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 Change Management consultants are often thrown into a complicated mix of programs, projects and initiatives like a paratrooper in a war zone. This certainly is not my recommended way to engage a CM practitioner. It is however, one of the best opportunities for leveraging the external resource.
Change happens so fast, and is happening so fast that there is rarely the time or the ability to focus on connections, hidden crossovers and similarity. Externals have a knack for seeing overlaps, hidden threads across functions and replication. That has two advantages for a client- on the business side it
Continue reading Parachuting in- External Advantages
The keynote here emphasized the future in relation to the past. It talked of the path to get here and what today and the future looks like. It pushed aside previous approaches, and important for me it did not acknowledge previous assumptions as levers for change. Things like resistance, change curves, Kubler-Ross etc. They were all illustrated as pieces of the change knowledge puzzle. They, in my words, are the frame of the puzzle.
What did the rest of the first days speakers follow with?
All of the assumptions….
Change takes time; even changing the management of change.
Technorati Tags: Change, change management, Garrett Gitchell, vision to work
One theme running through the conference this week is the Change Funding Gap.
There is a massive disparity between what it costs to guide change effectively and what is budgeted for. The knowledge of the complexities and the time needed for change and the American, at least, insistence on short term timing.
The time needed for change
This is as much a factor of the period it takes for individuals to move to a change as it is for filling in all the blanks of the process. My own critical push here is that many of the firms and
Continue reading The Change funding gap
I am spending the beginning of the week at the Prosci 2010 Change Management conference. The start is good since our keynote speaker ————— framed his talk around the history change management based on the original models, his book and all the additional “boxes” that have been added since (the boxes being more in the models for either information or marketing and differentiation for that particular firm or person). That is a good start for me personally because it is not about the models as I have said before.
What it is about is the interpretation and implementation of
Continue reading A room full of Change Agents
When you body-surf there is a spot right when the wave catches up to your swimming pace that you get lifted, almost tipped over, unless you are swimming fast enough to catch it. And then on you go- toward the beach.
The wave and what it brings is the past, the sweet spot of staying ahead is the exact present and the future lies on the beach. Wave after wave after wave.
It is one cool continuum.
Every moment is one of those spots for change.
Technorati Tags: Big
Continue reading Past, present and into the future- over and over and over
A fictitious situation-
A big company buys a smaller company.
Big company lets small company retain name and separateness (in location and operation).
Later, much later, big company decides it is time for, now viewed as little company, to assimilate (and that is a nice way of saying it).
Big company has done lots of functional one off initiatives, but never tied them together, or illuminated one individual one.
So transformational change hat on- this is an excellent opportunity to call out the use of change management, use that leverage to model horizontal work for the organization as
Continue reading and a little more Leverage with Change Management
Maybe it is my perspective, but few of the engagements I come across for change management are truly stand alone. I would venture to say that every initiative in some way touches the whole. Or at least ventures out of its original vertical function in a horizontal (or diagonal) direction.
Time, awareness and history stand in the way.
Time because timelines are rushed and it is not yet common practice to bring in change management at the idea. Time because making horizontal connections takes some, in fact a lot. Time because it is measured by task rather than
Continue reading Leveraging Change Management
A question from a client leveraging change management for a merger- “What is the most important thing for us to keep in mind?”.
Let’s use a sugar into coffee (or tea or water) analogy.
The coffee is the parent entity or merger; the sugar the “mergee”. The parent company protected by the strength of the cup will stay intact; the company bought will, at some point depending on the purity of the sugar, dissolve into the coffee.
The sugar people may see ruin (an old fashioned CM consultant will call this resistance- big mistake, see almost any post
Continue reading M & A Change Management- a little like sugar in your coffee
My oxymoron for the day.
Because of the nature of change (and good innovative business for that matter), as soon as something is defined as a best practice it is probably no longer best. And will quickly become too practiced.
Disclosure- I have never liked this term. It tends to be either an internal organic way to justify status quo or an external effort to find the mix that a client will pay for. The first I see all the time now in organizations; the second is a common way to start a firm (and I can think of
Continue reading Change Management Best Practices
I have touched on this before. The revisit is because one it is hitting me personally (stakeholders I feel your angst) and two it just hits home for what I think is the core problem in a lot of change initiatives- Assumptions.
There are so many things in life that to understand, follow through with or participate in require shared understanding. With the need for speed in shared understanding comes assumptions. If we start “from the same spot” we can move forward faster. If you already know something at a certain level I can then teach you the next
Continue reading Assumptions, CSS and Change Management
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