What is the value of feedback when I can’t frame it, understand it or act upon it? Will I be labeled ‘resistant’ if I ask to reframe it over and over again? Feedback – yes but… feedback that is not actionable and measurable in my world will not empower me.

Blessed with a pair of craftsman hands, a good sense of humor and a healthy dose of common sense, my dad challenges me to widen my perspective from time to time. And he beats any management guru, scholar or business school with the advice that he gave me upon graduating:

“Do right and fear no one.”
- my dad

Kyoto & Copenhagen

Recently my dad installed a new condensing boiler and the system is said save a lot of energy compared to his 30 year old oil boiler. As one thing leads to another, my dad soon started looking for a measure. How much am I saving compared to my old boiler? Although you wouldn’t allow my dad to join the Davos, Kyoto or Copenhagen conferences his quest is one of high importance and high direct impact on current levels of energy spending. The question is the following: ‘How can I see the Euro amount of energy I am spending?’.

Struggle for Meaning

So here is what we did: we called the gas distribution company and asked how we can track our spending in Euro. Turns out that it was the first time they were confronted with this question. But after a few minutes the helpful helpdesk correspondent managed to get an amount of Euro Per KiloWatt-hour.

Unfortunately there is no such thing as a KiloWatt-hour meter on our consumer side. We do have a meter, but it reads volume (cube-meters). It would take a simple conversion with a factor 10 to make the calculation. However, this would not be a good measure for monitoring the energy spending because there are about 10 other parameters that influence the final invoice.

The Whyway

Contrasting this simple question to the TV news reports on Copenhagen, Kyoto and Davos I imagined a Yes Men scenario: stating the obvious question in the middle of a powerful crowd of leaders who are trying very hard to look the other way.

My dad is asking for a simple dashboard to monitor his energy spending; stating that he, his neighbors and every family can reduce 25% of their energy spending.  If only they had a proper dashboard to monitor. Like the dashboard of a car, the display of a gasoline pump or simpler: the price tags in a grocery store.

So we rang the gass company about three times until… Well. Until it felt wrong. We felt like behaving annoying and offensive. Embarrassed. Uncomfortable. That’s the price you pay for asking WHY too many times.

In his 2004 bestseller The Seven Day Weekend, management guru Ricardo Semler stesses the importance of asking why. It is one of the most important mechanisms for navigating out of the control-zone and back into the area of what matters most. In his company SEMCO, they even have a name of it: they call it the Whyway.

But it takes guts and perseverance according to Semler:

“Ask why. Ask it all the time, ask it any day, every day, and always ask it three times in a row. This doesn’t come naturally. People are conditioned to recoil from questioning too much. First, it can be perceived as rude. Second, it can be dangerous, implying that we’re ignorant or uninformed. Third, it means everything we think we know may turn out to be incorrect or incomplete. Last, management is usually threatened by the prospect of employees who question continually. But mostly, it means putting aside all the rote or pat answers.”

The Result? The Wattson!

My dad is not a university professor or an academic of any kind. Instead he spent his life on the production shop floor experiencing first hand what works and what doesn’t. So when he asks a ‘why’ question he is not playing an intellectual game. He is on to something.

How much am I spending on gas? Why can’t we monitor our energy spending? Why can I see my energy spending instantly when I drive my car but not when I am heating my house?

As a coincidence I was reading Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein. They explore he psychology of our every day decision making and argue that we make poor decisions due to the architecture of how choices are presented to us.

As it turns out my dad and I have nothing to be embarrassed about because one of the nudges that they illustrate responds almost exactly to our monitoring quest. Have a look at the Wattson device below:

The Wattson monitors our energy spending for electricity in a currency we understand and care about. We like that. We want that. And we also want one for the gas spending!

The Takeaway

What can organizational change practitioners learn from this story?

First,  that the ‘whyway’ is the road less traveled because people run the risk of being labeled ‘resistant’ in a split second. Peter Block warns against the paranoid habit of some consultants interpreting every line manager’s objections as resistance (see: Sometimes it’s not resistance).

