‘Lasting capacity’ must be a keyword for change management and its methods. The issue today is less about how to go from A to Z, and more how, in doing so, the project, programme, process etc, is or is not, building long term capacity for change.
Methods take you from A to Z but not necessarily build any learning capacity, other than perhaps paying some lip service. Platforms, however, include a method but ‘leave behind’ a capacity, new competences, new ways of working and perhaps a new style of leadership.
What we have learnt from many years of Viral Change™ is precisely that. Outstanding clients were always the first to point it out: now we know how to work peer-to-peer, how to use the informal organization, how to do storytelling, how to identify and use influencers, how to distinguish and manage behaviours, and, ultimately, how our leadership model got small and we needed to grow it in order to integrate ‘backstage leadership’, for example.
There you are, Santa got them all, when in reality we just wanted to go from A to Z.
Today, ‘change methods’ that do not focus on legacy, and that still are presented and sold as the mechanics of going from A to Z, are not worth the money.
Once the objectives of the ‘change’ has been declared achieved (perhaps a reorganization, a deployment of values, a customer-centric change programme), if all we can say is that those goals have been achieved, but we have little to say about what has changed forever in the operating system of the organization, or what we have learnt, we have, sorry to say, failed miserably.
Reaching the (change) destination is a pass, a baseline. Learning about the journey and establishing a long term platform for change (change-ability) is the real goal.
We must leave behind more than an expensive set of powerpoints and dozens, if not hundreds of meetings, powered by workshopsterone.
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