How exactly does one change an organization?
Projects involve change. While our firm uses analogies to GPS systems to describe how we succeed, we also understand change management – very deeply. I recently ran across a puff piece from Forbes that alleged to share “Three Key Principles of Change Management.” To give you an idea of how “puffy” this was, and to save four minutes of your life by summarizing it, here are those principles:
1) Rise to the occasion
2) Recast the role of project managers
3) Foster a supportive change culture
Wow.
I really like that last one – a “key principle of change management is to foster a supportive change culture.” A key principle of living is to open your mouth and breathe.
Change management is too critical to leave to seemingly AI-authored “three tips to lose 20 pounds tomorrow” articles. I have accumulated a number of excellent resources that guide us in helping others navigate changes that are inevitable with projects. Here are four of my favorites.
1) Influencer by Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, et al
This program contains specific steps to analyze and plot out a course of change. The workshops were excellent, full of research as to why the steps are what they are and practical examples of the method in action. I’ve used this process to help people acquire new behaviors when a company elected to reduce voicemail length to 1 minute. Worked beautifully.
2) Strategic Doing by Ed Morrison, Scott Hutcheson, et al
Just published, this book offers 10 skills for something called Agile Leadership. Is your strategy stagnant? Is it just sitting on the shelf in a report, in a 60 slide PowerPoint file, in your Marketing spiel? Strategic Doing is a process where disparate stakeholders get together to align on common vision, share resources and take immediate actions to implement a strategy. It is a high-powered collaboration model to “unstick” the most “stuck” organizations around.
3) Designing Organizations for High Performance by Dave Hanna
This is admittedly my personal favorite. Hanna provides a model to assess and/or design an organization to get the results you want to get. “All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get,” he says early on in his book. I particularly like his pragmatic “take” on culture as “observable behaviors” and on the cause-effect relationships of an organizational system on those behaviors. After all, behaviors beget results!
4) Process Consultation by Edgar Schein
MIT-product Schein’s work on organizational culture models pre-dates the above resources. We still find it valuable as it helps us understand the nuances behind change. His fundamental three-stage approach to managing change is deep and practical: 1) Unfreeze; 2) Change through cognitive restructuring; 3) Refreeze. We find it to be a terrific foundation for any change effort.
Be forewarned, you’ll find no puff pieces here. No “Key tips to survive rain – open an umbrella” level of insight.
But I know there are other good change management models out there as well. I’d love to hear what you’ve found helpful in the comments below! And visit us at GPS for more project insights.