Second, ‘why’-people may drive you crazy, but they prevent you from project cocooning and other defense mechanisms. Think about it: what would happen if you were to replace your ‘Resistance’-labeling-machine with a ‘Whyway’-labeling-machine? The label is not an ending point to ditch people into a category – period. Rather, it would be a starting point to improve and fine-tune the project at hand.

Finally, involving the whyway people creates buy-in andstimulates their ownership of the project results. Remember: Why-people take a risk because they care. Why-people take the risk of feeling embarrassed because they are committed. Why-people leave their comfort-zone for a good cause. Outside their comfort-zone they are vulnerable. And if we follow common change-management methodology we are most likely to label them as resistant and to treat them in a belittling way. Should we not suspect ourselves in the first place?

Whyway-people go a long way to reframe the feedback they receive. Feedback that is actionable and measurable in a currency they care about. Actionable and measurable feedback empowers people and accellerates their change-readiness … by 25 %. OK – this is a bold statement. So bring it on. Prove me wrong. For I do right and fear no one.

“Communication is not the message sent, but the message received.” You knew that. Because like me, you are smart. Like me, you may have used it to outsmart other people when it comes to criticizing their message. But can you make a better message?

Ehhhmmmm… while the statement “It’s not what you say – it’s what they hear, stupid!” is a direct way to demonstrate the flaws of a communication, coming up with a better alternative requires different ammunition. And that’s exactly the word to cover this article. Did you know that military operations and military field manuals can help us a great deal in achieving better communication?

Uncle Sam

In their 2007 bestseller Made To Stick the Heath brothers (Chip and Dan) are setting a new standard for SUCCESful communication. The SUCCESs acronym is a communication stickiness checklist and stands for: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotion, Story. For the first part of the checklist – Simple – they draw heavily on the US Army Combat Maneuver Training Center in order to get to the core of the idea.

Like no other, the US Army knows that the distance between the intent and the operation should be kept as short and as straight as possible. Else they risk inadequate mission accomplishment. The way they do it is through Commander’s Intent.

The commander’s intent describes the desired end state. It is a concise expression of the purpose of the operation and must be understood two echelons below the issuing commander. . . It is the single unifying focus for all subordinate elements. It is not a summary of the concept of the operation. Its purpose is to focus subordinates on the desired end state. Its utility is to focus subordinates on what has to be accomplished in order to achieve success, even when the plan and concept of operations no longer apply, and to discipline their efforts toward that end.

What’s in it for you: Focus

I never thought that Uncle Sam would be of any help for explaining things to my grandmother – which is my ultimate bottom line. Commander’s Intent helps you to achieve focus, because when all plans fail you better not freeze and grind to a halt. In case you’re not convinced, consider the quote of Mike Tyson below:

CI is the military version of “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Urging their leaders not to make the battlefield planning too complicated because in the heat of battle, innumerable variables will dictate the proper course of action.

The CI technique

The US Army teaches their leaders in all echelons the following technique:

=> Complete the following sentences:

1.)  If we do nothing else during tomorrow’s mission, we must ________________________.
2.) The single, most-important thing that we must do tomorrow is _____________________.

=> By answering these questions, you have basically written your intent.

=> Remember, your intent statement provides a framework for the operation. It does not tell your soldiers what to do. It does give them the overall picture of what you say the company needs to accomplish to be successful.

=> By making your intent a clear, concise, and focused statement, you greatly increase the chances that your soldiers will continue the mission, even when the operation doesn’t go as planned.

Your Mission Statement

Here is a great video by Dan Heath explaining why the US Army had better invaded our business schools and most of the corporate off-site strategy workshops. In this video he explains how to write a mission statement that doesn’t suck. The moral of his story for corporate mission statements:

1. Use concrete language

2. Talk about the WHY

My Granny flies Southwest

Southwest Airlines is a company that discovered the secret behind a Commander’s Intent to get to the core of their success, as their CEO Herb Kelleher asserts:

“I can teach you the secret to running this airline in thirty seconds. This is it: We are THE low cost airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can.”

