Self               Team               Larger System

Welcome to the Change Management Toolbook!

Are you personally ready for change? Is your team in serious need of new ways to work together? How can your organization deal with a change project which lacks focus or direction? Do you want to know why change is inevitable but hard to achieve? Do you want to surf on the waves of change? You will find some of the answers to your questions here.

The Change Management Toolbook is a collection of more than 120 tools, methods and strategies which you can apply during different stages of personal, team and organizational development, in training, facilitation and consulting. It is divided into three principle sections: Self, Team and Larger System.

Introduction to Change Management As in the Renaissance, it will be an exciting time, a time of great opportunities for those who can see and seize them, but of a great threat and fear for many. It will be more difficult to hold organizations and societies together. The softer words of leadership and vision and common purpose will replace the tougher words of control and authority because the tough words won't bite anymore. Organizations will have to become communities rather than properties, with members, not employees, because few will be content to be owned by others. Societies will break down into smaller units but will also regroup into even larger ones than now for particular purposes. Charles Handy: Beyond Certainty: The Changing Worlds of Organizations, 1995 Change Management is the process, tools and techniques to manage the people-side of change processes, to achieve the required outcomes, and to realize the change effectively within the individual change agent, the inner team, and the wider system. There are a multitude of concepts on Change Management and it is very difficult to distil a common denominator from all the sources that are applying the phrase to their mental maps of organizational development. But obviously there is a tight connection with the concept of learning organizations. Only if organizations and individuals within organizations learn, they will able to master a positive change. In other words, change is the result from an organizational learning process that centres around the questions: 'In order to sustain and grow as an organization and as individuals within; what are the procedures, what is the know-how we need to maintain and where do we need to change?', and, 'How can we manage a change, that is in harmony with the values we hold as individuals and as organizations?' Change Management has also to be seen in the light of the discussion on Knowledge Management, which took several turns during the nineties. When the establishment of an intranet was suddenly feasible to any large organization, IT and management scientists declared the beginning of the "knowledge society". The immature anticipation of knowledge management was that every member of an organization would be highly motivated to share information through a common platform and a quality improvement process would be enabled more or less by itself. It took only a couple of years to realize that this assumption was false. Up to now, there are no examples of a company in which transformational learning is facilitated by an IT system only, because the early protagonists forgot that information does not equal knowledge and that human knowledge is in the muscles of the persons who make the parts of a larger system. Back to square one. How (and whether at all) change can be "managed" or facilitated? In essence, change takes place on three levels (Figure 1): The self, the team or the (small) organization and the wider system that surrounds the team or the small organization or the organizational unit - depending how you define the system borders. In a process, learning needs to be facilitated on all three levels to become sustainable. Figure 1: Levels of Change

There are many schools and tools that are related to Change Management and most of them are meeting if it comes to two principles: The constructivist paradigm ("The map is not the territory") and the systems approach ("The whole has a different dynamic than its parts."). However, I mainly draw my tools from the following schools of thought: Learning Organizations (Peter Senge) Theme Centred Interaction (Ruth Cohn) Transactional Analysis Gestalt Therapy (Fritz Pearls) Systems Thinking / Family Therapy (Virginia Satir and all the new thinkers, including Bert Hellinger, Fritz Simon, etc.) Neurolinguistic Programming / NLP (Richard Bandler, John Grinder, Robert Dilts) Chaos Theory (Santa Fé Institute) Communication Theory (Paul Watzlawik) Whole Systems Change (Harrison Owen, Marvin Weisbord, David Cooperrider) Neuro-Biology Quantum Physics (Heissenberg) Human Resource Development Total Quality Management

What are the skills that people need who want to facilitate change? Table 1 gives an overview of the different skills related to the three levels of change (self, team and system). It is by no means exhaustive. Related to Skills the Change Agents need to acquire Self Team System Technical Skills of the Specific Sector     X Quality Management   X X Listening and Inquiry Skills   X X Defining Objectives / Visioning X X X Understanding Mental Maps / Shifting Perspectives X X X Resource Orientation X X X Dealing with Complexity (X) (X) X Learning from Mistakes / Feedback X X X Coaching   X X Leadership   X X Training Skills     X Facilitation Skills   X X Large System Change Tools   (X) X Understanding and Catalysing Self-Organization   (X) X Table 1: Skills of Change Agents (X = strongly needed, (X) = partly needed)

If I relate these skills to the schools previously mentioned, they provide different methodologies which can be associated with the development of the specific skills (Table 2). Roots and Schools of Change Management Skills Appropriate Methodologies Listening and Inquiry Skills NLP, Family Therapy, Communication Theory, Learning Organizations Defining Objectives / Visioning NLP, Systems Thinking, Learning Organizations Understanding Mental Maps / Shifting Perspectives Gestalt, NLP, Learning Organizations, Communication Theory Resource Orientation / Solution Focus Appreciative Inquiry, Family Therapy, NLP Dealing with Complexity Systems Thinking, Family Therapy, Chaos Theory Learning from Mistakes / Feed Back NLP, Family Therapy, TCI Coaching Family Therapy, NLP, Gestalt, TA Leadership NLP, Family Therapy, Gestalt, TA, Human Resource Development Large System Change Tools Understanding and Catalysing Self-Organization Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry, Future Search Conferences Table 2: Roots and schools applicable to change processes Finally, all the methodologies, beside providing a general framework which helps to orient yourself and act appropriately in a given situation, provide a wealth of applicable tools (always keeping in mind that only fools worship their tools). You know that I try to collect these tools and through my work offer to maintain an overview, using the simple assumption: "If something does not work, try something else". I am not in the position (and I will never be) to list them all. But if you browse our website and the old newsletters, you might find most of the tools mentioned in Table 3. Here, I have related different tools to the various step in a change process, grouped into micro and macro tools. Micro tools are usually applied as a one shot intervention where they are well circumscribed and used to serve a specific purpose (such as the Walt-Disney Circle). Macro tools consist of several micro tools - you might also call them methodologies. Look at Future Search conferences: there is the time line, the mind map, the group work on "prouds" and "sorries", etc. This is a true macro tool.

Some Examples for Micro and Macro Change Management Tools Basic Processes Micro Tools Macro Tools Diagnosis Processes Different kind of questionnaires, Organizational Constellations, active listening tools, Time Lines, Organizational History / Mapping Open Space Technology, Future Search, Appreciative Inquiry Concept Building Processes Visioning, creativity techniques (e.g. Walt-Disney-Cycle), Mindmapping Project Cycle Management, Appreciative Inquiry, Scenario Technique Psychosocial Change Processes Various coaching techniques, Peer Mentoring, Meta-Mirror, working with hidden agendas, 6 Thinking Hats, Working with Limiting Beliefs Open Space Technology, Future Search Conferences Learning Processes Dialogue, tools for self-reflection, mentoring Formal training or on-the-job, Open Space Technology, Appreciative Inquiry Information Processes Tools for recognizing and utilizing different thinking styles, Pacing and Leading Public Relations Campaigns, Intranets, Stakeholder Forums Implementation Processes General management techniques General management techniques, Real Time Strategic Change (RTSC) Management of all Change Processes General management techniques General management techniques (e.g. participatory monitoring), TQM Table 3: Some tools for different steps of the change process

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