'Switch'ing Focus to Enable Change

A strong recommendation from a LinkedIn group of organisational change practitioners recently caught my eye

I have just finished reading Switch: How to Change Things when Change is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath and I am convinced that this book will change the way we talk and think about organisational change management

and so I was very interested to read an interview with Chip Heath in the McKinsey Quarterly in which he talked about the book.

Very striking was just how close the approach being advocated is to the approach that FranklinCovey adopts in supporting clients in the process of change, specifically

The core idea is that there are two sides to the way human beings think about any issue. There's the rational, analytical, problem solving side... and there's the emotional side that's addicted to impulse or comfortable routines.

and

Consider how change initiatives are typically rolled out. In many organisations, a change initiative consists of 35 slides in a Powerpoint deck analysing the reasons for change. (However) there's nothing in the deck that helps employees believe that "We're the kind of people who can successfully make this change."

Most recently, a key focus for us at FranklinCovey has been in supporting clients to manage change 'with a human touch' - helping leaders and managers to deal with the natural human responses that accompany change and providing them with a toolkit as they engage their teams to 'think differently' about change in order to get a different result.

Another issue identified in Switch is that "People have a tendency, especially in a change situation, to focus on the negative", and this is another key topic for us - enabling people to direct their energy most productively on what they can influence, and maximising the impact they can have (and the reputation they can build for themselves) during critical times of transition.