In short: next time I outwit my colleagues by telling them: ‘If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, forget it’ – I can rely on Uncle Sam to complete the action.

Communication is not the message sent but the message received. But when the receiver reacts opposite to our expectations we tend to blame the receiver. You are right and they are wrong. There is a name for this game;  it’s called "game over".

But hang on – here is the good news: if you to stop being right and start to investigate the choice architecture of your message, there is a great chance for you to improve your communication.

In a recent book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein explore the psychology of our every day decision making and argue that we make poor decisions due to the architecture of how choices are presented to us.

This includes food decisions, investment decisions and all kinds of well-informed decisions (that’s the frightening part!).

Choice Architecture and Door Handles

Below is a excerpt from chapter 5 explaining the core ingredient of their book "Choice Architecture"

"Early in Thaler’s career he was teaching a class on managerial decision making to business school students. Students would sometimes leave class early to go for job interviews (or a golf game) and would try to sneak out of the room as surreptitiously as possible. Unfortunately for them, the only way out of the room was though the double door in front in full view of the entire class (though not directly in Thaler’s line of sight). The doors were equipped large handsome wood handles, vertically mounted with cylindrical pull about two feet in length. When the students came to these doors, they were faced with two competing instincts.
One instinct says that to leave a room you have to push the door. The other instinct says, when faced with large wooden handles that are obviously designed to be grabbed, you pull. It turns out that the latter instinct trumps the former, and every student leaving the room began by pulling on the handle. Alas, the door opened outward."

Further in that chapter the authors continue:
"At one point in the semester, Thaler pointed this out to the class as one embarrassed student was pulling the door handle while trying to escape the classroom. Thereafter, as a student got up to leave, the rest of the class would eagerly wait to see whether the student would push or pull. Amazingly, most still pulled!"

With this example Thaler and Sunstein point out that the doors display bad choice architecture because they violate a simple psychological principle called Stimulus Response Compatibility (SRC). SRC means that you want the signal you receive (the stimulus) to be consistent with the desired action. Flat plates say "push me" and big handles say "pull me". So don’t expect people to push big handles! This is a failure of architecture to accommodate to the basic principles of human psychology.

From Handles to Heamophilia

Saying "red" when you see a red light go on is an example of high compatibility. Having to say "green" when a red light goes on is an example of low compatibility. This has far reaching consequences, even in the medical world. Below is an example that I have experienced multipe times.

Patients with haemophilia A cannot produce a protein known as factor VIII (FVIII) and must get it from somewhere else. KOGENATE® Bayer is a FVIII product that a patient can use instead of natural FVIII. KOGENATE® Bayer is a great product which improves the lives of many haemophilia patients. But it’s also an expensive product, burdening social security with more than 100.000,- Euro per patient per year.

Needless to say: we better don’t waste a drip of this precious and expensive product! Yet, this is precisely where the engineers of Bayer have failed to cater for some SRC into the design of their injection bottles. Have a closer look at the instructions below: the fluid (drawn in black) is in one part and needs to be mixed with the powder in the other part. Movements A to J must be performed a few minutes prior to injection.

To cut a long story short: figure C and D is where it mostly goes wrong – even with well trained nurses, parents and patients. The normal way of using ‘fluid-and-powder’ products is to screw on and inject. That is what the design communicates: "screw and inject". Yet – as you can see in C and D, there need to be two separate pushes (followed by a ‘click’) prior to adding the fluid. The latter is so counter intuitive that I have literally seen thousands Euros being flushed onto the ground before my eyes.

Even trained parents and nurses who are familiar with this product need their full attention or they miss the crucial C and D.

OK for door handles. Not OK for social security.

