Category Archives: Change Story

Time to reflect

November 20, 2012 12:59 am /

“In today’s fast paced world… time for reflecting, rather than doing is extremely scarce. It is very difficult for people to set aside sufficient time from their busy schedules to reflect on their work”  (C.L McDowell, A. Nagel, SM Williams, C. Canepa. 2005. MIT University).

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As the year speeds to a close and Christmas decorations are being strung, hold your horses for just a moment before you leave on holiday, file the old year and start furiously filling up the new year diary. It’s important to reflect on the chapter that’s about to end. Maybe you’re in the middle of a long-term change programme that runs over a few years; maybe you had a few new changes delivered into your business area this year, maybe you’ve just kicked off a new project or series of projects… Wherever you and your organisation are at, it’s essential to learn from what you have already done  – to reflect, review, and re-position yourself and your team, in order to have a greater impact, and to ensure that that which you are doing is still appropriate.

“Reflection is a key tool for learning, to increase the ability to improve performance.  It also increases self-awareness, and supports successful progression in workplace contexts.  Reflection is the ability to look back at experiences, question them in greater depth, and to make sense of them in order to repeat what worked well and to learn from mistakes” (University of Northampton web – http://www.northampton.ac.uk).

Reflection on the past year’s experiences will help you gain deeper insights to guide future action and planning. So as your team’s work is winding down and you’re supposing everyone is probably too tired to think, I would challenge and urge you to set aside some serious reflection time before everyone downs tools, and get together in a workshop or meeting context (preferably with an independent facilitator) and reflect on the past year:

  • the goals achieved,
  • the changes and their impacts,
  • the benefits realised,
  • the misaligned expectations,
  • the lived values,
  • the forgotten values,
  • the thorns in your sides,
  • the losses and pains,
  • the victories to celebrate,
  • The learning themes.

Unpack the learning with purpose and resolve, pull people into dialogues and storytelling about what they’ve experienced, what it really meant, what worked, what didn’t, what needs answering and what needs changing. It is very hard to work with the tacit, presumed and unsaid, so you need to all open up, say it out loud and have the innovative conversations.

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Without purposeful and focused reflection and dialogue, valuable knowledge and learning can remain untapped and therefore unprofitable. It’s really not enough to go around the table at your year-end team lunch and ask people to summarise their year in one quirky and clichéd sentence, because as a leader that’s looking to effectively and sustainably lead the change in future, you’re going to need more than that to really understand where people are at, and where the ship is collectively headed. People need to be walked through reflection, need to know that it’s okay to share and be encouraged to really listen to others perspectives on the same experiences, and agree what is right for the group to take forward. Encourage innovation and creativity. As leaders we model what our team is allowed to express and what’s taboo, so be open to feedback, not attached to your specific outcomes, and encourage expression and openness from others.

You’ve heard it said that we don’t know what we don’t know – well we also don’t know what we know until we take the time to reflect. Remember that intended benefits that didn’t get realised or delivered as promised are expensive, but what adds to the perpetual bill is not learning the lessons.

For greater impact, agility and sustainability going into the new year, create the space for your team to really reflect, and let the reflection sharpen your focus before the dawn of the next exciting chapter.

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PS: Some questions for you to choose from for your co-created conversation menu:

  • What were the memorable moments, and why?
  • What did we achieve, and what did we set out to achieve?
  • Are our projects delivering on intended benefit?
  • What value are we seeking to create and for whom?
  • What are we trying to do, what is our mandate?
  • What business purposes are we serving and why is this beneficial?
  • What are our critical goals?
  • What are the needs and problems are we facing?
  • What are the potential opportunities and solutions?
  • How are we networking and collaborating internally and externally?
  • How are we partnering with other departments, disciplines, suppliers, customers?
  • What is our communication strategy?
  • Are we inclusive?
  • How are we helping stakeholders and communities to effectively change?
  • How do we keep our eye on the big picture, yet get to the details and administration?
  • Do we have strong sponsorship on our projects and programmes?
  • Have we lost good people to other organisations, and what can we do to better engage going forward?
  • How can we be more agile?
  • Are we doing too much, is it all delivering benefit?
  • How can we do more by doing less?
  • How can we speed up the decision making process?
  • Are we better, more mature, more effective, wiser than when we started? Why? Why not?

Change Story offers an in-house facilitated Reflection Workshop, which provides powerful insights and reflection about your team’s efforts, so that you can make a more focused and strategic impact going forward.

 

Posted in: Change Management, Change Story, Leadership, OD, Project Management, Workshop Facilitation

Execute strategy through storytelling

September 26, 2012 10:02 am /

Organisational executives and leaders need to engage with the power of storytelling. Stories get people interested. They communicate the purpose behind what you are doing in a vivid way, in order to foster shared meaning. 

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Remember in a previous post I mentioned that “essentially re-socialisation is at the heart of change”, well then consider that stories have a lot of social content, and if mentally stimulating these stories lead to simulation of social experience, and the ability to infer the mental states of others (Raymond A Mar from the University of Toronto).

