What Role Does Culture Play During Change?
(2) CommentsCulture—“the way things are around here”—is often beneficial to organizations during periods of relative stability. After all, culture reinforces itself. It operates in ways that ensure its own continuity, which is a good thing when all is well. When we introduce change (a disruption to or intrusion on what people expect), however, the culture works hard to defeat it, and to maintain the status quo. Bigger change means more disruption and even more intrusion, and the culture will work even harder to defeat it. more
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Putting It All Together—The Mechanics of Capacity Management
Previous postings in this series have highlighted certain aspects of capacity management:
- Attending to the effects of future shock: resistance, results, encroachment, credibility
- The mental, emotional, and physical energy required to make adjustments in expectations
- The difference between capacity and resources
- Operating in The Zone
- Calculating change demand and measuring remaining capacity
In this final posting, we’ll look at the mechanics of the actual capacity management process and explore how it can be used to balance the demands of change with the capacity that remains. more
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Five Lenses for Viewing Patterns of Change
We’ve been talking about lenses that practitioners can use to identify patterns, and to help sponsors deal with change. I’m sure there are lenses you pay most attention to, and I encourage you to share them here. I’ll tell you about five I often rely on:
- The importance placed on matching challenge and commitment to change
- The importance placed on the intent of the change
- The importance placed on sponsors
- The importance leaders place on agents
- Leaders’ understanding of the nature of organizational change success
Each of these lenses reveals a series of mindset and behavior patterns.
Here are a few representative examples of the success mindset patterns more
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Use Mindset and Behavior Patterns to Your Advantage
(2) Comments
Once you understand that a specific mindset and its associated behaviors can either facilitate or impede success, you have a level of insight that can be truly invaluable to a sponsor who is less familiar with these kinds of change dynamics.
Mindsets are made up of frames of reference (the ways individuals make sense of situations) that lead to the formation of priorities (the relative importance of various options). Shared mindsets within an organization serve as the foundations of culture and ultimately lead to common patterns of behavior.
Successful change requires a specific mindset that is shared among key players as they perform their respective roles. This “success mindset” reflects the more
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