From Heamophilia to SAP

To me the link with communication in big organizational change projects is obvious: communications are vital and precious for the health of an organization. And expensive too. Nevertheless communication sometimes turns out in the opposite direction. This is mostly due to failed choice architecture and untested stimuls response compatibility. When respondents fill out the wrong details, use the wrong settings or insert their card upside-down, it is easy to call them ’stupid users’ or to tell them RTFM (this stands for "Read The F** Manual").

I still remember the day that the logistics responsible typed the article number in the weight field when we were implementing SAP in a large chemical plant. The automatic interface that we were so proud of automatically blocked all the transports available of our 51 neighbouring plants. We had to write a program to unlock all those transports. And guess what we said: ’stupid user’. However, this did not prevent other users from committing that same mistake.

From SAP to Traffic

Next time you build a survey or a communication, a note or a manual requiring your receivers to fill out something, to use a system or to take an action of any kind, consider how SRC-proof your communication is by testing its usability at full length PRIOR to sending it out.

As a final thought I could easily link this idea to the communication articles I have written before. Whenever I talk about communication I tend to use the metaphor of traffic and this one fits in pretty well; If communication would be a mission to bring a vehicle (i.e. your message) from point A to point B, then you want this vehicle to be equipped with an SRC button. SRC will avoid your vehicle from going in the opposite direction when you accelerate.

How can we un-learn management science and get back to the common-sense of teamwork? Switch-off all the rules, check-lists and scorecards we have been spoon-fed in our management education? A scenario for disaster you may think? Quite the opposite as I witnessed yesterday.

Dull libraries on leadership, knowledge management and communication came to action right in front of me.  It all happened as the musicians performed their scores at the rehearsal of the prestigious B’rock ensemble.

So…?

In this rehearsal B’rock gathered for the forthcoming ‘Adieu to the pleasures’ performance. Nothing spectacular about this rehearsal you may think, except from a management point-of-view.

As a management consultant I spend most of my time between shopfloor, project cockpit and boardroom. When you travel that path long enough you will find that management speak and lengthy checklists melt down to their essence.  For example: ‘always remember the 3 C’s: communication, communication, communication‘. Damned if you do – damned if you don’t.

I was curious to find out how the musicians were going to pull it off, given their limited time, budget and different nationalities involved (sounds like a real project, doesn’t it?). Almost immediately I was struck by their effortless communication. So I took my camera and captured what the 3 C’s look like from a B’rock perspective. Have a look…

1. Tuning

This is the first part of any teamwork of musicians – be it a rehearsal or a real concert. They tune their instruments and make sure everyone is on the same wavelength BEFORE they start playing. Have a look at the video below. These musicians are saying: hey this is my bottom line – what is yours?

In management speak: they are setting up a service level agreement (SLA). And they do it BEFORE they start to play. There is a lesson in there: an SLA is negotiated upfront to create a common understanding about services, priorities and responsibilities.

Tuning is not a quick-fix for a troubled relationship in the middle of the play: the relationship is tuned upfront. And yes: that makes an awkward and unusual sound.

2. Feedback

Once the instruments are tuned, the ensemble is ready to kick off. For the first time they play the scores that each musician has carefully prepared at home. For the first time they hear how they sound within the group. Have a look at the fragment below to see how that works.

You will note that the ‘project leader’ behind the harpsichord defines the context and shapes the meaning of the piece they are performing (at 00′:30"). Although every musician knows the scores and plays outstanding as an individual, they now feed-back to one another how they can make teamwork happen (as of 01′:30"). Note that during the break one of the musicians revealed to me that the most important instrument during a rehearsal is actually a musician’s pencil!

There you are: outstanding performers rely on each other in order to adapt their scores for the benefit of team performance. In this setting it would be absurd if they didn’t. Yet, where I come from I see most of the good performers touting their horn so loud that the team performance suffers.

The musician later added: ‘you feel when it’s your turn to say something‘. And that’s exactly what it felt like: this was no feedback as we know it; what I witnessed was feed-forward. Not as a task or an obligation, but rather as a game bringing the performance forward.