And we can further pull people into the change conversation by inviting them to contribute anecdotes and threads of their own to the story-line.

But if you keep your strategy locked behind the boardroom door, and don’t effectively engage and tap into the teams and people that can help turn that strategy into reality, then your strategy may remain a closed book.

Also people don’t always grasp statistics, report data or bullet points in complex often tedious presentations, but stories are easily assimilated because they are cross-cultural and capture the minds-eye. The human brain is hard-wired for stories, and they have the power to instantly stir up emotion and relatedness.

So story is a more inclusive way of explaining and presenting the strategy because everyone loves stories! Think about how teachers struggle to control mischievous children all day long but come story time at the end of the day: all sit quietly of their own will and listen with great curiosity as the storyteller evokes their imaginations. Think of the great politicians and leaders of our time, and how they used the power of stories to rally for action and change.

And so, you can be a better leader of your people by getting the strategy out of the boardroom and spreading it through the hallways of your organisation. And you can do this best by telling it and building it through story. Tell it with purpose and meaning. Tell it with passion. And plan it – have a beginning, middle and end. Who are the key role players? What’s in it for them? Explain how you see it unfolding from your perspective, and then open the floor to your community, and change your role at that point from storyteller to story-builder by inviting the contributions of others to build a much richer, deeper and co-created narrative.

Strategic storytelling is a way to translate strategy into something more tangible that sticks in people’s minds, gets people talking, gets people motivated and creates a common narrative that all can associate with and work towards.

Need help with your strategic storytelling?
Contact caroline@changestory.co.za

Posted in: Change Management, Change Story, Communication, Leadership

Sincere pursuit or hit & run?

August 20, 2012 12:08 pm /

I believe it is important to think of change management as an imperative philosophy that you and your business or department take on board and adopt holistically across the project lifecycle, rather than the single workshop, teambuilding or “expert intrusion” just before go-live.

That is why I am not a huge fan of the “hit and run” change management intervention or team rally that ONLY takes place just before go-live in order to tick-off the change management activity from the task list. This single intervention usually requires a full day or two or three crammed into a go-live schedule when people can least afford to be offsite. And although once-off interventions have their place in certain circumstances and I guess are better than nothing, to me they are usually too superficial to have a lasting effect. They seem to come across as being an afterthought rather than a sincere pursuit. They may only have the hope, if done properly, of “selling” the change to the affected stakeholders, and can never be passed off as co-creation. It is too late in the process to be allowing people to have their say, to be promising to incorporate their requirements and to be finding out people’s readiness issues for the first time.  The output to be expected from such an intervention is compliance and “buy-in” rather than ownership and commitment.

I would think it is much better to do a few light change management initiation and planning sessions early on in the project life-cycle, such as during the planning phase of the project, to gear people’s thinking towards the people-side readiness from the beginning, and get everyone’s input and to understand the needs that should be addressed . This will knit your project plan, your communication plan, your change management plan and your training plan nicely together from the start, and it will avoid duplication, confusion and working in silos.

Holistic change management planning and awareness upfront and throughout  prevents finding out about readiness and adoption issues very late in the implementation, it also utilises and builds on and taps into the internal team strengths and skills that you already have. It give the people who have to live with the change after go-live the means and the reasons to make the change their own.

Posted in: Change Story

Applying PMBOK Chapter 10 back at the office

August 8, 2012 2:19 pm /

Yes, to pass your PMP exam you need to cram chapter 10, is it, on Project Communications Management. So does it stop there, is it theory in a book that is used to pass an exam, or do you apply PMBOK chapter 10 back at the office?

Most of what you do as a project manager is communicate and plan, but do you plan to communicate? Do you sit yourself down when you’re assigned to a new project, and consider the impact on and the influence of the users, their bosses and any other relevant participants that may be affected by and affecting the change that you are trying to bring about?

Do you fundamentally understand that you are busy bringing about a change in people’s lives, their work lives, their departments, their business operations, where they spend a good chunk of time each day, and where they probably have some or other vested interest in the status quo, which you and your project team are busy directly or indirectly challenging? Do you see that their knee-jerk resistance is quite normal and understandable, and do you contemplate how you may get them to stop resisting and to start driving the change forward, which usually requires quite a mind-set adjustment for most mortals when it comes to change.

Do you take it a step further and plot their names, and roles, and attitudes on what we may call a people radar or a stakeholder map and then analyse their level of understanding of what the project is delivering, their information needs, and assess how their individual commitment to change affects your overall project success. And then how you plan to go about sharing information and conversations with this project community to give them the reasons and the means to change and succeed, so that you and your project team can succeed. Well, have you?

PMBOK chapter 10 is about people people people, it’s about communicate communicate communicate. Don’t leave it on the shelf after the exam, apply it back at the office.

Posted in: Change Management, Change Story, Communication, PMO, Project Management