fuel the creative destructive cycle – “it’s a myth? That’s really interesting – so what are you using now to fill the need it created…”

Jen Frahm

Dr Jen Frahm – Experienced change management practitioner, communications professional, coach and facilitator. Member of Change Agents World Wide network, author of the Transformation Treasure Trove Series 1 & 2 and upcoming book “Conversations of Change – navigating workplace change” .

The post Of myth busting, babies and bathwater appeared first on Conversations of Change.

@jenfrahm

Twitter you’ve changed.

What’s seems like eons ago, I posted on my first 100 days of Twitter. It was actually in February, 2009. Reflecting back on that, it seems like so much has changed (which I guess is to be expected) and so much has not. You can certainly find more change management tweeps now!

Twitter is still a tremendous source of genuine thought leadership, a place to research ideas, meet people who might be great fun at a dinner table or a valuable contribution to your business. You can test ideas, seek input to stuff, and for me it still is my primary source of articles to read.

It has of course changed, twitter grew in usage and the usage of it broadened as people determined how they saw value in it. Sadly, for me, the conversational element of it declined, with mass market usage it became a vehicle for indiscriminate one-way marketing. Indeed, most of those who I got great value out of in my early years, have since moved on and now re snap chatting away.

But you know what? There is no “twitter has changed” without “we have changed, I have changed”. Twitter is a community and we all have a role to play in how it is consumed and how it adds value.

Recently in listening to a Reputation Revolution podcast with Trevor Young (@trevoryoung) and Stanley Johnson (@branddna), the conversation turned to the value of twitter.  Stanley challenged listeners to not be that indiscriminate retweeter – to always add value to something you retweet, not just an endorsement, or “this is great”, but to add to the ideas or challenge the central premise of what you are tweeting about.

This was a terrific call to action and when I looked back at a 30 days of my tweets I could see I was contributing to the vast echo chamber that twitter can be with RTs. Twitter had changed, because I had changed.

Twitter for those who work in Change Management

For those who work in organisational change, the potential benefits of twitter are vast. Some immediate ones are:

• You can find peers who think like you and those that don’t. Both enhance your capability for dialogue and sense making
• Twitters 140 character limit conditions you to communicate well with brevity – a must in change management
• You can research organisational cultures on twitter – the organisations of your clients.
• Follow the right people and twitter shows you the future direction of your change work
• Follow the right people and you can improve your practice, people with change expertise are generous in their sharing.

But one of the challenges in getting value out of twitter is knowing who to follow. So with that in mind, I have 10  tweeps I think you should follow if you are not already.  And I know as soon as I publish this I will think of others!! And will have potentially offended some. Sorry about that :-/

Change Management tweeps to follow

These are tweeps who are mostly consistent in their tweeting, stay pretty much on topic (although there are some related deviations). They are conversational and often make connections for you, when they know your interest. They are primarily content creators – so are doing their own thinking about change, as opposed to curating content (retweeting others), although their content curation is also excellent value. They have also achieved their following organically as opposed to using auto follow bots  or buying followers (from what I can see). I think authenticity is important in social media.

This is not a perfect list – obviously, and I may be hampered by global time zones e.g. there may be terrific tweeps who fit these criteria but do not use auto scheduling of their posts or hashtags and so I miss them in the AEST time zone. We can rectify that in the challenge at the end of the post!

1. Jason Little – tweeting since 2008, author, blogger, podcaster, involved with Spark the Change conferences, agile OCM
2. Dr Jen Frahm – yes, me. You should be following me. Tweeting since 2008, author, blogger, soon to be podcaster, Communications and OCM, smattering of Future of Work and agile OCM, #CAWW
3. Heather Stagl – tweeting since 2009, author, blogger, consultant and podcaster, TEDxer, primarily OCM
4. Caroline Kealey – tweeting since 2009, blogger, developer of the Results Map, OCM and Communication
5. Simon Terry – tweeting since 2009, blogger, Co-founder of International Work out Loud Week, Charter Member of Change Agents World Wide (#CAWW), change with a heavy dose of Future of Work and ESN
6. Gail Severini – tweeting since 2009, blogger, owner the Organisational Change Practitioners group primarily OCM and thought leader in Strategy Execution, exemplary connector
7. Luc Galoppin, tweeting since 2009, founder of Organisational Change Practitioners group, driver of #socialarchitecture in change
8. Change Factory – tweeting since 2009, blogger, primarily OCM
9. Chris Smith – tweeting since 2013, blogger, editor of Change Blog, primarily OCM
10. Lena Emely Ross, only tweeting since 2015, but definitely one to follow – OCM + future trends

And from the #cm2follow challenge

11. Helen Bevan – tweeting since 2010, Chief Transformation Officer with the NHS, #CAWW nominated by @innovate, @simongterry, and @surveyguy2

Top change content curators to follow

And here’s some of the tweeps who only offer value in their tweet stream and I would LOVE to see share some of {more} of their own content.

