International workshop series – building your change adept organisation

You would have thought that the bigger organisations would respond to the current economic downturn by looking for better ways to cut costs and improve performance…

As a small consultancy specialising in helping clients do just that,  we have been finding it increasingly difficult to get in front of senior managers in the larger organisations with whom we can add greatest value. They are either putting off implementing  projects, finding in-house solutions or using the bigger, more established consultancies – “safe pair of hands”.

We have decided that our response to this should be get together with a group of consultancies across the world similar to us in size and thinking and put on a series of breakfast/dinner workshops aimed at our target markets. So far we have opened discussions with a couple of consultancies, jointly developed the focus and outline programme structure and have started testing it.

The focus of the workshops will be:
- What makes a change-adept organisation, with the resilience to cope with the ever-increasing complexity and uncertainty of today’s world?
- Benchmark your own organisation against key change capability characteristics
- Learn how to build the capability for change into your infrastructure, standard practices and core values – how to become a ‘change-adept’ organisation.

The intention is to charge enough to cover our costs so that it becomes a self-funded marketing programme.

Each workshop will be hosted, marketed and facilitated by the local consultancy, with one or more of the global team present to give it the international flavour we seek to get across.

The first workshop is planned for February in Amsterdam and focuses on the Healthcare sector, as our local partner reports good feedback on the idea from that sector. Discussions are in progress with colleagues and contacts in Australia, Canada, Denmark, South Africa and the US.

If you have a good local network of senior people in large companies (preferably multinationals) that you would like to tap into with this proposition to expand your business and join us in this project, I’d be pleased to discuss it further with you.

Get in touch!

The other Black Hole

People’s resistance to change is frequently the cause for change projects to grind to a halt, but do your IT systems constitute another insurmountable barrier to successful and timely change?

The IT systems that underpin an organisation’s processes can be the other ‘black hole’ that plagues change initiatives. Most change initiatives need these to be modified, upgraded or replaced, in order for the change to be implemented. But, like shifting an organisation’s culture, changing the IT systems doesn’t happen overnight. The requirement has to be specified, new systems need to be designed and implemented, and the whole cycle can take months, if not years to complete – delaying the changes, and often threatening to cost so much you end up having to find ways to work around them.

Even when you implement new systems, how often do you still end up working around them, because they don’t actually do what you need them to do? One reason for this is the time it has taken, during which everything has moved on but you haven’t been able to change the processes or the management reports available.

Another reason for the shortfall is the gap between the way you work and the standard processes embedded in the systems. Typically, from the first day you implemented your current systems – and even before – you will have had to deal with the frustration of not being able to include all the messy, less routine activities – the stuff that didn’t fit, not to mention the event-driven, ad-hoc, urgent ‘on-my-desk-by-tomorrow’ work that interferes with our planned, routine tasks. So, alongside the established systems, you will have built up a pile of ‘non-routine’ data collection, processing, analysing and reporting activities.

But that’s often the stuff which actually defines how flexible and successful you are in delighting your customers, not to mention how well you deal with your suppliers, shareholders and competitors – i.e. how profitable you are. Not the routine core processes.

That’s also where the real opportunity for improvement often lies, but traditionally the cost and difficulty in mapping, coding and implementing systems prevented us from attempting to go there.

Well, today we can go there.

We are teaming up with Eximium to deliver Procession - an agile software platform that enables you to involve managers and staff in mapping, implementing and continuously improving fully automated web-based processes on an Oracle system, in 20% of the time and cost you have been quoted.

It’s still not easy. You need to tease out the detail and map it, just like you did for the routine processes. Only this time, each ‘input-process-output’ that we map will be highly conditional on external triggers and may include stuff that only happens occasionally… So along with the new technologies we need to apply a different set of skills – the ability to find patterns in this ‘white noise’ and to include these patterns within a richer set of repeatable processes.

It’s that combination of skills and technologies that sets us apart from the average BPR (business process redesign) merchants.

Think of the benefits:

At the moment, every time you carry out an ad-hoc task, you have to adapt an existing process or reinvent it, which means you waste time and make mistakes.

And every time you finish the task and leave the output in its folder in your filing system, you have wasted an opportunity to share the process and an output that might be useful for someone else.

