Change Activities

To drive change, there are two approaches you can take. First, you can ask for input from individuals or groups on how to drive the change. This helps people feel involved and part of the solution. Second, if there are specific imperatives for the change, you can present them and ask people to embrace the change and identify its benefits. This helps create an emotional attachment to the change and reduces the perceived workload. Asking for input or focusing on the benefits of change can be effective ways to drive change. When it comes to change, we have to think about the required change and there's a couple of things that you can do. You can first have an activity, it could be with an individual or a group, and you could ask what are the things that we could do to drive this change, okay? So on one hand, we can ask for input if it's open enough to have people also facilitate their own input to drive the change. So if you have a project that is going to require change, one of the great things that you can do is to literally say, here is some change that we're going to need to have, what are some of your ideas to help drive this? That way people feel a part of the solution. Now we can't always do that, right? So let's say the flip side of that, you know what's required, you know there are very specific imperatives in place that need to occur for the change to be driven. You can present the change and say, here are the three things our team is going to need to do going forward. Hearing those three things, I want you to share with me, number one, what are you going to do to embrace this change, and number two, what are the benefits of this change? Now I know some of you are thinking that you don't have time to do this, we'll get to that. And what that does is when people start thinking about the benefits of change, all of a sudden that stack on their desk doesn't seem as big because there's an emotional attachment positively to the change. It is a great whiteboard activity. So again, you can ask for input on what we need to do to drive this change, so their co-authors, or number two, present the change and the specific things that need to occur and ask them, what do we need to do to embrace this change, and what are the benefits? And the benefits question as an activity, and you list those out, and you revisit those, it helps drive change.