The Importance of Commitment in Change
(1) Comment“There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.” ~Author Unknown
There are so many aspects to being a professional change practitioner that it’s easy to lose sight of the fundamentals that comprise our role. It’s OK to add all the bells and whistles we want, but at the same time, we must deliver on the basics. One way to think about the bottom line of our function is that, as change facilitators, more
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Using Errors to Our Advantage
In the last two postings, we discussed the fact that mistakes are inevitable during major change—essential to the learning process, and an inherent part of transition itself. We also distinguished failures (falling short of expectations without learning) from corrective experiences (missed goals that lead us to learn how to avoid or minimize the same error in the future).
There are clear patterns displayed by people who view missing the mark as a corrective experience versus a failure. 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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The Intent Architect—Guardian of Outcomes
To avoid the symptoms of intent mismanagement (see my last post) and keep the intent’s line of sight in place (clarity, expression, and integrity), critically important initiatives must be supported by an intent architect.
The intent architect is responsible for helping the initiating sponsor maintain the integrity of the intent as the transformation is executed. He or she is the guardian of the desired end state. The role includes facilitating intent clarity with the leadership team, helping to communicate it to others, and interpreting it for the various individuals and groups involved in implementation, as well as for the leadership team itself. more
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Symptoms of the Need for Intent Management
Organizations often succeed in installing change, but find it’s more difficult to achieve realization—the true intent. Most of the time, the results of key initiatives are:
- Unrecognizable: They bear little resemblance to the original vision and goals.
- Underdelivered: They yield less than the intended result.
- Overdelivered: They achieve more than the intended result—usually with time and cost implications that limit sustainability. On the face of it, overdelivery doesn’t sound so bad, but it can actually be worse than underdelivery when the final solution proves to be too expensive to maintain. Overdelivery sets up high expectations, which can often lead to abandonment of the solution.
When any of these outcomes occurs, a gap exists between what was expected and what was produced. Senior management’s response is usually more
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The Path of Intent Management
(1) CommentIn my last post, I said that, as practitioners, we sometimes devote more time getting people to change than we spend on the change itself, and that having a complete, concise, understandable, and compelling statement of intent is critically important to achieving change success. I’d like to say more here about managing the intent process.
When important projects are not orchestrated effectively, they sometimes melt down or never get off the ground. More often, what happens is more
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Weaving Science With Art—Over and Over Again
We all unfolded differently in our paths toward proficiency, yet we each found our own understanding regarding the relationship between science and art. In this post, I’ll share how I have seen these two elements impact the way practitioners develop.
In my years of facilitating change and coaching change agents, I’ve seen people use many different routes to become skilled practitioners. Some approaches are much more effective than others more
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Our Craft Is a Blend of Art and Science
“Art and science have their meeting point in method.” ~Earl Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
Fundamental organizational shifts are partly chaotic and partly predictable. We have to be able to plan for and address the known aspects of change and at the same time acknowledge and deal with the inevitable puzzles, contradictions, and conundrums that arise.
Think of the execution of organizational change as a continuum. At one extreme, it is a stable process where we manage events by applying set rules and formulas. Here, a “paint by numbers” or cookbook solution would be acceptable. At the other end, it is a more
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