Before Shift Happens
(1) CommentIn my last post, I talked about the term “paradigm shift.” Very simply, we can say it’s “a fork in the road that opens up a completely new way of perceiving, thinking, and taking action—with no turning back.” I also said that the term has become part of our slang, and that its real meaning has often been diluted more
ChangeThinking.net
©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Lessons Learned About Building Commitment to Change
After three-and-a-half decades of being a professional change practitioner, I’ve seen my share of successful and unsuccessful attempts to generate enough commitment to reach full realization. If there is one thing I’m sure of it’s that the necessary momentum and critical mass of commitment toward desired outcomes is not easy to come by. Below are some of the more important lessons that have affected my practice.
1. The commitment process unfolds at both intellectual and emotional levels.
Usually, intellectual commitment precedes emotional commitment. Most people can grasp the implications of a change at a cognitive level fairly quickly. However, they often find that they need more time to make the necessary emotional adjustments.
This split-level commitment can produce confusion, mixed signals, and more
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©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
What Have We Learned About Learning?
(1) CommentEnlightenment isn’t about knowledge you learn, it’s about knowledge you turn into. ~Deepak Chopra
In my opinion, learning is one of the indispensable bedrocks of our craft. I layer many concepts, tools, and techniques on top of this core element, but fostering learning—my own and my clients’—is at the heart of what I do.
Recently, though, I realized that I haven’t been paying enough attention to what I’ve “learned from learning.” This prompted me to go back and reexamine a variety of learning models that I’ve used over the years and ask myself to what extent I apply, by design and with forethought, the concepts or tenets from these frameworks. I didn’t merely ask, “Have the models influenced my thinking or impacted my actions?” but “Am I intentional and mindful about their application?” My answers varied from model to model—sometimes it was encouraging, but mostly it was sobering. more
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©2011 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
One Practitioner’s Art Is Another’s Science
The science of change execution is for the domesticated parts of our work; the art covers the untamed aspects. Both are essential to creating the value we promise clients. To reach the proper balance between the two, however, we must have a deeper understanding of their distinctions.
In any profession, both science and art have two levels of application: more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
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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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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Finding the Balance Between Logic and Creativity
There are clear signature patterns that indicate whether an initiative will succeed or fail. An experienced change agent who recognizes and properly addresses them can greatly influence a project’s outcome:
- The characteristics of success can be infused into the implementation process from the beginning and encouraged throughout execution.
- The dynamics and behaviors associated with failure can be avoided altogether—or at least anticipated, detected, and mitigated as much as possible when signs begin to surface.
Change agents who practice their craft with the proper balance of art and science foster success patterns and minimize failure patterns. In doing so, they bring to bear a powerful competitive advantage for their clients.
However, finding that balance is a challenge.
Professional change facilitation resides on a continuum, with “art” and “science” at the poles. Our “craft” is represented by a sliding point that can reside at any position between the two extremes. Movement toward or away from either end of the continuum shouldn’t be based on more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
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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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
How to Get Unstuck
(1) Comment“You don’t drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there.” ~Edwin Louis Cole
In my last post, I wrote about what happens when initiatives become “stuck.” Challenges and obstacles to implementation are a regular and expected occurrence in any change initiative. They become problematic, however, when the attending change agent doesn’t have a plan he or she believes in, or even an idea, of how to solve the problem.
There is a framework practitioners can use to determine how to get unstuck, regardless of the nature of the desired outcome, or the implementation approach used (Kotter, Bridges, Anderson, Prosci, Conner, etc.), or the specific actions they call into play. This post provides a way to look at a generic intervention process and how to apply it to any change or execution methodology. more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
Patterns Aren’t Created, They Are Revealed
We don’t own patterns, yet we are all responsible for them.
Some of us might be fortunate enough to be the first to observe and document a pattern, but we didn’t invent it, we uncovered it. Adjusting to the unfamiliar has been part of the human experience since the beginning of time. Any change-related pattern we use was in play long before any of us started practicing this craft. And even though some of us have fashioned our own particular way of articulating transition dynamics (nomenclature, principles, guidelines, axioms) the basic patterns can’t be commandeered by any of us.
So, we can’t take credit for conceiving the patterns of change, but because we did discover them, we have a responsibility more
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©2010 Conner Partners, Inc.
www.connerpartners.com
