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How to De-Escalate and Calm an Angry Person – Fast (with Resources)
We all encounter people who are irrationally angry. They can be confusing, frightening, concerning, or all the above. Here’s what you can do to deescalate
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Paving for Change
When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person, she didn’t expect that racial disparity would disappear overnight. When Dr. Martin
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Fear of Success
One of the oddest barriers to getting people to change their behaviors is their fear of their own success. Instead of looking forward to the
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Knowledge Sharing Culture
Trapped inside the hearts and minds of its workers, the assets organizations already have are unable to be leveraged. Instead of copying the success in
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Shared Delusions
The team has finally finished the work in defining the change that will chart the course for the organization for the next two years. The
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Eliminate Yellow Lights
Songs have been written about how our lives are filled with green light days. These are the days when we breeze through things without a
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Degree of Support
Sometimes, the greatest challenge in getting your change initiative accomplished is knowing whether people are really on board with the change – or if they’re
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Rogue Ripples
They’re called “rogue” waves. They have no identifiable cause, and they can be deadly. They catch people off guard, because they’re not expecting them nor
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Don’t Let Your Change Be a Hurricane
It’s August 29th, and a hurricane is bearing down on the Gulf Coast of the United States. The exact location of landfall isn’t known, but
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Seeing Around the Corner
It was slightly more than 20 years ago when my friend Jason Dunn and I got into a rented car with our Pocket PCs, GPSs,
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Change Utopia
Inside change, there is a constant pull between the utopian vision that drives the change forward and the complicated, messy, reality that is day-to-day living.
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Turn the Ship
Quick: what sunk the Titanic? Obviously, the answer is an iceberg. However, the more interesting question is why couldn’t the Titanic steer around it? In
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Something is Lost in Translation
It’s hard to believe that your change initiative isn’t amazing. The vision of where we’re going looks amazing. Your executives are all on board, yet
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Measuring Change
In my post Trust Your Instruments, I raised the issue of whether you should believe your intuition about change or whether you should have solid
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Why Change is Hard
Whether you’re wondering why there’s a 70% failure rate of change projects, why your personal change projects are failing, or you are hearing it from
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Trust Your Instruments
There are a handful of things that stick with you when you’ve been trained as a pilot. They’re life lessons that have specific applicability to
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Proactive or Reactive Change
Do the same principles of good change management apply when the change is reactive rather than proactive? How can we draw the line between the
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The Little Change That Shouldn’t
There’s a children’s book, The Little Engine That Could, that speaks towards constant striving and productive output – to making progress. The book and others
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Holding Space
Standing still doesn’t seem like you’re getting much done. It’s not productive. It can’t be efficient. However, it’s possible when holding space for people in
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Comfortable Uncertainty
Leaders who are perceived as surer of their message are more likely to be followed. We crave certainty, particularly in uncertain times. The more uncomfortable
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Buildings and Rate of Change
We tend to think about change in terms of the increasing velocity and veracity that we’re facing today. However, there’s wisdom in the way that
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Recovering a Change Project
The Brooklyn Bridge, while not anonymous, isn’t nearly as famous as other bridges, but it does hide a secret. It was constructed with faulty steel
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Why Healthcare Providers Don’t Wash Their Hands
It’s not a secret that germs and other pathogens exist. Everyone is taught in elementary science or health class about Ignaz Semmelweis and how he
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Push or Pull
Should you push people towards your change or wait for them to pull themselves towards the change? The answer is simple, but making it happen
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Staying in Their Shoes
Our ability to read each others’ minds is what makes us truly unique as a species. In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt explains that it’s
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Cold Start
One of the problems with any new system is the tendency for people to not know what they’re supposed to do and therefore freeze. Here’s
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Crisis Response
Most people wouldn’t consider crisis response a part of the change process – but it’s the other side of the planning and preparation, and it
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Pluto Isn’t a Planet
It shouldn’t matter. Pluto is literally miles and miles away from my home and where I grew up, but somehow changing the number of planets
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Creating Champions
Everyone wants to be a champion – a winner. However, when it comes to changes, you need to make others champions if you want to
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What is Digital Transformation?
Everyone wants to talk about the digital transformation efforts that their organizations are doing. They’re leading the way into the new digital age. The problem
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Change Management or Change Leadership?
The question about whether we’re talking about management, leadership, or both is one of those perennial questions that keeps popping up in the conversation of
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Constricted Thinking
I was up on stage. It wasn’t any different than the 50 other times that year I had been on a stage – except it
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Adoption or Engagement
In our post, What’s Different Between Adoption and Change Management, we focused on the fact that change management is more focused on the broader context
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Going Through the Motions
It’s early, and you’re not caffeinated yet. You’re doing your morning routine with barely a thought. Not bad for a morning routine – but it
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Change Fatigue
Each time you start talking to someone else in the organization about the latest change initiative, you’re met with an audible groan. You made the
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Sustainable Pace
Driving your car faster on the highway burns more gas. Parasitic drag increases as velocity increases, and therefore it takes more energy to travel the
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Correlation or Causation
It was a correlation that was mistaken for a causation that caused the recession of 2008. It stacked up kindling high and wide, just waiting
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What’s Different Between Adoption and Change Management
In the technology world, the word “adoption” is often used to describe those who are using a piece of software. It’s a global term that
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Subtle Barriers to Identity Change
I was wearing a Hawaiian-style US Coast Guard shirt. He was a Rear Admiral in charge of Cyber. What he noticed had escaped me. The
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Disagree and Commit
While many like to speak of change resistance, I prefer to refer to those who are uninformed about a change and thus need to know
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The Limits of Certainty
Though many speak of change resistance, I prefer to break the appearance of resistance into two categories. The first category are those folks who are
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Addressing Paranoia
Everett Rogers described them as the laggards. They’re the people who refuse change even when it’s become apparent to the majority that the change is
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Why You Can’t Make Them Change Their Mind
As a change professional, it’s my job to help people change their behaviors. It’s my job to get them to change their mind. I’m supposed
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Trust as the Lubricant
Some changes appear, on the surface, to be very easy. Every indication is that it will be a fantastic success. However, unforeseen circumstances can derail
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Cogs in the Wheels of Change
The most dominant view of an organization is that it’s a machine. We think that our work as change leaders is to change out the
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Change Uncertainty
You’re about to start the job of your dreams, and you’ve got a bit of trepidation and fear. What if it’s not exactly what you
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Operational Excellence and Innovation
There are two great causes of organizational death: poor execution and lack of innovation. They both rely on change management skills but different ones. Knowing
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Changing Indirectly
Lakshmi is the Hindu Goddess of wealth. The problem is that if you chase her, she’ll avoid you. Sarawati is the Hindu Goddess of knowledge.