Schein uses the term Diagnostic Interventions to indicate that consultants should be aware of the fact that each contact they have with the client is an intervention. We may think we are only diagnosing or ‘just asking some questions’, but in reality we are interrupting the reality of the person being interviewed.

Diagnostic Interventions?

A whole dynamic of questions, reactions and assumptions is put in motion once we have started our diagnosis. Who is that consultant? Why is he asking those questions? And why is he coming to me? If you fail to frame the purpose of your interview these questions will start to lead their own life in the back channel. Therefore it’s crucial to have your act together and make sure you have a conversation about the conversation before actually starting it.

Diagnostic Interventions are the best way to involve members of the organization in the change program. By asking them relevant questions about the present state, you not only learn relevant facts about possible resistance to change, but you also begin to influence their thinking and get them involved in the planning. You need to recognize that no matter how neutral and innocent the questions may be, they will influence the thinking of the people in the organization.

The Anatomy of Diagnostic Interventions

As I work my way though an organizational change project I often notice that every diagnostic is an intervention and that every intervention can serve as a diagnostic. This is shown in the drawing above. I think that there is a correlation between the diagnosis and the intervention and that the balance of the two depends on the level of trust.

For instance: if I am visiting a site manager of a multinational organization for an interview in order to determine the scope of a project (i.e.: even before the project has been called into existence) the level of trust is low and there is very little intervention I can do. I am at the complete left side of the drawing. The one thing I should recognize is that the level of trust is low and therefore I need to frame the purpose of my visit with care. This is often done in preliminary meetings with the sponsor of the program. After all, as a consultant, you are a foreign element and often a first sign that the boat is going to be rocked.

Consider that I am meeting this same site manager at the moment of implementation of the change program. Time has passed, work has been delivered and we had the chance on multiple occasions to build a mutual relationship. I am now on the right-hand side of the drawing. This means that I am able to get some work done in co-creation with this site manager because the level of trust has increased. At the same time I should be aware that there is still some temperature that I can measure on-site.

The Moral of Diagnostic Interventions

The concept of Diagnostic Interventions pulls our attention to the fact that we need to split our brains:

• When we are diagnosing a situation we are influencing it. Therefore we need to be aware of the consequences of that intervention and frame the purpose of the diagnosis;
• When we do an intervention we should be aware of the diagnostic opportunities. Don’t take things for granted and ask how people are doing.

There is always a little of both – diagnosis and intervention – when we have a contact with the customer.

In a recent article published in The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell underscores the cost of being first when it comes to introducing technological innovations. Gladwell’s original article is about the glorification of the genius of Steve Jobs. According to him, the genius of Jobs epitomizes the advantage of being late.

Another Look at the Industrial Revolution

Remember the Industrial Revolution? You know: that period in time that is popular to bash. Unfortunately, as we expose ourselves to the generalizations of history there is some fine research that we tend to overlook. Luckily there is Gladwell; a master in pointing out where we have it backward with our taken-for-granted causalities. As he reframes the genius of Steve Jobs he draws a parallel to the exceptional driving role that England played during the Industrial Revolution.

Gladwell explains that Jobs stole the basic idea of the mouse from PARC, introduced the iPod five years after the first MP3 players appeared, and came out with the iPhone 10 years into the smart phone era. That is because Jobs was not an inventor, but rather a ‘tweaker’. This term is based on the the reasearch of Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr of the Northwestern University. They found out that, although England experienced a poorer development in education than other European countries, they did remarkably well in adopting the newest technologies.

Inventors versus Tweakers

Meisenzahl and Mokyr found that there were deep complementaries between two groups of key workers. The first is the relatively small group of people who actually invented things. The second is the somewhat larger group of highly skilled craftsmen who possessed the training and natural dexterity to actually carry out the “instructions”. According to them:

“The second group is critical. They had to implement – with a high degree of accuracy – the new recipes and blueprints that inventors wrote. This involved building the parts on a routine basis with very low degrees of tolerance for error while still being able to fill in the blanks when the instructions were inevitably incomplete. It was this technical competence of the British mechanical elite that was able to implement and tweak the great ideas and turn them into economic realities.”

