Leading change

Leading change in an organisation can often feel like an elastic band.  You push hard to stretch it and when you stop pushing it goes back to it's original state. Why is that? People form habits - new employees quickly identify what are the social norms in a company  and adopt those habits.  Organisations have collective memories. If you want to fundamentally change the behaviour of an organisation you either need to start small or shock the organisation - bankruptcy, mass redundancies are the obvious shocks to a business that can trigger alternative behaviours. So let's look at the ying and the yang of change.  Change creates consequences - some intended - some unintended. Objectives, Goals, Targets and Measurement So you want to create some change.  Well a classic management technique to drive change is put it in people's objectives.  Well formed objectives follow the SMART acronym.  Specific, Measurable,  Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. So objective

Understanding how a piece of new technology relates to an organisation is extremely  useful.  If it's an evolutionary change, replacing something existing - it's pretty straight forward. However it's never been done before then it's inherently viewed as higher risk. In Professor Eddie Obeng’s book All Change!: The Project Leader’s Secret Handbook,he provides a model for classifying projects by type. Eddie introduced an incredibly simple map to allow you to figure it out. I love the idea so much that I’ve extended Eddie’s concept and overlaid project methodologies on top of it. Here is Eddie’s original map: Painting By Numbers are those childhood picture kits where you match the numbered paint colours to corresponding numbered areas on the pre-printed canvas. It’s a very simple, almost foolproof, way to create a painting. Fog is pretty self explanatory.  If you are unclear about What needs to be delivered and you’re unclear about How to deliver it, then you a