Is Change Implementation the new frontier for change agents?

How do we make change stick? This is a big question for any leader of any type of organisation.

Typically the top team make the strategy for the organisation. It’s no surprise that they are also the ones who get rewarded on the success of the strategy. Whilst developing strategy is an art, some of the best plans either never get done or fail during the execution. There is often an enormous gap between the plan and who and how it’s going to be implemented.

The secret of successful change implementation lies in engaging all parts of the organisation.

Let’s start with the formal structures. The formal organisation is expressed in the organisational charts. Formal structures sustain the organisation through regulatory compliance, governance and control the purse strings.

The informal organisation is based on the reality of day-to-day interactions. Informal structures develop because people find new and better ways of doing things which are easier and save time. Patterns of interaction are shaped by friendships, practice, interest groups and other relationships. Most new ideas and innovations emerge from the informal structures.

Here’s where things come unstuck. Just because strategy is made at the top and there is a management structure, doesn’t mean that the formal organisation is the best way to roll out strategy. Organisations that implement change top down through the hierarchy will inevitably fail. Top down doesn’t work because of egos, push back, politics, ‘not my idea’, blame, over worked managers, poor communication, lack of buy in etc.

Even if the strategic plan is a work of art, the quickest way to kill off change is push it down through the hierarchy. The biggest hindrance with top down implementation is that it fails to take the informal organisation into account.

Implementation is holistic Sustainable change is only possible when the formal and informal structures are fully engaged in the change process. Everyone who is a stakeholder in the game wants to be part of the action.

There are champions and supporters in the informal organisation that are both passionate and better equipped to take change implementation to the next level than often burned-out and overworked managers.

The role of the change agent is therefore a political one bridging the competing needs and wants of the formal and informal structures. Without such a bridge change is even more painful than wants be and will almost certainly fail.

I call the process of including and engaging all levels Collaborative Change Implementation.

Here are the 3 stages of Collaborative Change Implementation:

- Alignment Stage

- Traction Stage

- Integration Stage

I’ll write more about these stages in future editions of Changing the Game. The practices and tools for implementing successful change are incorporated in the UFacilitate Suite: QUEST Change Track and QUEST Dynamic Meetings www.tincanlearning.com/tincan_u_facilitate.htm

Peter Senge - The Next Discipline

Peter Senge - The Next Discipline

Abstract of an interview with Peter Senge by Mike Hanley

Peter Senge wants to save the earth. Now, with the rise of sustainability and corporate social responsibility, Senge thinks it’s time for a global awakening of consciousness. unless companies understand the impact they have on the world, and use that understanding to create a deep and lasting sustainability, we are all, literally, doomed. Senge compares modern corporations to a cancer, expanding blindly, Businesses, he says, cannot afford the kind of narrow ideologies that have driven them in the past. They need to engage with other parts of society with a systems view in order to survive.

The idea is to create a world that is no longer “governed primarily by habit”. Senge argues that habit prevents people, companies and societies from making radical change. Systems thinking is a way of imposing a wider perspective on our everyday actions and he has developed a number of tools, one of which is the concept of a systems archetype – a way of viewing patterns of interdependence.

The art of conversation is something that people spend their lives developing. Fifty or a hundred years ago, what did people do at the end of the day? They talked, they sought out each other’s perspectives. In real conversation, we not only discover each other, we also discover ourselves. Whereas when one person ‘tells’ another they are making a demand for obedience.

Senge’s research is based on the principle that fundamental change happens because people decide to make it happen, and organisations can inhibit or enable that change. He is convinced that real changes are created by maybe 5 to 10 per cent of people and organisations over time.

Published in AFR Boss Magazine August 2005. Read full article:

http://www.afrboss.com.au/magarticle.asp?doc_id=24915&listed_months=1

The Power of Negative Thinking and Negative Feeling

By Steve Wells

Numerous new age and pop psychology authors and so-called experts insist that you should always frame your goals and affirmations in the positive because your unconscious mind “only thinks in positives”. So instead of thinking that you want to “lose weight” you are supposed to focus on being “fit and healthy at my desired weight”.

A similar pronouncement that is very popular right now since the publication of The Secret is that you are supposed to always feel good, because all negative emotions are vibrationally bad! So if you are feeling bad then you should immediately find something that makes you feel good to focus on…

This is going to shock many of you: Many very successful people regularly use what may appear to you to be negative statements and negative motivation with extremely positive results! And many many people can trace the day they turned their life around to the day they experienced a negative emotion.

How can this be? Because the key to the power of an affirmation is not in the statement itself, but in the energy it evokes and the actions it leads to. And all of our feelings have a place, and can ultimately lead us to wholeness if we allow them.

Let’s look at these one at a time…

read the whole article

http://www.eftdownunder.com/blog/?p=8