“What counted most, however, were the characteristics of the top few percentiles of highly skilled mechanics and similar artisans.”

“Those who had the dexterity and competence to tweak, adapt, combine, improve, and debug existing ideas, build them according to specifications, but with the knowledge to add in what the blueprints left out were critical to the story.”

(these quotes were copied from the working paper titled: The Rate and Direction of Invention in the British Industrial Revolution: Incentives and Institutions)

Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Sure as hell, when Gladwell refers to this research there is a lesson in there. In a recent visit to the Creativity World Forum in Belgium last week he revealed three  reasons why he thinks this is important. They are:

1. The pace of innovation is always greater than our capacity to make sense of it. This reminds me of a wonderful quote of Bill Jensen: ‘Change all you want, just know that execution happens at the speed of making sense’.
2. The most valuable part of an innovation cycle is in the last mass-phase of the curve; and not in the head of the curve. This is where the tweakers ‘steal’ the blueprints of the inventors, add their vision of practical implementation and conquer the world with their tweaked version.
3. They who made the most of it were the ones with the least resources. Gladwell reminds us that Jobs was desperate, out of luck and out of money at the time of the biggest breakthroughs of Apple.

To summarize in Jobs’ own words: ‘Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish’. Forget about waiting for the perfect conditions.

The Five Blocks

Maybe I’d better put a disclaimer before you read any further. A sort of statement that warns you that writing about the starting conditions of a program does not make you immune for missing them – even if it looks as easy as five domino blocks.

So without further ado, here they are:

1. Sponsorship: Being a fan of the program is not enough. You need someone with the sanctioning power to drive the change all the way through the implementation, i.e.: not only propelling the program out of the harbor, but navigating it all the way to the destination.
   Sponsorship is about providing the required level of commitment and support to deliver on the promise. This can only be done by someone who has the ultimate control over the resources of your program. (I strongly recommend Daryl Conner’s blog for in-depth knowledge on sponsorship)
2. Identity: When the journey is long and the destination is far, people will need something to connect to. This is why program branding is important. Mind you: I did not say ‘advertising’.
   When I say ‘identity’, I refer to the level of community-building that is needed for people to place their trust upon an uncertain future. The ‘brand’ or ‘identity’ of a program works like an emotional bank account: people make deposits and do withdrawals to the same extent as you stick to the promises of your brand. (I have borrowed the concept of an emotional bank account from Stephen Covey’s ‘Seven Habits‘)
3. Ownership: When the program is big you will need a team to make it happen. But that’s not all: you will also need a team to own it and to maintain it AFTER the program arrived at its destination. People need a social architecture that helps them to connect and share their knowledge.
   Building such a community is not easy because it is not done with the pressure of authority. Rather, it is done with the gradual and consistent work of going local, being there, and connecting.
4. Urgency: This is the ‘now’ when a change is needed. It all comes down to defining what ‘now’ is. Therefore the sponsor needs to have a vision that is broad enough to communicate the destination, and narrow enough to communicate that there is no alternative. (This is where John Kotter’s work on the different types of Urgency comes in handy)
5. Parallel Projects: I sometimes nickname them as ‘killer whales’; i.e.: social animals who can kill your program. At the start of a program it is very unpopular to start listing all the parallel projects that may possibly hinder the program. It is very uncomfortable to state that other projects will either need to stop or redirect even before your program has delivered any tangible result.
   Yet I recommend to start this conversation as soon as possible, because killer whales will socially swim along your boat as long as your speed and power is not a threat to them. After that, … well…,  that’s a different episode of Free Willy.

The Order Matters

There is a logical order these domino blocks should be placed in. This is the order in which the first domino block will push against the second. The third block will be pushed by the combined energy of the first and the second, and so on.

