All tagged change management
Adam Lawrence’s The Wheel of Sustainability: Engaging and Empowering Teams to Produce Lasting Results is a practical primer on his concept for implementing Lean-oriented projects, primarily in a manufacturing and shop-floor environment.
Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling was written back in 1988. Does it still make sense? The obvious thing for me in re-reading and discussing the book with some colleagues is that the concepts apply more broadly than only sales environments. In any large change project, the change agents are always selling - working to make the change happen and make that change become an embedded way of operating.
This reading’s key takeaway: Practice!
My review of David McRaney’s How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion, which I picked up on recommendation from a colleague. The simplest summary of the book is that “changing minds” is much more about opening people to new thoughts and experiences than it is berating them with new procedures or facts.
A lot of people struggle to identify the “real” problem they have. Some thoughts about the typical challenges with problem statements and ways around them.
“When Your Team’s Path Forward Isn’t Clear, Carve It” by Adam Kahane takes the idea of “carving” a solution through its paces. I like this way of framing the approach, even if the blog post doesn’t provide specifics (leave that for his book).
The Theory of Constraints community has a number of useful tools to help people think through change: the Layers of Resistance and the Change Matrix. Lars Axelsen posted a nice article combining these two ways of thinking, Change must address reservations!
When bringing a new way of doing things to organizations, we often get enamored with the physical or technical changes that support the new way of working. Surely if we have this THING, then we must be doing THAT.
But does this really mean that we have changed?
Organizational change requires some of the obvious checklist items, but lasting organizational change requires that the operation and way of doing things. It's a shift from ticking checkboxes to doing things in a new way.
Change management is always an entertaining topic. It usually starts with some version of "they don't want to change" and then variations on how to make it work. Thinking about it a little more, it's not that people always resist, but there is something about the change that doesn't work for them or maybe they don't understand. Maybe it's time to step back and take a look at their perspective.
April K. Mills' "Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials" is a distillation of several change management approaches into clear and enjoyable approach to change.
Kevin Kohls had a great talk on the topic of The "Bad Luck" Obstacle - Management Churn. Essentially, he is asking the question of how people who do TOC (or any other) implementations deal with the fact of life in organization: management moves around.
"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953.
"One-time events create change like dieting only on your birthday and expecting to lose weight."
"Pride and Joy" by Alex Knight is a Theory of Constraints business novel about a hospital in chaos and a way of thinking that can help move beyond the chaos to a truly patient-centric, high quality environment.
Charles Duhigg's The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business has a lot of familiar material in it. Duhigg puts it together in a compelling story that talks about why we get stuck in ruts - in personal life and in business life - and the paths to breaking out of the rut.
Blue Ocean Strategy is a ten-year-old book that is still relevant today. How do you craft a business strategy that moves you to a new mode of operation - away from the competition and setting your own destiny? I also see a lot of Viable Vision in this book.
After the TOC ICO conference, I picked up Yuji Kishira's Wa - Transformation Management by Harmony, based on a conversation with him and other attendees. It is a fun take on Theory of Constraints, change management and other topics.
Steve Holt had some fun with his talk at TOCICO this year that he created out of conversations with April K Mills of Engine for Change. This time he suggests create policy buffers to protect change efforts.
I read Bob Sproull's _Epiphanized_ in just a few days and found it told a gripping story of TOC transformation, even if the writing style was sometimes off-putting.
We need to do a better job of helping our colleagues - and helping ourselves - see the whole picture when a change is at hand. What are people really trying to DO?