My Favourite Change Enabling Tools
As change professionals, we have the responsibility to support change initiatives but our ability can be very constrained if we do not have visibility to different methodologies available around us. My pet peeve is watching organizations bring a change team as an afterthought in a major transformation journey to communicate and get buy-ins. This is the beginning of the failure of a change journey itself. My philosophy, therefore, is to look at change with a different set of lenses altogether. I have been therefore working towards combining a complete journey of change which consists of all three components. 1. Problem Solving 2. Change Deployment and 3. Change Adoption.
Change professionals therefore need to get comfortable with multiple types of tools and like a Swiss Knife, ready to use the right tool for the right kind of intervention.
In this newsletter I want to share my top five favourite change management tools and activities that I have been very fond of.
As change activists, we all will need a range of tools and resources to work through our change initiatives. In our 4A Model of change, we try to educate our change activists to get comfortable not only with project management and problem solving areas but also focus on facilitating a dialogue which can get us results.
While some of these tools help us to facilitate a discussion, there are activities within, which can be used as Icebreakers or to capture ideas, maybe to bring consensus in the group, solve problems or even capturing problems from the group.
Fishbone Diagram
This tool is my all time favourite. I have used it for brainstorming, going to the root cause, risk assessment and so on. This is the tool which has the breadth and depth together in one tool. You may know this as Fishbone, Ishikawa or Root Cause analysis. While facilitating a discussion, this will easily structure a conversation while capturing ideas.
Force Field Analysis
I use this tool a lot to facilitate the dialogue during the "ALIGN" phase of our change journey. This is a great tool to facilitate a conversation but most importantly to align a group to get on to the same wavelength. Every planned change has pros and cons. Different people in your team may have different views. Capturing these forces by looking at what is making it work today and what is likely to be the obstacle makes it a great conversation aligning leaders.
Impact Assessment
This is where I find many change initiatives going wrong. Not identifying stakeholders correctly or undermining impact on these stakeholders can lead your change initiative into a completely wrong direction. Worst is when we paint the entire population with the same brush not evaluating the impact correctly. This tool helps us differentiate between the audience and stakeholders, helps look at impact and also the magnitude of that impact.
Value Stream Map
Probably the most solid foundational tool that I would urge every change professional to get familiar with. This tool allows us to map a process with process steps and its sequence and then assign a value of quantity, time taken, wait time etc so that you can identify waste in the process. This methodology is amazing when it come to waste elimination and shortening the cycle time of a process.
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Persona Building
Taken from the world of design thinking, persona is used to segment customers and stakeholders' profile through key personality factors of this population. In an employee journey mapping you can differentiate how the journey will look like for a technology savvy customer as against a technologically challenged individual. This leads to the creation of targeted customer journeys for their respective audience.
Which are your favorite tools?
About the Author
Karunesh Prasad is the Founder and CEO of Change Et Al, a change management consulting and training company. Over the last several years Karunesh has been consulting, training and speaking on the topics of change management, talent mgt, gig economy and future of work for clients all over the world.
As former Global Head of post merger integration at GE, Global Head of Quality & Simplification at GE GBS and various CHRO roles living and working in Singapore, India, Germany, Belgium and USA, Karunesh brings in some of the most practical concepts in change management to the forefront of his training, coaching and speaking engagements. He created the 4A Model of change and he uses that to enable change for his clients around the world.
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GM/Strategic Change Consulting Practice Lead at The Advantage Group, Inc.
2yKarunesh Prasad. Great article. All tools are developed for a reason and offer specific functionality. They are as good as the user. User just need to be fit and equipped to maximize CM tools utilization Runners do a fitness test before enter a marathon to check how fit and ready they are to prepare to avoid collapsing during the race Leaders and CM Consultants can also do a Readiness Assessment before engage in Change to check how fit Organization/People really is (not guessing) to address any capability gaps (Culture/Processes/Systems) to prevent implementation from derailment and ensure Change sustainable deployment After so long many Organizations and CM Consultants keep missing doing a Readiness Assessment before engage in Change Would you let a doctor operate on you without doing an examination first? I doubt it Thank you for sharing
HR/OD Strategist @ ADEO & DGE | Singapore PR | People Strategy, OD & Transformation, Executive Development, HRBP | 日本語, Bahasa Indonesia, Français, Español, 中文
2yAs a management consultant I've seen lots of change initiatives and change management is consistently neglected. Enabling change is critical to any major change effort. One of my favourite change methodology is a custom version of Kotter's 7 step model. Ask me about it!