This is how it goes for change programs:

1. Make sure that the sponsor of the program is visibly in charge and publicly commits to the program;
2. Build a brand by connecting it to how people experience the program. No matter how hyped the name of your program; no matter how dull the logo of your initiative; what matters is the stories that people will tell about it.
   Make sure that you brand the program though the stories they tell – and not through the advertising of some expensive external agency (have them create the logo, but let them stop there; the tagline should be yours!);
3. Make sure that the appointed owners of the program AND the future owners of the end-state are included in the creation of the brand. Amplify their stories and connect them as early on as you possibly can.
   Also: free up their time (hint: only a true sponsor with sanctioning power can do that);
4. Build a case for change. Please make sure you use the right arguments in the correct order: speak to the heart, then to the head, and eventually to the hands;
5. Be ruthless about parallel projects. Cram the image of a killer whale into the head of your sponsor as soon as you can. Tame them before they kill you.

The Distance Matters

In order to create momentum for your program, these domino blocks need to stand close to one another. This means that the distance between each block should be a maximum of weeks, not months! Else a domino block will fall over and create no effect on the next one. Timing does matter: compression will generate energy from one block to the next.

In this article I present an overview of the things in change management I believe in. At the end of this article I try to connect the dots with Social Architecture. My conclusion is that Social Architecture is an upgrade, not a replacement.

The Four Containers

The organizational change management approach caters for 4 different elements. They are: Communication, Learning, Organization and Performance. Each element represents a specific need that people have during a change.

1. Communication: people need an identity to hang onto so they can see what is in it for them. Constructing an identity for your project is necessary in order to provide an answer to the question “What’s In It For Me?”.
2. Learning: People need to know what is expected of them in terms of attitude, knowledge and skills. A part of this is provided in the form of classroom-trainings (the know-how), but the largest part of the knowledge transfer will take place in practice, during the testing phase and the phase of problem-solving. That is why the learning work is never restricted to the classroom and – most of all – we need to carefully build a network of local ambassadors for the project.
3. Organization: this is the need to know “Who does what?”. This means that the setup of the future roles and responsibilities needs to be clarified upfront.  Next, the support structure in the long run needs to be setup, i.e.: the community of ambassadors who will be responsible for the sustainability of the solution.
4. Performance: Finally, people need to know what exactly will change in practice and how this will affect their working habits and usage of time. This includes a detailed follow-up of the chronology of tasks and the creation of a uniform procedure that is shared among all departments.

Critical Mass

The four elements above determine the scope of change management. However the key success factor for these elements to work is determined by the critical mass that we will be able to create.

The critical mass of a project is a combination of different project roles who are working together to create enough energy to make the change happen. Daryl Conner masters this subject very well. According to Conner, the different roles are:

• Advocate: An advocate is an individual (or group) who wants to achieve a change, but doesn’t have the authority to make it happen.
• Initiating sponsor: The initiating sponsor has the sanctioning power to drive the change process through to realization. He or she has ultimate control of the resources—including human, economic, political, and logistical—required for implementation of the initiative.
• Primary sustaining sponsor: report to the initiating sponsor. They formally sanction the change within their areas of responsibility. Primary sustaining sponsors provide a “united front” of leadership support for the endeavor and coordinate implementation activities across functional or geographical lines as necessary.
• Local sustaining sponsor: Local sustaining sponsors are the individuals or groups who cascade the change below the level of primary sustaining sponsors.
• Agents: An agent is an individual responsible for facilitating the implementation of a change project.
• Targets: Targets are the individuals or groups that must change for realization to be achieved.

Momentum

The main preoccupation of change management is to make sure that the above cascade of critical mass is capable of achieving a momentum in the organization.

In a recent article Conner explained that in order to achieve momentum the sponsors and agents of this project need to find a proper way to manage the pushbacks that arise from risk-factors of this project.