Conventional BPR regards such complicated, non-routine activity as ‘too difficult’ and excludes it when designing the ‘core’ systems.

But with a more versatile set of tools we can start to include this activity, working with you and your people to spot and track the patterns of repeatable processes and identify the location of data you need to share across your organisation in order to improve performance.

We then use the power of the new technology to turn that into a working prototype of your information and operating system. With our support, that’s tested and refined by your operations people – not the IT dept – with the result that not only can you start using it within just a few weeks, your people understand and own it, so it gets used.

A typical project can take less than 3 months from start to finish and cost 80% less than a conventional systems implementation. Moreover every time you undertake a new process that looks as if it might be relevant in future, you can add it, quickly and easily to the system.

Does this sound too good to be true?

It is only with the arrival of new tools and technology that we have the capability to bring Knowledge Management and BPR together and build far richer and flexible operations and information management systems, using all of the knowledge and creativity of your people:

1. Imaginist’s Change Readiness Assessment methodology ensures that you are developing the new processes using the knowledge and creativity of your people and that you have identified and addressed the cultural barriers to change.
2. Eximium offers BPR and process mapping skills to trap and include this richness of knowledge and activity.
3. And we have harnessed Procession’s agile business application software platform to enable us to design and implement a set of fully integrated processes within weeks, encompassing existing ‘core’ systems and extending to include much of the formerly hard-to-automate activities, without the traditional time, cost and hassle. This system is then able to adapt and flex to accommodate refinements, changes and improvements, without the disruption and costs associated with changing a traditional information management system.

So the holy grail is in sight:

• You need to make your routine, core processes as cost efficient and fit-for-purpose as possible…
• You need this management information and operations system to encompass any activities that are recognised as being useful and repeatable, and whose outputs may have value beyond the initial requirement and be worth sharing…
• You need it to integrate existing systems, functions and processes that have been stand-alone in the past…
• You need to be able to do all this quickly and at a fraction of the cost it used to take…
• You need to be sure that whatever changes and improvements you make are based on the knowledge and experience of your people, and are understood, accepted and used by them …
• And, finally, you need to be able to continually refine and improve your system and flex it to meet new requirements, quickly, cost-effectively and with the least possible disruption to business-as-usual…

You can!

If you are interested in building an organisation that is capable of continuous improvement and resilient in the face of the challenges ahead, contact us.

And here are some useful links to information on Procession:

• What is Procession® and what does it do?
• Continuously improving systems

What makes an organisation good at managing change?

In a recent McKinsey’s article, management consultants Scott Keller and Colin Price summarise their forthcoming book: ’Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage’. The message is clear: organisational health is the “ultimate competitive advantage” and organisations need to build the capacity to learn and keep changing over time, if they want to achieve and sustain high levels of performance.

This confirms what we’ve been telling anyone who will listen for the past year: it’s what we call the organisation’s Capability for Change and it’s a crucial core value, if you want to survive in the face of the accelerating pace of change and rising levels of business complexity.

I took my definition of Capability for Change from Rebecca Henderson (Harvard Business School): “Attention and resources focused on people and processes, developing the organisation’s stock of capability and resilience”.

I also like this one:

Resilience: “The attitudes, skills and strengths, that enable individuals, and teams to thrive within organisational change” (The Taylor Clarke Partnership)

But like all aspects of an organisation’s culture and values, its resilience and capability for change requires continual investment and maintenance, or it will erode through natural entropy. In our opinion, any transformation programme needs these core values at the heart of its core deliverables, but in our experience, most don’t go there.

So, how do you know if your organisation has resilience and capability for change? How do you know whether it is good at managing change as a normal part of ‘how we do things around here’?

Try our ‘starter for ten’ list. Does your organisation have these characteristics?

1. Strong, visible, empowering, leadership
2. Clearly articulated and shared vision
3. Attention paid to supporting core values
4. High level of trust between managers and staff – decision-making devolved wherever possible
5. People allowed to stop doing stuff when taking on new initiatives – overload issue managed well
6. Innovation encouraged and well managed
7. Good communication between departments
8. Good communication/collaboration with customers and suppliers
9. Adherence to standard ways of doing things
10. HR benefits and rewards aligned to business objectives.

