Models

Call in the SWOT team. Analyze the weakness and put up a solid strategic defense to the onslaught of environmental threats. That's the kind of language that too often permeates change projects. Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change seeks...

A surprising amount has been written about change. It's been written from an organizational context, a personal context, and a societal context. The underlying connection is that all change is personal change. To get our organizations and societies to...

As hard as it is to hear, the easy part of change management is the technical part. It’s something that I learned over a decade ago, as we were called in to implement new technology. We found that, though the solutions were technically beautiful, organizations w...

It was years ago in the subterranean conference center of a hotel in Washington, DC when I met Dave Snowden. He had a keynote speaking slot as well as a workshop. I had some breakout session that I had managed to get. I was speaking with a friend when...

I never got to meet Jay Galbraith.  His first work was published just months after my birth.  However, Galbraith’s perspectives on organizations and change have reverberated over the years, and I finally got a chance to read some of his later work – D...

Ideally, there's a body of knowledge that defines a profession. It's what you should know if you're a member of the profession. The Effective Change Manager's Handbook: Essential Guidance to the Change Management Body of Knowledge seeks to be that for...

You would think that with the great value I saw in John Kotter’s Leading Change  book I would have jumped to read The Heart of Change  – but I didn’t. Part of that may be the fact that I’ve had a pretty deep reading list for a while. Part of it may h...

Subtly, under our conscious thought, we have models for organizations. The way that we see the organization colors how we interact with it and shapes our thinking. In Images of Organization , Gareth Morgan exposes the different kinds of models that people...

I’ve been working on crystallizing my thoughts on creating adoption and engagement. As a part of that I’ve been looking for frameworks for creating change. One of the models that I was investigating was John Kotter’s 8-step model that’s laid out in his ...

If somewhere between half and three quarters of all organizational change initiatives fail, why do we keep trying to do them? We do them because in today’s ever-changing world, we know that we don’t have any choice but to try to evolve our organizations. Som...

Agile software development becomes lean development and lean startups, and sometimes the folks who grew up in software development transition into organizational change. They bring with them ideas from software development and information technology in...

Change management and organizational change are a big topic area. However, for the most part it's been a territory without a map. Few books have focused on cataloging the organizational change space and instead seek to promote their own perspective about...

Somehow, the idea that we’re making a transition seems larger than making a change and simultaneously more concerning and more comforting. Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change  intentionally couples the word “transitions” to change to remi...

Many people have tried to understand and share their understanding about how organizations change. Some of these are scholarly enough to refer to studies and research to back up their claims. Rarely, however, do I find such well researched work that looks...

I have to say that I was a bit embarrassed to tell people I was reading Peopleware: Produtive Projects and Teams .  It wasn’t because the material wasn’t good — it definitely is.  It’s not because I felt squeamish about the title — I didn’t.  However, I did ...