This is what this comes down to visually:

• The solid line shows a change in which momentum meets little pushback from the risk factors and moves quickly to realization.
• The broken line shows an initiative that faced some significant risk factor counterforce and slowly but steadily overcame the organization’s tendency to maintain the status quo.
• The dotted line shows a project in which momentum made some headway at the beginning of its implementation but then became overwhelmed by the counterforces before critical mass was reached with the local sustaining sponsors.

Social Architecture

Finally, the main question to ask before we start this project is ‘what will be left when the project is over?’. This does not refer to the deliverables, but rather to the structure of agents that is put in place to sustain the benefits of this project.

Here is what I have written about Social Architecture earlier:

The objective is to put in place an architecture of people who are bridging the communication gaps that your project is trying to solve. Moreover, this structure should be reinforced by the sponsors to operate in the long run.

Connecting the Dots

For several weeks I have been saying that Social Architecture does not replace Change Management. Rather it is an upgrade. The only question is: how do they relate? Have a look at the attempt below:

Makes sense? Please let me know – because connecting the dots will always be work in progress!

Jane McGonigal is a game designer who is on a special mission. She wants to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games.

In the below video she explains how 21 billion hours of online gaming per week could save the world. Now, before you discard this idea as pure nonsense, have a look at the video first and read on, because Jane is on to something big.

Epic Wins

McGonigal describes an epic win is a classic gaming emotion. It is composed of  a sense of urgency, deep focus, optimism, surprise and foremost: the sensation of achieving something that is almost beyond the threshold of human imagination.

She discovered the epic win emotion while studying collaborative problem solving environments such as World Of Warcraft. She found out what makes this particular game so special and addictive:

• There are lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world saving mission;
• The mission you get is perfectly matched with your current level in the game;
• It is challenging because it is at the verge of what your are capable of;
• There is no unemployment and no sitting around;
• Millions of collaborators everywhere you go, ready to help you to achieve your epic mission;
• The epic story of why we are here is omnipresent;
• The positive feedback (leveling up, +1 strength, etc.)

The only ‘problem’ with these collaborative online environments is that the sense of an ‘epic win’ feels so satisfying that we decide to spend all our time there.

Waste of Time?

It is tempting to say that gaming represents a serious degradation for the human race. The fact that the majority of gamers look even lazier than a couch potato watching TV doesn’t help that perception. Even worse, from that vantage point, finding out that we have spent 5,93 million years of solving the virtual problems of World of Warcraft is not something to be happy about.

However, contrary to the elapsed time we have spent watching TV, these 5,93 million years of virtual problem solving turn out to be changing what we are capable of as human beings.

We are evolving to be a more collaborative species and we have developed an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers. Their addiction to gaming is not the problem. It is their solution to cope with a messy real world. Their solution just happens t to have quite some positive side effects.

The Real Question

Gamers are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. And the only problem is that they believe that they are capable of changing the virtual world and not the real world. That’s the problem I am trying to solve.

Jane McGonigal

Knowing that we have an entire generation of youngsters who are extraordinarily good at … something … the real question is: What exactly are they good at? Because if we can tap into that potential we have a limitless human resource at our fingertips.

McGonigal found four main things that games are making us good at. They are:

1. Urgent Optimism: The desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that it is achievable;
2. Social Fabric: we like people better after we have played a game with them. This is because it takes a lot of trust to play a game together.  Gaming builds a tight social fabric of bonds and trust;
3. Blissful Productivity: Gamers know that they are being optimized as human beings to do hard and meaningful  work;
4. Epic Meaning: Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions of human and planetary interest. Gamers love to build an epic story.

The Next Level

The mediocre manager believes that most things are learnable and therefore that the essence of management is to identify each person’s weaker areas and eradicate them. The great manager believes the opposite. He believes that the most influential qualities of a person are innate and therefore that the essence of management is to deploy these innate qualities as effectively as possible and so drive performance.

Marcus Buckingham

While Jane McGonigal is on a mission to change how we tap into the gamer’s potential on a societal level, I aim to zero in on what this means for leadership and organizational change management.

