‘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 became 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’ have 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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Join our first, free webinar, The Myths of Change [1], TOMORROW – 18th June, with Leandro Herrero and his team. Register NOW! [2]
Traditional management and a great deal of academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of ‘change programmes’.
The first in our series of webinars will debunk uncontested assumptions in this area and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this debunking of myths is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment.
To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations, particularly in the areas of change and transformation. We must abandon change as something imposed in favour of people becoming true agents. Organizations that have mastered this have been in ‘the new normal’ for a while!
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Out Now! – The Flipping Point [3] – Deprogramming Management by Leandro Herrero – his new booking challenging the trend for adopting absurd management ideas. Management needs deprogramming. This book of 200, tweet-sized, vignettes, looks at the other side of things – flipping the coin. It asks us to use more rigour and critical thinking in how we use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago.
