Change is Goodness

It has been a busy week that will all but culminate tomorrow with a full-day version of the three half-days that began the week, with a sister organisation. 

Despite my confuddlement with the AVT Creation, I will give it another bash albeit in a new way. I was heartened with the success of the Model Creation and subsequent Action Planning that I mentioned previously. I look forward to deconstructing it all especially with Dave's kind offer and the upcoming Practitioner Workshop in Melbourne on Friday week.

But this post is not about that... instead on the sidelines of this week some great things have happened... A strategic change recommendation was implemented with gusto as some sort of silver bullet solution to a Crisis in a bigger job, which had seen me running down the East Coast. I think this was my first conscious attempt (and success) and a Randy Pausch Headfake.

The other was my renewed vigor to finalise the Change Management Guide in the form that I envisaged... I am hoping for completion by the Practitioner's Workshop... so expect some more as it crystalises

Baptism of Fire

Well I am convinced that I picked the absolute most completely unsuitable group to attempt my first Archetype Creation Workshop... It was a completely insular and stove-piped group of Aerospace Engineers, associated Technicians and Data Managers. 

I considered the organisation ready for something different for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the suggestion that the Business Plan was not working and a new approach was required. All of this being said, I am open to suggestion that everything looks like a nail at the moment, and this is my new Hammer...

To initiate the sharing of experiences I used the Wordle tool that I mentioned back in June. The learning point for me here was that using the word 'story' as part of the instructions was never going to go well with the audience. Add to this intolerance of ambiguity and we start to get the concept of how the morning went... That being said, I think that with some tweaks this could've worked much better, in particular taking it toward a Comparison

Despite all this some archetypes did emerge and some were nearly useful... but some lessons have been learnt in preparation for Thursday's one-dayer with a sister organisation... but Tomorrow holds a Model Creation by Social Construction amongst a communication game to pick up on where the Comparison would've gone. Wish me luck

The Future, Backwards

Yesterday I ran my second Future, Backwards  in my role as an internal consultant. The day was focussed on developing a plan of action in a changing environment.

The day was scheduled to conduct two simultaneous 'Future, Backwards' then to take the Turning Points from both as Sensemaking Items for use in the Cynefin Model Creation by Social Construction (corners method). The result was to role directly into a Domain-based Strategy Planning Session. There is nothing overly exciting about this as a methodology but it was my first attempt.

It is probably timely to recognise that I was assisted by team members that are not accredited practitioners, which had some impact but was not really the biggest learning point. There were a number, particularly the cognitive load that it places on the participants needs to be managed and exposing the executive to so much ambiguity does not necessarily lead to great results. 

The real take away for me was finding myself frustrated at the lack of imagination and extremely limited vision in the description of possible future states. On thinking about this I wonder if the issue is a 'dominant organisational narrative' in the form of a mantra. Namely, 'more people', 'more money' and  'more resources'...

I am particularly interested to know if anyone has come across a similar issue in their organisation or am I dealing with something peculiar

Boy its been a while

No excuses... 

But I do wonder about this. In light of the recent financial thing (excuse my flippancy...) I do wonder if the video were revisited from an international perspective, how would it change? It is compelling but I wonder about the simplicity and catastrophising it implies.