3. Performing

This is when the communication rubber meets the road. After individual preparation, tuning of the instruments and adapting the scores for team performance it is time to give it a go. I invite you to look at the below fragment twice: once with the sound on and once with the sound off.

There are two things that you can see clearer when the sound is off. First, the musicians don’t stop communicating when they perform. Continuously they look up from their scores to exchange cues. Second, as a result of this exchange you can actually see the resonance among the musicians.

Although they are all playing their individual score you can see that they are in resonance. One of the musicians saw this resonance as a growing process as he reported: ‘during the intense days of rehearsing you kind of grow into the performance’.

The Moral

Preparation, tuning, adaptation and continuous exchange of cues results in good performance. The moral of this story isn’t hard to fetch – but it may be hard to swallow for those of us who have their MBA education tattooed all over. This rehearsal reframes the question: why does management education exist? None of these musicians has ever studied, examined or attended a course in communication, teamwork or feedback.

Think of what we said last week about barefoot running: your company is not broken by default – just like your feet are just fine the way they are. Once you go barefoot your body automatically adjusts. Effortless.  In terms of management education B’rock musicians go barefoot. And they go a long way.

By the way …

This goes without saying that B’rock is a project-based organization (in management speak): the performance at hand determines the staffing, their level of commitment and … their leadership style.

In case you wonder how I got into that setting in the first place… well … together with B’rock and other top-notch musical ensembles we are discovering Arts-based Learning. I’m quite proud to be scouting learning methods and workshop possibilities in this exclusive and (until now) closed setting. A bizar experience … that’s why the initiative is called BizzArts.

Below you can see B’rock performing Vivaldi ‘for real’.

No doubt about it: Belgian finest Baroque can only be performed when excellence & passion are mixed with barefoot empowerment. And now you have a witness.
____________
Related articles:
- Music and Leadership – July 20th, 2008
- Music and Management Consulting – September 27th, 2008

During large programs it is very difficult to keep an eye on what is cooking inside the organization and how people’s perceptions of the upcoming change are evolving. Hence, a commonly used instrument to check this ‘change readiness’ is holding surveys. Last week I mentioned the Top-10 signs your employee survey needs to change.

In addition to that list, Naomi Karten describes 6 recommendations for conducting surveys and avoiding that they become a waste of time.

1. Set survey objectives. Define those objectives before you start, or you will end up with a list of questions that are unanswered because they were unasked.

2. Keep survey length under control. Avoid nice-to-know-but-so-what questions. A well-designed survey can be completed in less than ten minutes.

3. Make the survey action-oriented. Surveys are often full of thermometer questions. For example, "Did this course match your expectations?" is a thermometer question. Responses may suggest the existence of a problem, but provide too little information for you to understand the problem or recommend changes. If, instead, you ask questions like ‘are you now able to go back to your workplace and put what you have learned into practice?’, ‘Which difficulties did you experience when making the exercises?’, or ‘which topics will require extra attention before using them in practice?’ , you can use the responses you receive to plan a course of action.

4. Balance open-ended and closed questions. Closed questions ask respondents to select from a set of fixed responses. Respondents can answer these questions quickly, and responses can be tabulated, summarized, graphed, charted, analyzed and reported. Open-ended questions, by contrast, ask respondents to answer in their own words. Responses take time to review and are subject to interpretation. However, open-ended questions frequently provide a level of insight into the customer perspective that is impossible to obtain from closed questions. 

5. Ensure an adequate survey response. To generate interest, set the stage by publicizing the importance of the survey in helping you improve your service effectiveness. Explain your objectives and how quickly the survey can be completed. Marketing, branding the survey can dramatically influence the level and quality of the responses you will receive.

6. Tell stakeholders about your survey findings. This is the most important and yet most forgotten about element. Inform stakeholders of your findings and changes you will make as a result of their feedback. When you implement suggested changes, announce that you’re doing so because of their feedback. Don’t overlook this essential element of providing feedback to customers about their feedback to you.