In a recent book called Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein explore the psychology of our every day decision-making and introduce the term Choice Architecture. This is the careful design of the environments in which people make choices. According to them, if anything you do influences the way people choose, then you are a choice architect.

In my opinion choice architecture could be applied on a more subtle level, as the quote of Marcus Buckingham indicates.  I believe there is a need for leaders to design and configure work in such a way that individuals can stand out and perform. And with an entire generation of young gamers graduating, our responsibility is to shape the world of work so that these gamers can deploy their innate qualities as effectively as possible.

Designing Games That Matter

The challenge we face as leaders is to tap into the potential of an entire generation of gamers. And we may be closer than we think: compare the above list of what games make us good at with the list of the things that motivate us:

1. Autonomy: need to direct our own lives;
2. Mastery: the desire to learn and create new things;
3. Purpose: being in service of something that is larger than oneself;
4. Progress: the sense of making progress.

I would say that the list of things that motivate us is pretty close to the list of things that games make us good at. The organizations that will thrive in the next decade are those who can connect these two lists, i.e.: to design games that matter.

Our Game

In a recent post I have stated that it’s time to raise the bar for our profession by leveling up towards relationship management and social architecture. McGonigal’s insights emphasize three things in this approach:

• the need to develop our skills to the edge of what we are capable of (i.e.: Blissful Productivity on the Expertise level);
• the need for designing projects as collaborative problem solving environments (i.e.: applying Urgent Optimism on the Relationship level); and
• the need to deliver platforms that inspire urgent optimism, tighten the social fabric, aspire blissful productivity and have an epic meaning (i.e.: creating the Social Fabric of the Social Architecture level).

So what are we waiting for? The game for Organizational Change Practitioners has three levels: Expertise, Relationship Management and Social Architecture.

What else do we need to start playing?

And what would happen to the classic failure rates when all of us got addicted to this game?

________

Related articles: Gamers Will Save Our Economy

Behavioral science shows that we want to be self-directive. But the truth is that we are climbing out of the industrial revolution and simply don’t know how to redesign our workplaces for more autonomy. It is still tempting to believe that the best way to motivate people is with external rewards like money.

According to Daniel Pink that is a mistake. In his latest book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, he builds on more than 40 years of research on motivation to prove that there are flaws in this thinking. But it is only now – when we can no longer deny the end of the industrial revolution and failing of ‘if-then motivation technology’ – that these insights are starting to make sense.

Carrots and Sticks

To understand why the carrot-and-stick logic is failing more and more we need to have a look at what drives people. Human beings are stimulated by a mix of drives: biological drives (we do things because we are hungry, thirsty, horny, etc.); a reward and punishment drive (the external reward to which we do respond very well) and a contribution drive (doing things because they are interesting and because they give us a feeling of belonging).

Over the past decades, ‘work’ as we know it since the industrial revolution has changed. In our knowledge economy, work is no longer repetitive, straightforward, well defined and rules-based. Yet, this is what all of the past generations in the world of work have been doing for a living and for a very long time.

Today’s work is increasingly non-routine. It requires a greater degree of creativity in order to solve the more complex challenges. The bad news is that carrot-and-stick motivators – which are very good when you need to follow a repetitive set of instructions – are no longer effective in this new context. According to Pink, this requires a different ‘technology for motivating people to do it’.

Pink also found that external rewards sometimes demotivate people. He calls them ‘if-then’ motivators. This means that they are very good at focusing our minds and directing our attention in a tight way. This is great to achieve specific and well defined goals. But when performing creative and conceptual tasks they are less effective. As Pink puts it: ‘this defies the laws of behavioral physics.’

Internal or External Rewards?

To cut this one short: you have to pay people enough. Frederick Herzberg’s Two Factor Theory (1959) is a ‘classic’ that is still proves to be valuable in this context. According to this theory, people are influenced by two factors. First, motivation factors, which help increase satisfaction but have little effect on dissatisfaction. Second, hygiene factors which, if absent or inadequate, cause dissatisfaction, but their presence has little effect on long-term satisfaction.

