Change Champions -- who are these magical people?  This week, we dive into who change champions are, and how they can help hasten the adoption of change.  We walk through the three main character types we see in organizational change, how they help us and how to find them.

Leaning on Malcolm Gladwell's seminal work, The Tipping Point, we discuss Connectors, Mavens and Salespeople, how they show up in change, their characteristics and how to find them

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What does technology adoption have to do with change? We often use the technology adoption bell curve to talk about how change actually works and happens in groups of people. One of the most important factors to why it works is the level of power and influence that your change leaders and stakeholders have. 

Diffusion theory (Rogers, Diffusion of Innovation) and tapping into the Innovators and early adopters within your stakeholder communities are important concepts to think about when planning and executing change. But who are these innovators, and change agents and how do we find them?  Malcolm Gladwell's work in the Tipping Point provides important insight into the important characters we are looking for.  We start to unpack why you need to think about how your innovators and early adopters are communicating and influencing others and why this is an important component of change success. 

Lastly, we talk about the only time that you can consider using negative incentives for change, and the risks and rewards of negative incentives.

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Change resistance is one of the most misunderstood aspects of change and one of the most difficult to manage well.  Resistance will show up in every change effort, even though people are often surprised by it! While many change models and approaches in the popular literature tackle resistance head on, we do this very differently.  In fact, managing resistance is a numbers game, and spending to much time on the loudest, but smallest cohort of change stakeholders will undermine the effort entirely. So what happens if you don't "manage" resistance?  We discuss how the bell curve and the diffusion of innovation model plays a role in understanding and working with resistance, and how personal choice and autonomy is an important factor in tackling even the most resistant stakeholders.

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One of the biggest roadblocks encountered in change efforts is change fatigue. Change fatigue can happen at various points and can show up unexpectedly at the end of a transformative or profound change. In present day society after 2 years of a pandemic we are all experiencing a state of change fatigue. This experience can help us become better change leaders and learn how to manage change fatigue and help the people we lead move forward effectively.

References:
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Amy Cuddy, Pandemic Flux Syndrome

​​When we're leading change, we are in control of our own response and outcomes. When change happens to us, it involves a sense of loss.  When we experience unexpected or unwanted change that happens to us, we are left grappling with feelings of loss, and grief.

The five stages of grief by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross is an oft-cited and poorly understood framework in change.  We discuss the additional sixth stage (added by David Kessler in his groundbreaking work) and how this framework applies to change theory and practice.  We discuss why loss and grief isn't linear and why groups of people don't always align on the stage they are experiencing and importantly, how to help others move forward by finding meaning.

References:
Change Curve
5 Stages of Grief
Brené Brown & David Kessler
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​Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube


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What has the last two years of the pandemic taught us, and how can we use these experiences to become better change leaders? Reflections on the lessons of our current circumstances, and the role of empathy in effective change leadership.

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​Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube

Article Reference:
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The Secret to Leading Organizational Change Is Empathy - Patti Sanchez, December 20, 2018

In sailing, a change in our ultimate destination is called a course change. Deciding to change course is not a quick decision.  When setting out on a journey, we set our destination, the ultimate goal of where we are going.  When we decide to change course, it is because we're abandoning the previous path and choosing another destination entirely.

So much about change relies on our abilities as humans to respond and react. We're hard wired to avoid and resist change. So how can we change more effectively?  

In this podcast we will investigate the leading edge of change practice, discuss how real-world events illustrate how we change, bring change models and methodologies to life,  challenge our assumptions and beliefs about change and learn how to become better change leaders.

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​Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube