Successful Organizational Change

Every leader understands the burning need for change–and every leader knows how risky it is, and how often it fails. To make organizational change work, you need to base it on science, not intuition. Despite hundreds of books on change, failure rates remain sky high. Are there deep flaws in the guidance change leaders are given? While eschewing the pat answers, linear models, and change recipes offered elsewhere, Paul Gibbons offers the first blueprint for change that fully reflects the newest advances in mindfulness, behavioral economics, the psychology of risk-taking, neuroscience, mindfulness, and complexity theory. Change management, ostensibly the craft of making change happen, is rife with myth, pseudoscience, and flawed ideas from pop psychology. In Gibbons’ view, change management should be “euthanized” and replaced with change agile businesses, with change leaders at every level. To achieve that, business education and leadership training in organizations needs to become more accountable for real results, not just participant satisfaction (the “edutainment” culture). Twenty-first century change leaders need to focus less on project results, more on creating agile cultures and businesses full of staff who have “get to” rather than “have to” attitudes. To do that, change leaders will have to leave behind the old paradigm of “carrots and sticks,” both of which destroy engagement. “New analytics” offer more data-driven approaches to decision making, but present a host of people challenges—where petabyte information flows meet traditional decision-making structures. These approaches will have to be complemented with “leading with science”—that is, using evidence-based management to inform strategy and policy decisions. In The Science of Successful Organizational Change , you'll learn: How the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) world affects the scale and pace of change in today’s businesses How understanding of flaws in human decision-making can help leaders guide their teams toward wiser strategic decisions when the stakes are largest—including “when to trust your guy and when to trust a model” and “when all of us are smarter than one of us” How new advances in neuroscience have altered best practices in influencing colleagues; negotiating with partners; engaging followers' hearts, minds, and behaviors; and managing resistance How leading organizations are making use of the science of mindfulness to create agile learners and agile cultures How new ideas from analytics, forecasting, and risk are humbling those who thought they knew the future–and how the human side of analytics and the psychology of risk are paradoxically more important in this technologically enabled world What complexity theory means for decision-making in the context of your own business How to create resilient and agile business cultures and anti-fragile, dynamic business structures To link science with your "on-the-ground" reality, Gibbons tells “warts and all” stories from his twenty-plus years consulting to top teams and at the largest businesses in the world. You'll find case studies from well-known companies like IBM and Shell and CEO interviews from Nokia and Barclays Bank.

"Identifies dozens of myths, bad models, and unhelpful metaphors, replacing some with twenty-first century research and revealing gaps where research needs to be done ... Links the origins of theories about change to the history of ideas and suggests that the human sciences will provide real breakthroughs in our understanding of people in the twenty-first century ... Change fundamentally involves changing people's minds, yet the most recent research shows that provision of facts may 'strengthen' resistance ... will help you build influence, improve communication, optimize decision making, and sustain change"--Jacket.

The subject of organizational change is receiving increasing attention. Whether it is re-inventing government, re-engineering corporations, or reforming churches, all kinds of organizations are attempting major transformations. This book will "walk" you through our framework of the five ingredients of transformation: Burning Platform, why should you do anything; Vision, where are you going; Leadership, are you leading the effort, and do you have the skills necessary to lead; Technical Plan, how will you close the gap between the vision and the burning platform; Social Plan, how will you enroll others in the plan. At the end of reading this book, you will understand why change efforts fail, what ingredients are needed to ensure success, and what skills are needed at the organizational, group, and individual level to maximize improvement efforts.

From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented merger and acquisition activity to scandal, greed, and, ultimately, recession -- we've learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. By outlining the process organizations have used to achieve transformational goals and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work.

The only constant is change—especially in today's business environment. Increasing globalization and the rise of new markets and technologies are forcing companies to compete in a more turbulent world than ever. To survive and thrive, organizations must be able to continuously evolve. Unfortunately, people tend to resist change. Uncertainty can be daunting, and people generally prefer to keep doing what they already know, avoiding unfamiliar situations, particularly in their work. The good news is that change can be managed using the same processes many organizations already use in their day-to-day project management activities. After all, every project results in some type of change to an organization. Building on the Project Management Institute's Managing Change in Organizations: A Practice Guide, and drawing on the project management expertise of a wide variety of authors, How Successful Organizations Implement Change explains the critical aspects of the change management process and outlines the methods that project, program, and portfolio managers can utilize to bring effective change in a complex and transient business context. For practitioners who are directly leading the change effort as well as those affected by it; for executives formulating strategies, even those managing operations; and for academics researching or teaching others about organizational change management, the examples provided in this book cover a broad range of industries and areas of business. How Successful Organizations Implement Change combines the change management knowledge of experts, academics, researchers, and practitioners with tools, processes, and templates, all of which make this volume a valuable resource, a must-have, for leaders of change in organizations.

In his first complete text on the ADKAR model, Jeff Hiatt explains the origin of the model and explores what drives each building block of ADKAR. Learn how to build awareness, create desire, develop knowledge, foster ability and reinforce changes in your organization. The ADKAR Model is changing how we think about managing the people side of change, and provides a powerful foundation to help you succeed at change.

In this revised and updated edition of Leading Successful Change, Gregory Shea and Cassie Solomon share success stories from a host of companies including Twitter and Viacom. They offer a tested method for leading successful change, which they have developed over a combined 50 years of helping organizations do just that.

Cultural Change and Leadership in Organizations discusses ways in which organizations are able to implement successful strategic change; inspirational and conceptual material is combined with practical examples and concrete interventions for planning and implementing cultural change within organizations. Cultural Change and Leadership in Organizations is targeted toward professionals, including organizational psychologists, consultants, senior managers, and human resources professionals, as well as advanced-level business school courses.