I like the idea that change is mostly about Leadership.

As a practitioner I have discovered that genuinely involving staff in implementing the change is the key.

Put simply, leading others to change themselves works best in the long-term.

A useful summary of the process I generally follow:

1. Establish a sense of purpose. What is there to gain / What happens to us if we do not act.
2. Identify early adopters and work with them from day one. Involve everyone, yes everyone, at all levels. Spot the “negatives” and try to tune into and comment on their chatter. Adopt strategies to diffuse it.
3. Create a “story” about what work will be like when the change has happened. A realistic, believable, deliverable story. Tell it to everyone, at all levels, every day, until you are thoroughly bored with hearing it. Then tell it some more.
4. Communicate, communicate, communicate, in appropriate ways at all levels. Have the formal and verbal communications originating from the team where possible. Respond to all comments received.
5. Free up the early adopters to act. Give them permission to do stuff that helps the change happen. Change is unsettling and unnerving, your permission will give the team confidence to act on their own ideas. Be ready to help out when they make a mistake, because they will.
6. Take every opportunity to highlight short-term wins. Publicly, but most importantly, privately within the team and at one to one reviews.
7. Consolidate all the improvements and at some point declare the change-process ended……. Then encourage the team to keep it going. They will do so even though the “end” has arrived.
8. Make sure the new ways of working stick. Now is the time to target the remaining negative voices in the team.

Finally, when staff and managers say that they are afraid of change, what they usually mean is that they fear that change will be imposed upon them. They usually recognise that change will happen, but are unsure about what to do.

This is why change is really about good Leadership.

About the Author: Adam Blackie is a professional Interim Manager who leads service delivery teams through their change programmes. He works with CEO’s and their Boards in the UK to change the way technology is used by staff and their customers.

Excellent Customer Service

Here is a great story that came back to me during a recent conversation about customer service.

My ability to recall it is even more remarkable because it happened over 10 years ago.

A hotel in San Francisco, in winter.

I booked in early and left my bag in the lobby. Unfortunately it was mistakenly loaded into a car with another departing guests baggage. The other guest drove 300 miles before  realising the mistake, he called the hotel.

The hotel called me (at work) and sent someone to my office to discuss what to do next. They took my details and checked out my fashion sense (none), went shopping, delivered a case with enough kit for 2 days and then sent a courier to collect the original case.

I continued my stay unaffected by this possible calamity.

That was not the end of the story. At the end of my stay they insisted on a complimentary car to the airport and there were further apologies from various staff who were all unconnected, but familiar with the story.

I have a habit of calling these events Heroic Rescues. They stay with one for a long time as a good experience, not a bad one.

So if any of you need a recommendation for a great hotel in San Francisco please let me know.

About the Author: Adam Blackie is a professional Interim Manager who leads service delivery teams through their change programmes. He works with CEO’s and their Boards in the UK to change the way technology is used by staff and their customers.

Futurology

There are a number of drivers of global business change coming our way in the next 10 years or so.
The key ones as I see it at the moment are:

• West – East power-shift, especially the growing dominance of the East in financial markets.

• Use of internet and Telecom technologies, typically giving smaller businesses the same computing power as their larger rivals and also empowering small business units within centrally controlled organisations to “do their own thing”.

• Dis-intermediation of information flows, how we look for and receive news will change. It will be immediate and through smaller distribution channels. Big business and government control over news distribution will become a thing of the past.

• Ageing populations will affect all business models and markets. How will the world cope with the largest ever proportion of over 60′s?

• A move away from money focus to individual and spiritual values. We’ve had 80′s greed, 90′s prosperity and 00′s austerity. The developed world has more stuff than it can use. We will move away from materialism in favour of self-development.

The most vulnerable part of every organisation will be whatever delivery mechanism it has to offer services and products to customers.

Change will increase in frequency and complexity as the global trends identified above take hold. The most successful businesses will predict / react to these changes and alter their value delivery systems and processes appropriately.

Those that are blind to the changes will fail.

What takes 1500 Lifetimes?

1500 Lifetimes

In a working world where we can create and save terabytes of data every day, we need a way to decide what data we should keep.

The dangers of keeping too much stuff is documented elsewhere, but the key to success is great information management.
But this is a bit dull for most of us.  It's a bit like telling teenagers to tidy their rooms.A good idea but ineffective.

In short the benefits of keeping the right stuff are;

Reduced risk of reputation damage to the organisation

• Improved knowledge sharing and cross team working
• Reduced costs of IT storage and security

I often see situations where people are not aware of their responsibilities and where record keeping disciplines have broken down or just don't exist.

Question - How do you engage staff with this dry as bones subject?

Answer - Making it easy to understand and engage with.

Here is how I do it.

What takes 1500 Lifetimes? Our Organisation stores 80,000 Gigabytes of email and personal data. An average 250 page novel is 3 Megabytes of data. This is equal to 26,500,000 novels. It takes 10 hours to read a novel. It would take 265,000,000 working hours to read all our data. This is more than 1500 working lifetimes. And we have just over 1000 employees

Issue your version of the above to the Board on a slow day. Ask two questions:

• Is it all needed?
• What is the risk of storing and securing this if no one is likely to use it?

That should get their attention.  The rest is Information Management.