Gathering feedback and taking no action based on the findings is worse than not gathering feedback at all!

The below movie shows an interview with Curt Coffman, co-author of First, Break All the Rules. In my opinion his top ten covers all the pitfalls one can encounter when performing employee surveys.

#10 Your survey hasn’t changed since Bob Dole ran for president;
#9 Your survey has more items than your accounting system;
#8 Employees and managers feel more helpless after completing the survey;
#7 Your customer loyalty scores still have not improved;
#6 You are paying more than $10 per employee for data collection and reporting;
#5 By the time your survey vendor returns the data, your workforce has turned over;
#4 Employee surveys, what are those?…;
#3 You need a 3" binder to hold one report;
#2 The dog ate your action plans;
#1 You keep doing what you’ve been doing and expect a different result.
("When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change")

My both thumbs up for this powerful summary!!

PS: Thank you Craig Smith for pointing me to this video.

Since the beginning of this month school has started. For many families this indicates a moment in time where habits need to be switched and children need to make a step into a next level of development, be it in reading, writing, independent tooth brushing, cleaning up the toys, etc.

A thing that works pretty well with children is the use of a simple scorecard (mostly a board with all the days of the week, some targets and banners to be attached for every succesful achievement). All of a sudden agreements, targets and progress become visual and this seems to be very motivating. However, the thing that really makes this board succesful is the discussion prior to setting up the board: this is where buy-in happens!

For instance, some questions that are commonly covered in those conversations:
- When do we get a medal for an achievement (i.e.:‘What exactly does good performance look like?‘)
- What happens when we fail to meet the target (i.e.: ‘What does failure look like?‘)
- WIIFM: What’s In It For Me when I meet all targets?
- etc.

That’s how we get to SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Tracable. Although you can find this acronym in any MBA course, the added value of parenting is the insight that CONVERSATION and DIALOGUE is the one and only way to make smart goals. The below drawing outlines what this results into for a work setting:

Next to that, there are actually 3 kinds of KPI’s that work pretty well with kids – provided that they are SMART:
- Do new things. These KPI’s will measure new things that were not in place before;
- Do things better. Basically, these KPI’s come down to putting new tagets on existing measures;
- Stop doing things. These KPI’s measure the fading away of bad habits.

There is no reason what-so-ever to assume that a KPI at work should be more complicated than setting KPI’s with kids. It’s all about making agreements and working out the measurements TOGETHER. Forcing a balanced scorecard upon people and making people adhere to KPI’s that they didn’t buy into – or even understand – is an absolute recipe for disaster.

For people to be motivated, you will need to set goals that have been agreed upon with all parties involved. Finally – once you’ve got it all together – what’s even more important is to set positive targets instead of negative ones. For instance, you may be targeting a less than 2 per cent mistakes on deliveries or a 98 per cent of success-ful deliveries. They both measure and target exactly the same, but which one will motivate people most to perform?

Related articles:
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 5) – May 24th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 4) – March 1st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 3) – February 21st, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 2) – February 16th, 2009
Parenting as a Management Skill … Huh? (part 1) – February 9th, 2009

Chatting with Vera the other day on all sorts of management styles; we came across one she had never heard of before: Seagull Management. At first she thought I was kidding, but after googling the term we discovered that there are 632.000 results on this entry and that it is even featured on Wikipedia.

And this is all because there is one little sentence in the book The One Minute Manager that describes the term: "Seagull managers fly in, make a lot of noise, dump on everyone, then fly out."

Regular readers of this blog are already familiar with the grumpy boss. Now you know what his birdlike equivalent would look like. What’s more interesting is that this conversation made me take the dust off my copy of the One Minute Manager, so I’ll be blogging on that one pretty soon.

Thinking about how we use the word ‘but’ in our common conversations, this week I made a strange observation. ‘But’ is a blocker, a stopper, a false yes and most of all: a crusher of commitment.