Paul Thoresen – tweeting since 2010, heavy on IO Psych flavoured change and pure science, owner of I-O Psych network

Rita Meyerson – tweeting since 2010, Doctoral candidate, Accenture consultant, excellent example of conversational, authentic, and adding value to RTs

Concluding tips

So if you are in change management and you want to get more out of your twitter experience here are some thoughts.

• Follow change management conference hashtags like #ACMP2016 and follow those who are tweeting at that
• If you find some-one who is new to twitter and providing good value, tell them so, and signal boost
• When you attend conferences or meetups tweet your insights
• Use thoughtful hashtags #OCM or #changemanagement so people can find your tweets regardless of scheduling
• Create a list of people who give you value and share it – I haven’t been good at this, I’ve just started one here, and will continue to add to it.
• Subscribe to other people’s list and check in on it from time to time to find new people
• Follow the breadcrumbs – when you find some-one who offers good twitter value, see who they are following.
• If you publish something, tweet it! And tweet it more than once, it’s ok – not everyone sees it the first time

A twitter challenge (#CM2follow)

So in signing off, when you read this post, retweet it and add the name (s) of change management tweeps who you think provide great value and use the hashtag  #CM2follow. I’ll update as either a creator or curator if they fit the criteria, and ultimately we’ll collectively make it easier to find good tweeps to follow!

update 31.05.16 – the Tweeples Choice!

So the#CM2follow isn’t exactly yielding tweeps who fit with the criteria I have laid out above, but it has generated tweeps who are AWESOME to follow and offer value more broadly. So without further ado:

Celine Schillinger – change leadership and disrupting industries, #CAWW, TEDxer

Lois Kelly – Rebelling at work! #CAWW

Esther Derby – coaching, workshops, assessments, Agile teams

Paul Batfay – blogger, facilitator and great at back channel tweeting of conferences

Russel Raath – Kotter International consulting

Culture Digs – company culture, HR, leadership

Gotham Culture – leadership, culture, change, management

Keep em coming…

Jen Frahm

Dr Jen Frahm – Experienced change management practitioner, communications professional, coach and facilitator. Member of Change Agents World Wide network, author of the Transformation Treasure Trove Series 1 & 2 and upcoming book “Conversations of Change – navigating workplace change” .

The post 10 Change Management tweeps to follow appeared first on Conversations of Change.

My fellow organisational change practitioners, we need to talk…

Last week fellow change manager Nick Martin and I presented at Agile Australia on Translating OCM for the Agile community. The talk came about as last year when I attended the conference I was surprised at how many of the Agile community did not understand OCM or what a change manager does.

Having just wrapped a great experience of Agile OCM with a Workday implementation, Nick and I thought we had some value to share in a bit of a show and tell of what we did and some broader insights on Agile OCM.

It went really well – but what really surprised me afterwards was I had about a dozen Agile coaches approach me and say things along the line of “yeah, what you did was great and you get it, but we don’t get to work with change managers like you. We hate working with change managers”.

When I asked why there were three primary beefs:

1. Change managers hate change and are control freaks
2. They spend all their time protecting people from agile initiatives
3. They just want us to tick boxes on spreadsheets.

Let’s unpack these a bit…

1. You hate change

I’ve long asserted that change managers often are change managers because they don’t like change and they like to be on the front foot of it rather than the receiving end of it. I know I am, and I see it in a lot of my peers. I’ve also seen that organisational change managers are often appalling bad at future proofing – keeping up with new trends, practices etc and exploring.

Moving to an agile way of working means thinking about control in a different way – one where you can “control” the change process through different means – data, insights, feedback loops, co-creation. The use of build-measure-learn feedback loops and #failfast actually give you much greater control over a change implementation.

It also suggests that a great recruitment question for agile change managers is tell us what the most recent technology is you have embraced and why. If they are stuck for an answer, they are perhaps not well suited for an agile implementation.

As a side note, OCMers don’t take it too personally. I met many Agilists who were surprisingly rigid and close minded (this is the ONLY way to do agile).

2. The protector of the people

We know inherently that our role is to help people through the change process. But I have seen the phenomena where change managers embody that role in a highly protective way, rather than think about how to do you encourage people to adopt, explore, try the changes. It’s a subtle shift, and one that is worth exploring with agile coaches on your initiative. Often in our desire to appease our people (provide more training, more WIIFM, more support) we are actually encouraging learned helplessness in the workforce. Change can often and should often incur discomfort. Protecting people from that discomfort is not necessarily the way to go. You don’t create change!

3. Tick the box.

Great agile is built on the foundations of great OCM (communication, collaboration, co-creation). There shouldn’t be that many disconnects. But along the way, the rise of accreditation paths, commercial change management processes and enterprise Change Management Offices, the change management process has become very ‘tick the box”, produce this artefact. This of course is the antithesis of agile OCM. It sounds like there is a lot of overlaying of waterfall change management processes in to agile initiatives (just do it faster!). This of course is not necessarily the fault of the change manager – it’s indicative of a lack of commitment to agile at an organisational level and a redesigning of the PMO or CMO towards agile practice.