Yes? Then you are likely to have a good capability for managing change, i.e:

• High level of involvement and commitment
• Low resistance to change
• Resilience in the face of challenges
• Able to bring in changes rapidly and effectively in response to need.

No? Then you, like most organisations are probably on a ‘downward spiral to disaster’:

• Senior management is taking a short-term view and focusing on cutting costs and hitting revenue or output targets
• This may be succeeding in the short run, but it has diverted resources away from supporting your people and processes – your capability to manage change
• As a result, it is actually becoming more difficult for the organisation to sustain its revenue performance – everyone is under so much pressure that even normal routine stuff doesn’t get done any more

Only reinvesting in your core capability will correct this downward trend and give the organisation a fighting chance to successfully manage the accelerating pace of change and rising levels of business complexity.

How to Improve your Organisation’s Resilience and Capability for Change

I recently asked a senior director in a large multi-national corporation whether he was satisfied that they were building the resilience and the capability to handle the increasing pace of change and rising complexity of the challenges that his organisation faces today and in the future?

And he had to admit that they weren’t.

This is a question that all executives face, but most will (privately) agree that the answer is a resounding NO.

But those that fail to do so will not survive.

A recent IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs across the world confirmed that complexity is the single biggest issue for businesses and more than half doubted their ability to manage it.

In this blog, I want to explore how you can benchmark and improve your organisation’s capability to respond quickly, effectively and sustainably to these challenges – your Capability for Change.

In the past, this meant understanding your customers, knowing what your competitors were up to and putting in place the appropriate strategies to meet the challenges as they arose. You relied on your managers to run the operation, keep costs under control and implement the strategies (often in addition to their day jobs).

In fact, most organisations performed poorly in responding to the challenges that they faced. The need for change was often recognised too late and managers found themselves unable to galvanise their lumbering, bureaucratic organisation to respond quickly or effectively. However, the relatively slower pace of change allowed some degree of catch-up and the huge financial investment and sometimes sheer waste of skilled resources that were sacrificed because of the ‘too little too late’ response were rarely chronicled.

It is clear that the margin for catch-up and profligate spending and waste is far narrower in today’s more demanding competitive and economic climate. The organisation needs to build resilience into its core values and its infrastructure.

But how?

First you need to benchmark your organisation’s Capability for Change.

I am not talking about the capability of your programme and project management teams. It almost doesn’t matter how well-managed they manage the projects and programmes, if the people affected by the project do not have the capability to learn and embed the new ways of working. I am talking about the capability of the organisation as a whole to cope with the huge task of making change happen. And then do it again, and again.

Typically, CEOs underestimate the complexity of change and overestimate the capabiity of the organisation to cope with change. It’s the gap between these two variables that you need to understand.

How can you tell how wide a gap there is in your organisation?

A quick way is to look at how the organisation deals with overload. Are your managers working effectively? That means they are probably loaded beyond their ability to do everything in the day, but not so overloaded that nothing gets done properly or well. Or are they struggling to cope?

That probably means that change initiatives have been passed down for them to cope with on top of their day job. Sometimes this is disguised by redefining the day job to include the initiative, but the key question is: did you allow them to stop doing other stuff to make the time for the extra work? If not, the initiative won’t succeed.

Research over the past few months suggests that there is a tipping point, beyond which initiatives, however good they may be, cannot ‘stick’.

Conclusion: Unless one of the first things you do in planning a change project is working out how to allow key people to stop doing other stuff (‘the day job’), they won’t be able to give the initiative the time and attention it needs, so it will fail. That usually comes down to budgets and resourcing decisions, which are under serious pressure in today’s competitive and economic climate. So the only way an organisation is going to be motivated to build sufficient resource into supporting their projects so that people can pass routine work across in order to concentrate on a change initiative, is by making this a core value for the organisation. And the only argument for making it a core value is if you can clearly quantify the financial benefits of doing it this way – and the financial consequences of not doing so.

So when we talk about the gap between the level of complexity of the project and the capability of the organisation, that gap has to be quantifiable and its impact on the bottom line profits of the organisation has to be demonstrable.

That’s where the Change Equation tools can help.