The external reward of money is a hygiene factor; if you are not paying people enough, there will be no motivation. You have to pay people enough to get the issue of money off the table. If people are paid enough they can focus on the work. That is when you can switch to what Frederick Herzberg called the ‘motivators’: the factors which help increase performance.

But then, which rewards leads to enduring performance? To Dan Pink, the answer is pretty clear:
1. Autonomy: need to direct our own lives;
2. Mastery: the desire to learn and create new things;
3. Purpose: being in service of something that is larger than oneself

Note: these are all internal rewards and they call for managers and leader to replace control with trust; in other words: to get out of the way. The Atlassian example in the video above is an example of radical autonomy that reduces if-then motivation and infuses autonomy in the workplace.

Autonomy allows people to make progress and animates what people are doing with a greater sense of purpose. Instead of engineering elaborate incentive schemes, managers should recognize progress and shine a light on progress. In their book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, Chip and Dan Heath refer to this as finding the ‘bright spots’ and using them actively for shaping the path.

It’s Not About Rewards, It’s About Progress!

And there is more. The biggest surprise in this debate comes from the research findings that suggest that rewarding is not the issue at all. What really motivates people is the sense of making progress!

In a recent article of Harvard Business Review, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer present the astonishing results of a multiyear study tracking the day-to-day activities, emotions, and motivation levels of hundreds of knowledge workers.

A close analysis of nearly 12,000 diary entries, together with the writers’ daily ratings of their motivation and emotions, shows that making progress in one’s work—even incremental progress—is more frequently associated with positive emotions and high motivation than any other workday event.

The authors conclude that managers have powerful influence over events that facilitate or undermine progress. They can provide meaningful goals, resources, and encouragement, and they can protect their people from irrelevant demands. Again, the great catchphrases of Jeff Jarvis – the Google evangelist – resonate here: First, be a platform; then, get out of the way!

As a matter of fact, there are three insights about organizational change management that are somewhat related because I can see three distinct phases in each of them. Have a look at the drawing below:

First, Elisabeth Kübler Ross, in her research on death and dying distilled the five stages of grief. Ever since its publication in 1973 it has been commonly regarded as the “cycle of change”.

Second, about 25 years earlier, Kurt Lewin published his thoughts on overcoming inertia and dismantling the existing mindsets in a model commonly referred to as the “unfreezing – changing – refreezing” model.

Third, Arthur Schopenhauer, who produced most of his writings even 100 years earlier than Lewin, made this remarkable statement about three stages of “truth”.

I find some “truth” in all of them, but most of all I find the combination inspiring:

1. As ‘unfreezing’ actions and initiatives are being set up you are likely to receive responses that ridicule your initiatives. Most people react from a position of denial and anger.

2. In ‘changing’ times opposition takes all kinds of faces and you should prepare for a drop in performance and self esteem. People hit the bottom of desperation once they realize that the world as they know it will never return.

3. Finally, once the transition stage is accomplished and people start to accept the aspects of their new reality, most of the things they ridiculed in he first stage are regarded as self-evident. That’s when you know refreezing actions can start, anchoring the new reality.

Some of the things that I take away from this video:

1. The defining factor is never resources, it’s resourcefulness.

2. His understanding of human needs (the art of fulfillment):
——
Needs of the personality
- Certainty
- Uncertainty (variety)
- Significance (feeling unique)
- Connection & love
——
Needs of the spirit
- Growth
- To contribute beyond ourselves

3. Robbins found a pattern throughout the years, which he summarizes in three steps:
- What is my focus?
- What does it mean?
- What do I do as a result of that?

The first and most significant finding of this survey is that the goals of an organizational change program are often poorly defined, and that this poor definition seems to be highly correlated with the success of the organizational change effort. What’s more, the most successful programs have goals that represent a clear stretch in performance compared to the current state of performance.

To me this underscores the need for the work stream “performance”, which starts with the business case, the feasibility study and most of all, the definition of unambiguous benefits.