‘Yes but’ = ‘No’

‘But’ is the ultimate word to give away my power over a situation: either by avoiding to pronounce a powerful ‘no’, or by making you the effect of the situation instead of the cause. Some examples:
1. Avoiding ‘no’:
- I’ll do it now, but first I need to print that document (Meaning: ‘No, I’ll do it after I finished printing’)
- I can fix that problem for you, but it may take some time (Meaning:’ forget it’)

2. Giving away power:
- ‘Who is in charge here?’ ‘I am, but normally I do this job with my colleague, who is out of office now.’ (Meaning: I’m not prepared to commit myself if my colleague is not holding my hand’)
- ‘Are we going to make that deadline?’ ‘Yes, but there are some open issues that we need to decide on first’. (Meaning: ‘not quite’)

Try the alternative; ‘And’
Funny things happen whenever you change the ‘but’ by ‘and’. The exclusion of commitment disappears and you find yourself still in charge of the situation. One step further: if you do this while you are speaking – whenever you feel a ‘but’ coming up, throw in an ‘and’ – you are forced to change whatever you were saying. In fact, you stop lying. The false ‘no’ becomes a statement of fact without exclusion, and without loss of power. Applied to the same examples:

1. Avoiding ‘no’=> being ‘yes’
- I’ll do it and first I will print that document (meaning: ‘I commit and I stay in charge of what comes first’ + note how the sentence was forces to become active because of the word change)
- I can fix that problem for you, and it may take some time (Meaning:’ Count on me EVEN IF it takes more time than we expected’)

2. Giving away power => staying in charge
- ‘Who is in charge here?’ ‘I am, and my colleague is out of office now.’ (Meaning: I am in charge here and now. Full stop. Note that some information automatically dropped which would otherwise decrease power)
- ‘Are we going to make that deadline?’ ‘Yes, and we will decide on those open issues first’. (Meaning: ‘We’ll make it here and now, whatever it takes’. Note that the ‘and’ forces you to make the sentence more active)

Becoming aware of what happens whenever we use the word ‘but’ or ‘and’ has been my favorite experiment over the past weeks. I found myself pausing a few seconds after pronouncing ‘and’. It was instant transformation.

Hello Organizational Change Practitioners,

This is to inform you that I have done my homework. A few weeks ago LinkedIn allowed us to create subgroups within this group. Subgroups are like a break-out session at a conference. They enable you to create more focused areas than in the main group.

I decided to create a maximum of FIVE subgroups. But before I would do so I asked to hear from you which ones you would recommend. I received about 90 answers, each containing on average 3 recommendations. I didn’t expect such a response!

As a next step I had to cluster. My intention was to create a poll on LinkedIn in order to select the final 5, but the polls running on LinkedIn only have maximum 5 entries. So I decided to have a second look … and there I was with the final 5! Please read on if you want to find out how I selected the final 5, and why I gave them their particular name.

PART I: CATEGORIES FOR SUBGROUPS => CLUSTERING

I obtained the below categories by shuffling, re-shuffling and re-shuffling the suggestions:

1. LEADING CHANGE
Communication
Consultants
Managers
Change Leadership
Leadership
Communication
Large Scale Change and the Individual
Leadership Support
leadership
Leadership/Sponsorship
Stakeholder Management
Communication
Building Capability
Leading teams through change
Leadership and organizational alignment
Busting silo barriers
vision, leadership & communication
leadership change
Stakeholders and sponsors
Leadership Alignment (strategy, ROI, performance issues)
Board/Exec team level interventions