By applying the Change Equation models and tools in a Change Readiness Assessment (CRA) process, we can:

• Calculate the complexity of the project and understand the level of organisational capability needed for the project to succeed
• Assess the actual cultural and process management capability in the part of the organisation affected by the project
• Measure the gap and quantify its impact on the project’s ROI

The CRA takes very little time, but delivers significant benefits. If you undertook a CRA as part of the initial planning for all your projects, you would achieve a consistent improvement in project outcomes, raise your return on time and resources invested and see the financial benefits on the bottom line.

 But that’s just the beginning… Now improve your organisational resilience!

You can do something even more important with these tools. By carrying out an audit of a selection of past projects across the organisation, you can begin to define the common barriers to change inherent in the your culture, systems and processes.

Analysis of these barriers allows you to develop an enterprise-wide transformation programme that focuses on bridging the gaps, building capability into how you undertake projects, building resilience into the core values and infrastructure of your organisation.

So a large corporation – or public sector organisation – could integrate the Change Equation methodology into its standard practices at two levels:

1. At Project level – build the CRA into your project planning processes to ensure Change Readiness and deliver consistent improvement in change project outcomes
2. At Programme level – use the Change Equation principles, Route Maps and Action Plans to provide the framework and content to deliver organisational Capability for Change as a core value.

If you think we are on the right lines here, let me know.

And more important, let others know!

Developing “Change Capability” in the face of ever-rising complexity

As I recorded in my 2011/03/13 blog, the world’s private and public sector leaders have reported to IBM that a rapid escalation of “complexity” is the biggest challenge confronting them (Capitalizing on complexity – IBM Global CEO Study 2010).

“Events, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely unique situations. They expect this to continue – indeed, to accelerate – in the coming years.” As one CEO said: “The complexity our organization will have to master over the next five years is off the charts — a 100 on your scale from 1 to 5.” (Edward Lonergan, President and CEO, Diversey, Inc.)

The respondents to IBM’s study are also agreed that their organisations are not equipped to cope effectively with this rising level of complexity. They need to “invent new business models based on entirely different assumptions”.

David Snowden, CEO of Cognitive Edge, sees this as a shift from a world where we can predict probable risks and use risk management systems to make our plans robust, to one where we need to accept that complex and interdependent risks will occur, and find new ways to cope, building ‘resilience’ into our organisations.

“Moving from a system designed for robustness to one that supports resilience represents a significant strategic shift. Whilst systems have commonly been designed to be robust – systems which are designed to prevent failure – increasing complexity and the difficulty it poses to ‘fail-proof’ planning have made a shift to resilience strategically imperative. A resilient system accepts that failure is inevitable and focuses instead on early discovery and fast recovery from failure.” (Risk and resilience – David Snowden, Cognitive Edge)

This requires a shift from deductive and inductive methods of managing risk, to placing greater reliance on skilled managers’ sensitivity to emergent behaviour and their ability to use abductive reasoning – identifying relationships between factors that would not normally be considered linked. As it happens, that’s what humans do best!

So we need to apply new skills in our management of change projects and programmes. to focus on developing and maintaining an infrastructure that supports continuous innovation and transformation – I call it an organisation’s Change Capability.

In the Change Equation’s Organisational Culture Evolution model, this is described as an ‘Imaginist’ culture. But an Imaginist culture has to be built on a solid foundation – it can’t just be grafted on. To quote Mary Douglas: “If you want to change the culture, you will have to start by changing the organization”.

See our slidecast on this: http://www.slideshare.net/peterd35/inpact-slidecast-2

As the IBM study says, avoiding complexity is not an option – the choice comes in how you respond to it. Will you allow complexity to paralyse your already creaking organisation, reduce your responsiveness to customers, create corporate burn-out among your managers and eventually kill you off entirely? Or do you have the creative leadership, a focus on sustaining your people and the right calibre of managers to develop the change capability and operating dexterity you need to turn complexity into a strategic competitive advantage?

It requires a separate, continuous thread of capability development to reflect, transmit, embed and maintain the organisation’s core values and Change Capability infrastructure  - but that is the recipe for sustained growth and survival in these complex times.

Is that what your organisation is doing?