A note on Role Conflict

One of the points that the agile coaches I spoke to did agree with is the potential for role conflict – OCMers often have the same skill set and qualities as Agile coaches and unless there is an explicit conversation about roles and responsibilities there is potential for role conflict. This is because a good organisational change manager has a very broad tool kit and is very flexible. They are the protean project team member – facilitator one day, driver and motivator another, problem solver on the next and protector of the user or person who is on the receiving end of the change. Which is AWESOME if you need these capabilities bolstered and amplified. But the scrum master or agile coach is not aware of this, it can lead to role conflict. It’s worth a conversation at the outset as they often share the same characteristics

So what to do next?

OCMers:

Start educating yourself on Agile, there’s some breadcrumbs in the links below this post. Have a read of the Lean Start Up by Eric Ries. Search for blog posts written by agile folk. Make time to have a coffee with your company’s agilists and learn more about their world. Attend a meetup within the agile community. Attend conferences about Agile. Ask about one or two day course in Agile. Future proof.

If you are operating in an enterprise CMO, have a chat with the powers that be about the direction with regards to Enterprise Agility. There’s nothing wrong with structured processes provided they are fit for purpose and not a barrier to delivery. Similarly, change accreditation is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does not make you a change manager. It is your personal learning starting point, not end destination.

If you are intending to resource up an agile initiative, give me a call. I have a one day workshop which is designed to introduce OCM folk to Agile and Agile OCM practices so they know how to work within the team effectively.

Agilists:

Have a quick look in the mirror – are you totally open to new ideas yourself ; -)

When frustrated with a change practitioner, take a moment to think about who this persons reporting and reward structure is. It may be they are hamstrung by the funding model of project delivery?

Can you offer to take a change practitioner through your boards and explain the purpose?

Patience and persistence – you have been doing this for longer than the OCM folk (in this very specific jargon heavy world), not everybody learns new languages and customs at speed.

But to both of the Agile and OCM communities – what are you doing to understand each other’s world better?

Want to see / hear the full talk? It’s 33 minutes – enjoy

Related reading:

Translating ‘agile’ for communicators

Agile change management?

Keeping ‘Agile’ with Change Management

Jen Frahm

Dr Jen Frahm – Experienced change management practitioner, communications professional, coach and facilitator. Member of Change Agents World Wide network, author of the Transformation Treasure Trove Series 1 & 2 and upcoming book “Conversations of Change – navigating workplace change” .

The post We need to talk about Agile OCM! appeared first on Conversations of Change.

About 12 years I ago I finished my PhD studies in organisations that undergo continuous change. As is the case with every doctoral student there is usually a whole raft of stuff that you are interested in and you try and jam in to the thesis.

One of the things I was really curious about was how people respond to change, and particularly when that change is relentless. It struck me from my work life, that continuously communicating change doesn’t make things better – it drives anxiety and fatigue.

So that was part of my interest. The other was a conscious rejection of the term resistance – it seemed to be just blaming people for not liking the change, without any consideration as to whether that was valid or not. It felt like resistance was a catchall phrase that you could bundle up every response to change that was not overwhelmingly positive.

I was really excited to come across Kristin Piderit’s article about Rethinking Resistance and Recognizing Ambivalence in 2000 and her plea for a broader consideration of responses to change. Further exploration in the critical management theory area offered more reassurance that I was not alone.

First contact

I believe it was Pettigrew, Ferlie and McKee in 1992, who first used the metaphor of receptive versus non receptive with respect to strategic change in the health system and thus the term change receptivity was proposed as a more value neutral way of looking at how people receive change.

In their research, they found eight features of receptivity that are accompanied by an acceleration of change.

1. Quality and coherence of policy analytics and process
2. Availability of the key people leading change
3. Environmental pressure
4. Supportive organisational culture
5. Effective managerial – clinical relations
6. Co-operative inter-organisational networks
7. Simplicity and clarity of goals and priorities
8. A good fit between the locale and the change agenda

(Side note: Anyone want to run the political elections of UK, US and Australia  through those 8 features to analyse the public’s receptivity to change?!)

In later work Huy (1999) defines change receptivity as an interpretive, attitudinal state (both cognitive and emotional) to accept the need for proposed change and notes that it is both a state and a process. The notion of change receptivity being a process highlighted the challenges for those in the change management field – how quickly one can shift from a state of opened to change to change cynicism.

And so enamoured with the concept – I snuck change receptivity into the title of my thesis.

To now

And promptly forgot about it until recently this little gem of an article – The Resistance Retirement Party popped up in my feeds. It was great to see Gilbert Kruidenier resurrect the concept – and I wonder if it will have more purchase now?

So quicksticks – head over to Gilbert’s blog and have a read and let us know your thoughts on the topic!

Jen Frahm

Dr Jen Frahm – Experienced change management practitioner, communications professional, coach and facilitator. Member of Change Agents World Wide network, author of the Transformation Treasure Trove Series 1 & 2 and upcoming book “Conversations of Change – navigating workplace change” .

The post On change receptivity appeared first on Conversations of Change.