Another finding is that the involvement of all staff as early as possible in the program lifecycle is a significant success factor. Although the CEO and the top team need to have a clear exposure of their engagement; they cannot do the job alone. This underscores the importance of engaging a broad network of ambassadors during the program and avoiding project cocooning. Freeing up the time of process owners, key users, team leaders and domain leaders is a tough job which involves a lot of discussions during the program; but it is an investment with high returns.

When it comes to the communication-part I was relieved to find out that redundancy of communication channels – a topic that I regularly preach about – is an important factor. Indeed, as the survey shows, successful companies used more than three times several different tactics for engaging the organization than their unsuccessful counterparts.

Overall, the organizational change management portfolio succeeds the test, so I would label it ‘McKinsey’ proof.
______________
(*) Creating organizational Transformations – The McKinsey Quarterly – August 2008

All sorts of examples came to the surface that confirmed the “Nice-to-have” brand that is tattooed on the back of each change management team as they start off. Finally, just before the meeting started, an experienced and seasoned program manager summarized it as ‘wellness’. I gave it the biggest of grins. However, as much as I appreciated the pun, to the same extent I could not provide evidence against it. Painful….

So this one is for all of us who want to endeavor in the domain of change management and take their profession as seriously as I do. If we want to avoid the ‘wellness’ stamp or the ‘nice-to-have’ connotation, we better get our act together!

The ‘act’ to my opinion is composed of four pillars, or ‘containers of work’ as I often call them. In the context of a project or a program these are ‘streams’ that last from the startup until the very last phase of a project. Each of these project streams has a benefit that is defined in terms of the project’s return on investment.

They are:

• The Communication Stream:
  The purpose of this stream is to grow the program during its complete lifecycle. This does not mean project propaganda but a clear answer to the question who are we? And what’s in it for me? The process of communication is one of social construction of a new reality in the hearts and minds of all stakeholders. You manage perceptions of what is going on.
  Major communication activities include:
  -    Segmentation of your target population (yes: you will need a database!);
  -    The mix of communication channels, and
  -    Building platforms and opportunities to interact.
• The Learning Stream:
  Note that this stream is called ‘Learning‘ and not ‘Training‘, because the activities in this stream go way beyond the classroom. This stream aims to upgrade the skills and knowledge of the organization. Learning deals with three questions at the same time: ’1. Why should I care?; 2. What is the one thing I need to know?; 3. How should I do it ?’.
  The main outcome is not only the knowledge but most of all how it is used and shared at the right time and to the proper extent.
  Major learning activities include:
  -    Building communities of knowledge;
  -    Making it easy for people to share knowledge, and finally
  -    Training organization.
• The Organization Stream:
  Essentially, this is the question ‘Who does what?‘ 99% of organizational changes result in a change of responsibilities an accountabilities. The purpose of this stream is to define and implement these new structures, responsibilities and accountabilities. The overall objective is to refreeze a new organization structure that matches the operations to the objectives of the change.
  Therefore the major organization activities include:
  -    Role definition and assigning;
  -    Organization redesign;
  -    Setup of a support structure.
• The Performance Stream:
  This is where the rubber hits the road. People will ask you: ‘What will this come down to in practice?’. The purpose of this stream is to implement the new ways of working. Also, every reinforcement mechanism that is put in place belongs to this stream.
  Major activities here include:
  -    Physical changes on the workplace;
  -    Simulations of the future state (be it a system or a way of working);
  -    The setup of meaningful measurements.

To me, the above portfolio is a bit different than ‘wellness’. Rather I would summarize it as Michael Hammer once did: ‘The soft stuff is the hard stuff‘. I cross my fingers that change management teams all over the world start realizing that they are working with real budgets and that they need to get their act together. If they do, their large scale organizational change programs will no longer be a foggy substance or a nice to have.

From now on there are 4 goals, 4 teams and 4 containers on your weekly status report. To hell with ‘nice to have’!