How to measure the impact of distrust on your project

Trust is the ‘oil’ that helps people to accept change in an organisation. It empowers them to remove the barriers that block change, with a minimum of friction. (That’s why having a highly visible senior manager at change project meetings is so important – they don’t even have to say anything!)

An absence of trust between managers and staff and between parts of an organisation will slow down and even stop a project. The higher the levels of distrust, the more time and effort the project will require and the higher the cost. So if you could measure trust in the group that is to be affected by a change project, you could develop a useful predictor of the additional time and cost involved in implementing that change project.

I looked for in vain for an approach that would allow me to measure trust. Stephen Covey Jr wrote a useful book about “The Speed of Trust – The One Thing that Changes Everything” but one thing he failed to do in that book was to suggest ways to measure trust – and other authorities on the subject shed no more light.

So I dreamt up my own approach. How does one measure trust? By asking a few key questions…

There are essentially 3 key relationships anyone has in an organisation:

1. Relationship with my manager

2. Relationship with my staff

3. Relationship with my peers

That gives a 3-dimensional model. For each dimension, I used a four-point scale to score the relationship, where 0 is the lowest and 3 is the highest:

3 =  excellent relationship – high levels of trust and respect

2 =  quite good relationship, reasonable levels of trust and respect

1 =  poor relationship, low levels of trust and respect

0 = non-existent relationship, no trust or respect.

Then using a simple questionnaire, I solicited the responses from a sample of the people involved in the change project. Adding up the scores gives me a figure with a maximum score of 9. I turned this into a percentage and inverted it  (deduct from 100%) to obtain the % of distrust – because it is the shortfall in trust that acts as an drag on the time and cost of change. And I found that applying the distrust % directly yo the planned time and cost of a project gave me a pretty good idea of the potential impact of distrust on the ROI of the project.

So, if the trust score is low, say 3, that gives me a trust % of 33%. Deducting that from 100 gives a measure of distrust factor of 67%. Applying this measure to a project with a planned roll-out of 1 year and an implementation cost of £40,000 would add 8 months and around £27,000 to the cost.

In my experience, this seems to correlate well with what happens in practice – the lower the level of trust, the longer it takes to implement the projects and gain the benefits.

Let me know if you find this useful.

A fuller account of this approach is contained in my book: The Change Equation.

Managing in Complexity – convergence of ideas

Do you believe in synergy and synchronicity?  I do.

Over the past few weeks I have been seeing a real convergence of ideas from companies, experts and people I meet, suggesting that there are some fundamental deep-seated differences between organisations that manage complexity and change successfully and those that don’t – and that we should be able to identify and measure these, for the benefit of our clients.

Those of you who follow my blogs will know that I have been saying for some time that complexity is not linear and managing complex projects successfully demands a move away from ‘command and control’ style project management to one that supports and nurtures emergent behaviour and new forms of organisation. (I took my original cue from the work of Eve Mitleton-Kelly who runs the Complexity Group at LSE).

It is encouraging that the recent IBM study (‘Capitalizing on Complexity’) takes a similar view of business complexity, suggesting that the ever-increasing scale of complexity in business places new demands on CEOs to be more creative. One CEO in the IBM study concludes that “The complexity our organization will have to master over the next five years is off the charts — a 100 on your scale from 1 to 5.”

And today’s Sunday Times actually has an article (Complexity may be inevitable but it must be managed) about the need for companies to simplify in the face of complexity. It also identifies the non-linearality of complexity and accepts that levels of complexity are rising.

So complexity is the ‘space’ within which I want to be able to offer help and support to clients, whether it’s project (narrow focus) or business (wider focus) complexity.

Convergence of ideas

In addition to the IBM study and the Sunday Times article, here are some of the other ideas that are converging:

1st and 2nd Order Project Management

Michael Cavanagh (http://mcavanagh.com/) has identified that managing complex programmes demands a different approach to that required to deliver simpler programmes – what he calls “2^nd order PM”, focusing on some of the soft aspects of change, where 1^st order PM focuses just on the project outputs.

Michael refers to “Bureaucracy – when you know what to expect” and “Adhocracy – when you don’t”. I have for some time used a similar distinction, first encountered when reading Thomas Docker’s white paper on project complexity (he is Chairman of CITI):

• Complicated = not simple, but ultimately knowable (such as installing a new comms network)
• Complex = not simple and never fully knowable (such as restructuring and merging two departments)

(Interestingly, a discussion about complexity on BBC Word Service Radio this morning with Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Forum: 12/03/2011), used exactly those terms…more synchronicity!)

