Harnessing The Power of Change For Good, Not Evil

Understanding organizational change and mastering it to achieve results

Course Description

Change is hard. Organizations and people change when the costs of not changing – be they loss of competitiveness, falling performance, opportunity cost – is greater than the cost and anxiety of change itself. Change is tricky. If your change is not quick or responsive enough you can lose-out on the competitive benefits of change. If your organizational systems are not agile enough, the costs of change can eat up all the gains of changing. Change is fundamental. Pretending to change rarely succeeds in fooling your customers, stakeholders or the market. Real business agility comes when behaviors, systems and values effectively anticipate and adapt to change.

This highly-interactive course helps change agents, people managers, and business leaders harness the power of change to achieve their performance objectives. Through group exercises, discussion, role play and case study, participants will understand why people and organizations resist change and learn how to overcome that resistance by practicing techniques for changing behaviors, systems and values. Participants will also learn how to prepare themselves and their organizations to anticipate change and become more agile at managing it. This course is both fun and hard work, both practical and inspirational. Participants will leave with a strong sense of what to do next.

Learning Objectives

As a result of successful completion of this two-day workshop participants are expected to:

• Appreciate the interdependency of people, systems and values and their roles in facilitating or hindering change
• Recognize why and how organizations and people resist change
• Use behavioral analysis to determine what is reinforcing old undesired behavior and what will incentivize new desired behavior
• Use process mapping techniques to determine what system changes will maximize impact and minimize cost
• Identify un-spoken values and recognize their effects on behavior and systems
• Practice techniques for shifting organizational values and managing expectations, incentives and priorities
• Recognize learning organizations and high-reliability organizations as models of business agility
• Recognize what you can and cannot change by understanding business and individual identity
• Prepare yourself and your organization for change by becoming ready to learn

Course Details

• Length: Two Days
• Audience: Anyone who manages business processes, leads people, or drives business strategy.
• Prerequisites: None