Could you introduce yourself and what you do?
Sure, I’m Luke! I’m a change management professional, currently working as a consultant for Agilisys; a public sector consultancy. I help organisations change the way they work and try to ensure everyone’s happy about it!
There are a variety of definitions of change management, but how would you define it?
Here are the FIVE Observations that make corporates need Corporate Innovation, within this year:
Lean Six-Sigma, TQM and Process Improvement will create efficiencies and reduce cycle time, of that there is no doubt.
But these improvement programs are not sustainable, if they are temporary surges in cost reduction and in the absence of a whole systems perspective create downstream costs and hidden costs due to regrettable losses of mission-critical talent and employee engagement issues for those who are not involved directly in the improvement teams.
The change needs to pull together the whole system or it will be a short term illusion.
If you want change to stick you need to kick the bucket. This is something I often advise when I’m banging on about bringing about real – and lasting – organisational change. Unsurprisingly, it tends to lead to somewhat alarmed looks.
We conducted a Q&A interview with Chloe Avril, Global Technology Activation Lead at EY, around innovation, creativity and how they affect business change.
Could you introduce yourself and what you do?
In 2001 the largest five companies in the world by market capitalisation were GE, Microsoft, Exxon, Citi and Walmart. By 2011 they were Exxon, Apple, Petro China, Shell and ICBC (Bank of China). By 2016 they were Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook.
What distinguishes GE, Exxon, Citi, Walmart, Petro China, ICBC and Shell from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook is that the former could all be classed as conventional and the latter can all be classed as post-conventional.
Agile shines a light on dysfunction. Once the dysfunction is exposed, you have 2 options: 1) fix it or 2) sweep it back under the rug. Which will you choose?
How does Agile shine a light on dysfunction? All Agile practices are designed to unearth sub-optimizations.
I saw someone today carrying a notebook that said: “I am an early adopter!”... Why is this a genius move for change effort? Let’s find out.
Implementing change in a dictatorship is a change manager’s dream job. Once the decision is made at the very top, the masses are told what to do and the decision holds as an unbreakable edict that no one would dare challenge. It might take a bit of effort to communicate the changes to the people, but all in all, as long as the rules are clearly spelled out, there is no need to convince anyone that the dictator’s decision is the best way forward.
In the previous posts I described how we designed cross-functional squads aligned around strategic goals. A key benefit of alignment is that it automatically delivers an increase in speed of delivery by dramatically reducing, or eliminating, the dependencies and bottlenecks which so often slow us down. By aligning people around goals and outcomes you essentially streamline your organisation and expose the bottlenecks in resource.