Michael’s 2^nd order PM includes the use of “adhocratic” leadership, system thinking, outcome management and experiential learning – “learning in the experience, not from the experience” – a great distinction which fits well with David Snowden’s “Probe > Sense > Respond” approach to complexity, in his Cynefin framework. i.e. act in the uncertainty.

Overload tipping point

In the capability assessment that forms part of the Project Readiness Healthcheck, we assess the capability of the organisation to cope with change by looking at its culture and process management capability. But clearly another factor must be the sheer number of change initiatives being loaded onto the shoulders of the poor managers. I suspect that there is a tipping point, beyond which nothing new gets through.

A recent report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, “Leaders of change – Companies prepare for a stronger future” says that change programmes are “consuming ever more corporate resources” but adds that on average only 56% of change initiatives are successful. The report suggests that the limit of how many initiatives a company can absorb is, on average, just 3.6 changes annually. That average doesn’t tell us very much, unfortunately. It would be useful to know on what variables it was based – and to be able to assess an organisation’s overload factor as an indication of how well it would cope with further change.

What is the tipping point? 100% overloaded? 200%?

The strategy is obviously to get managers to STOP doing stuff…which fits with the idea that one answer to complexity is to simplify the customer and employee experience, i.e. simplify your processes… but that needs a strong, well-supported argument, based on research. Some work on overload was done by Rebecca Henderson at Harvard way back in 1981, but the details of this are not available and I haven’t seen anything since.  Time we focused on it again!

Investing in an organisation’s capability is key to longer-term success

That’s so obvious, it shouldn’t need saying, but how often do you come across organisations where they only really pay lip service to their Investing in People values? So it’s great when one comes across something that confirms the importance of consistently paying attention to developing and maintaining a strong set of core values and supporting people to trust, share and become empowered to ‘invent their own route to the future’. Following up the Overload work by Rebecca Henderson at Harvard produced this gold nugget:

When the CEO’s priority is to hit the revenue targets, performance seems to go up. So that becomes the strategy whenever the company comes under pressure. However, work done by Nelson P. Repenning and Rebecca M. Henderson at Harvard suggests that this apparent causality may lead to a “vicious cycle of accelerating decline”. Their (very technical) paper: ‘Making the Numbers? “Short Termism” & The Puzzle of Only Occasional Disaster’, suggests that the more the focus on revenue targets diverts attention and resources away from developing capability (i.e. their people and processes), the more the company risks disaster longer term. Again, there seems to be a critical “tipping threshold”.

So it seems that developing a strong, sustained cultural and process management capability enables an organisation to be flexible and achieve performance targets when the pressure is on, without detriment to its long-term survival.

That fits right in with our Change Equation principle that the management of change is not a subset of project management and cannot be achieved within the lifecycle of a change project – it has to start earlier, continue throughout and go on after the completion of the project. In other words it requires a separate, continuous thread of capability development to reflect, transmit, embed and maintain the organisation’s core values.  That is the recipe for sustained growth and survival.

So what do organisations who are good at managing change have in common?

They

• Have strong, congruent values, embodied and disseminated from the top
• Follow a ‘grow-your-own’ and ‘pick-the-best’ approach to talent and skills
• Take care with their people – ‘they are our real assets’ (and mean it)
• Involve their people in ‘creating their own route to the future’
• Set performance targets from the ‘outside in’, taking a systemist and holistic view of the organisation, where individuals are recognised to wear multiple hats
• Recognise the dangers of overload, manage out unnecessary processes and invest in change management
• Understand how to cope with complexity, are able to simplify and build in flexibility and adeptness for change.

That’s my list, off the top of my head…what’s yours?

And what tools have you got to measure all this?

Capitalizing on Complexity – important new study

I have just come across an IBM study (‘Capitalizing on Complexity’) which reveals that the world’s private and public sector leaders believe that a rapid escalation of “complexity” is the biggest challenge confronting them. They expect it to continue — indeed, to accelerate — in the coming years.

