David Pollard's list of change steps is worthy of consideration by change agents of any sort. In his entry ,Creating change, Seb Paquet welcomes David's weblog and this sequence of change steps into the Blogosphere.
As I hope to point out next month (after a complex family move cross-country), one's assumptions about how human systems work affect how one thinks about bringing about change. If we think about something organized less like a pyramid (most corporations, an army, etc.) and more loosely (like an extended family, a town, a city) the issue may be as much a matter of common discovery, of agreement, of communication.
l will say more about this in a series of entries on what has been called Fourth Generation (or Naturalistic) Evaluation.
From Dave Pollard's excellent new blog, How to Save the World, comes a piece of advice that could be helpful for people who want to effect change in just about any sphere of activity. It also hints at the challenge inherent in such an agenda.
[Seb's Open Research][...] Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable:
The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don't bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter's book, since that's what it's focused on. But the same preconditions apply to political, economic, artistic, scientific, spiritual or moral change. Whether the change agent is a preacher or a politician or a philosopher or a post-modernist, the process is the same. [...]
- Establish a sense of urgency
- Form a powerful guiding coalition
- Create a vision
- Communicate the vision
- Empower others to act on the vision
- Plan for and create short-term wins
- Consolidate improvements
- Institutionalize the change
