During transformation attempts we continue to see three glaring mistakes made by organizations of all sizes. The first mistake is that organizations fail to understand that a transformation is a large portfolio of initiatives that are intersecting and interdependent, which means that the initial planning for the transformation needs to take into account all of these initiatives and how they interact with each other. Unfortunately, most organizations and practitioners are unaware of all the initiatives needed for a transformation and never plan for them, this leads to transformation failure in almost every case.
The second mistake we see consistently during transformation attempts such as Agile, DevOps and Business Agility is the failure to incorporate change management tools, practices and concepts into the transformation. Our experience has shown that this is most often a case of practitioners in the various communities either believing that change management has no place in these types of transformations or simply not being skilled in change management.
The third mistake we see happens mostly is very large organizations with entire change management departments. During a transformation we see power plays where the change management department in a sense silo themselves during the transformation to try and protect their turf. The truth is that all parties in the transformation should be working together and leaning on each other to use everyone’s knowledge and skills to successfully see the transformation through to success.
To overcome these common mistakes, we have created two workshops, a transformation workshop to plan out the transformation at macro level and a change management workshop to bring to bear the powerful people practices, tools and concepts from the change management field.
The transformation workshop is a 5 day highly immersive experience where we bring together all of the key transformation players and through a series of scenarios and exercises put together a transformation outline that starts to bring into focus all of the initiatives needed in a transformation and how they interact with each other. The power of this workshop is that through the use of small breakouts sessions the participants are able to discover together how the portfolio of initiatives in a transformation are dependent on each other and how large impediments can be overcome when these dependencies are allowed to in a sense act as a force multiplier when they properly support each other. Through this workshop, individuals will gain a systemic and systematic view of what a transformation truly involves.
The change management workshop is also designed to be a highly immersive experience where participants learn and apply real change management practices, tools and concepts to transformations ranging from Agile to Digital. The power of this workshop is that it’s not a traditional check the box type of training, but instead the participants actually apply change management to their unique transformation. The workshop is very focused on culture and people, the participants will learn firsthand the concept of “Riding the Elephant” and how to apply the entire toolkit to the concept. The change management workshop is a 3-day workshop where our facilitators will act as guides for your change management journey.