They are equally clear that their enterprises today are not equipped to cope effectively with this complexity in the global environment. And they identify “creativity” as the single most important leadership competency for enterprises seeking a path through this complexity.

As the chairman of IBM says: “events, threats and opportunities aren’t just coming at us faster or with less predictability; they are converging and influencing each other to create entirely unique situations.”

Those of you who have been following my blogs will know that I have been preaching the importance of understanding the exponential nature of complexity. Managers typically underestimate the complexity of their projects and overestimate the capability of their organisations to cope with it.

The IBM study includes the advice: “predict and act,” not just “sense and respond.”  I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised to read what is almost a direct quote from David Snowden’s description of how to deal with complexity, in his Cynefin Framework – after all, he did that work while he was still at IBM…

Over the past few weeks I have been seeing a real convergence of thinking from companies, experts and people I meet, that draws me to the conclusion that there are some fundamental qualities in organisations that manage complexity and change successfully, and that we should be able to identify and promote these for the benefit of our clients.

More on that anon.

If you could improve your change project’s ROI by 10%, what would that be worth to you?

In my seminar in February, I showed how the Change Equation methodology provides a way to quickly identify and quantify the barriers to a successful change project.

Due to the high demand for places at this free event, I have arranged to run another seminar on 25th March at the City Business Library at the Guildhall in London.

DATE:  2pm-4.30pm on Friday 25^th March.

WHERE: City Business Library, Aldermanbury, London EC2V 7HH

TO BOOK: email cbl@cityoflondon.gov.uk

This seminar is free but you have to book your place in advance. Don’t leave it too late to book your place!

More information about the seminar at: www.imaginist.co.uk

Why attend the seminar?

Change projects have a tendency to fail – in fact only 70% ever deliver their full benefits.

Peter Duschinsky, Managing Director, The Imaginist Company, says that this is because most project managers and their bosses underestimate the complexity of their projects and overestimate the capability of the organisation to cope with change. That’s because project risk and complexity is not linear, but EXPONENTIAL.

Peter goes on to claim that conventional change management interventions designed to control the outcomes of a project will FAIL completely if it’s a truly complex project.

So how do you know if your project is complex? And how do you assess the capability of your organisation to cope with change? Come along and find out!

If you could improve your change programme’s ROI by 10%, what would that be worth to you?

Here’s what people said about the 2010 seminar series:

“Many thanks, Peter, for the seminar during the week, which I found very useful”

“Thanks Peter, I came away with plenty of food for thought after your seminar.”

“Just a short email to thank-you for this afternoons session. I found the content and your style very smooth making the knowledge easy to take in.”

“Thank you very much for the ‘How to manage complex change’ seminar, the ‘Management Culture’ model was excellent as well as the ‘Exponential Complexity.

Free Seminar: How to manage complex change projects – and succeed!

Change projects have a tendency to fail – in fact only 70% ever deliver their full benefits!

That’s because most project managers and their bosses underestimate the complexity of their projects and overestimate the capability of the organisation to cope with change.

And that’s because project risk and complexity is not linear, but EXPONENTIAL!

I would also claim that conventional change management interventions designed to control the outcomes of a project will cause it to FAIL completely if it’s a truly complex project.

So how do you know if your project is complex? And how do you assess the capability of your organisation to cope with change?

Come along to the City of London Business Library at 10am on 17th February and find out!

This is one of a series of free workshops and seminars being held in 2011 to support the marketing of my book: ‘The Change Equation’ and our Project Readiness Healthcheck – a simple-to-use process to ensure your projects succeed.

After the seminar there will be time to discuss specific projects if you need advice and think the Change Equation might provide some insights you could take back and use.

Here’s what people said about the 2010 seminar series:
“Many thanks, Peter, for the seminar during the week, which I found very useful”
“Thanks Peter, I came away with plenty of food for thought after your seminar.”
“Just a short email to thank-you for this afternoons session. I found the content and your style very smooth making the knowledge easy to take in.”
“Thank you very much for the ‘How to manage complex change’ seminar. The ‘Management Culture’ model was excellent as well as the ‘Exponential Complexity Tool’.”

The seminar is free but you have to book your place in advance.
Email: goretti.considine@cityoflondon.gov.uk