2. ORGANIZATION REDESIGN
merger integration
divestment
Mergers and Acquisitions; Divestitures
mergers, downsizing, integration issues
Restructuring (merger, acquisition, re-engineering, downsizing, growth, globalisation, etc)
M&A driven change
Business Transformation
Organization Design
organization
Enterprise Architecture (touches IT, Culture, people, leadership, ROI)
Strategy driven (e.g., change in products or markets)
organisation design
Strategy
Structure
strategy,
Strategy-driven transformation
strategy
Re-engineering/ redesigning organizations (M&A, functional, performance)
Strategic Change (include M&A, Business Transformation Outsourcing)
Business Process Change
Corporate
Strategy driven transformation
Organisational Strategy
New organizations
Organization Development
change process itself
Organizational Maturity
Process
Dynamic Systems Alignment
process improvement
Alignment with HR Processes
process,
process
strategic change

3. ROI (Return On Investment)
ROI
value driven target operating model
ROI
performance management
Performance driven change
Capacity Development
Organizational Effectiveness
Performance Improvement (could include Six Sigma, Best Companies, Customer Insight, IIP, ERP, Balanced Scorecard, Training and Skills, Mentoring, etc)
Compliance driven change 

4. OCBOK(Organizational Change Practitioners’ Body Of Knowledge)
Training
Methodology
Resources (Tools and Techniques)
methodology
Books, Articles, & Research Findings
Tools and mental models
Methodology
Methodology (culture, org alignment, training, communication, coordination with business process redesign)
tools – models, methodologies, and roadmaps, processes
Change management practice
books/articles related to change
Change Models (approaches, best practices, case studies, resources)
Models and Methodologies
Lean Six Sigma Change
Methods and Tools

5. HUMAN SIDE OF CHANGE
awareness
common denominator – human beings and change. What about the ‘human element’
human behavior
human behavior
behavioral change
TRANSFORMATIONAL
sustainability (‘what makes change stick’)

6. CULTURE
culture
Cultures/Strategy
Culture eats strategy for breakfast
Intercultural
Culture change
CULTURAL
context – international, large scale, health care, etc.
culture
culture change
workplace cultural change
Culture change
Culture (public, private, non-profit, small biz)
culture
culture
organizational culture
Organisational Culture (could include Attitude change, Team Building, Motivation, Gaining ‘Buy-In’, Coaching, Engagement, Staff Surveys, Management Styles, Leadership, National and Global cultural development. etc.
Non western contributions to change

7. IT RELATED CHANGE
system changes
IT Service Management
ERP
IT Service Management
changes in IT
IT Governance
ERP
Technology driven (e.g., ERP implementation)
systems
IT projects/new systems implementation
Technology (ERP, Web 2.0, emerging technologies)
Technology-Driven Change (ERP, Web 2.0)
Technology enabled change
systems implementation
technology
systems change
‘New Technologies’ – this could then evolve continuously as new opportunities develop with advances in technology

8. WEB 2.0
E-Culture (Web 2.0 and further)
Web 2.0
Web 2.0
E-Transformation

9. INDUSTRIES
Careers
Government
Research
Non Profit IT Governance
health care delivery change management
nonprofit
energy
transportation
manufacturing
public sector
retail
health care
communications
pharma
hi-tech
Customers
Market Segments: Government; Corporate; Research; Non Profit, Emerging (e.g., Web 2.0)
Health care
health care
HR
business

10. REGIONS
regional sub-groups
geography

PART II: REDUCING CLUSTERS TO MAXIMUM 5 SUBGROUPS

In order to select the final 5, I have broadened some categories up:

1. LEADING CHANGE
2. ORGANIZATION REDISIGN & ROI (Return On Investment)
3. OCBOK (Organizational Change Body Of Knowledge)
4. CULTURE & BEHAVIOR
5. TECHNOLOGY DRIVEN OR FACILITATED CHANGE

As for "industries" and "regions", I have decided not to create them, as these are either tackled in other LinkedIn groups, or they run across our five subgroups.

PART III: WILL I APPOINT SUBGROUP MANAGERS?

I don’t know yet… let’s first see if we can make this work!

Good luck to our community and thanks again for contributing!

Luc Galoppin

PS: Not yet a member? Join us right now!

Related Articles:
Web 2.0 includes Invisible Hand – June 29th, 2009