Welcome to Ask Dr. Change. I’m Dr. Linda Ackerman Anderson. I’m happy to have you join me today to explore how to seriously up level your leadership and consulting to transformational changes all through conscious change leadership.

welcome. Today’s episode is about what’s behind the power of our leading transformational change online program. The question we have gotten about this program is what is leading transformational change and how did we come up with these ten best practices? Why these ten strategies, five people strategies and five change process strategies?

They all go beyond conventional thinking, conventional change management, conventional project management, and we find them absolutely essential to the success of transformational change. Dean Anderson, my partner in life and business and I created this program and these strategies based upon our five decades of work with all kinds of organizations, public and private sector. And so we want to introduce you to what’s behind the strategies here and what’s behind the strategies for me means, after 50 years of doing work with leaders in organization transformation, what have we seen that has kind of made it obvious to us that these ten strategies are required for success and organizational transformation.

So we’re not really here to talk about the how. I guess that’s what the course does. But what we really want to do is kind of peel back the onion, if you will, take a deeper look inside what our history has revealed to us. Maybe tell some more stories, try to keep the names of the guilty out of it as much as we can and look at really, you know, the obvious, what became obvious to us around what’s not working and what is working, and then how that after 50 years of doing that action research, kind of rolled up into these ten strategies.

So there’s a lot of history behind what we’re going to share with you today through our stories. And we want to let you know if you want more information about leading transformational change to go to being first ICOM forward slash LTC. And there’s far more information there than we’re going to share today, but we’re going to give you the prompt about why this is such important work to succeeding at transformational change. So let’s start.

We’re going to go back and forth between the people strategies and the change process strategies. Dean The master of Self-mastery. I know I wouldn’t say that, but I will say this in my focus for probably my whole life and the obvious most obvious thing to ask me for sure, and I know for us as well, but I’d just like make it personal is that, you know, there’s a foundational life truth. That mindset is causative.

And so there’s all kinds of events we experience out in the world. We see things, things go on, and then we make interpretations of what that means. We we have a mindset that then has us see it a certain way. We make our decisions based on how we see it.

And so the bottom line is, is that there’s such an obvious realization that since mindset is positive, leaders building their own self-awareness and then their ability to manage their interior and then actually, you know, lead themselves in their own personal change process is critical. And so for me, I just have so many different experiences and, you know, one that I’ll share and I’ll actually use John will be his name because I just love John will be and John will be who was the CEO of Detroit Edison, because before they became DTE Energy and we had the honor of helping that transition over, working with that company for five years.

And I’ll never forget one of the highlights of my career in those young days. I mean, this is probably 20 some years ago would have been the late nineties. my God, Almost 30 years ago I was the first walk, the talk to change course. We’d ever delivered.

And in the summary statement that I was giving about the course and the experience that the executive team had had for four days, John popped out of his seat like a little kid and said, I get it, I get it. I’m the actual reason that we’re blocked in our strategy. It’s the way I see things, right? And it was such a revelation that he had and it was such a revelation for me 30 years ago, you know, I was 40 and, you know, I’ve been doing this already for 20 years.

But the my point was that it was so profound to watch what happened to him personally and his whole executive team as they all began to wake up that how they to the fact that how they were seeing things was the primary block to their progress and they were facing deregulation and they had all kinds of issues with maybe their nuclear power plant being deregulated because of some safety issues. And you know, there’s a long laundry list like most executives carry around challenges they were facing. But for them to look through all of those problems, that they could be blaming the outside world as their limitation to wake up to the fact that the outside world was just their circumstance, how they are going to actually succeed, mitigating or creating solutions to those challenges was all about how they were seeing it.

And that was just something that I’ll never forget. It was a it was an honor to to witness somebody whose personal revelation in such a deep way and so publicly and slowly, so developed leaders. Self-mastery is all about helping leaders see what they don’t see and see themselves in action so that they can alter what they’re doing and what they’re talking about and what they’re deciding about in the moment. That gives them the power to do that.

Yeah. So transform Nation really can’t be led unless leaders see themselves in action and know what’s required of them for the future. Well, let me challenge that. It can be led just not very successful.

Okay. Okay. Right. And so this first strategy of develop leaders self-mastery is something that we would suggest You don’t do it on the margins.

Right? It actually has to become part of fundamental strategy. Right. Strategy number one, in our approach, it has to be part of the effort, right?

You can send people to executive mindfulness courses or staff stress management courses or whatever. And that’s one thing that’s great, but it’s a far different thing when you integrate it right into the transformation. So all the challenges they are facing are what they’re working their own mindset issues through. So it benefits not just them as leaders, but the project itself.

Yeah, so what you’re leading into is there has to be a core part of the strategy for any transformation. That leads us to the first of the five change process strategies, which is create a unified change strategy. And so this is very different than a project plan. This is a strategy that influences project planning.

Now, what we’ve seen over and over and over again is how many clients have enabled a project team to jump in to give me the project plan, scope, schedule, budget without any strategic guidance about what they are doing as leaders, as Dean has said, and what’s happening for governance, for decision making, for managing across projects, for scoping so many factors. We realized once they jumped into project planning, they’ve missed what we call so much of the upstream strategic work required to provide guidance. You know, we’ve seen it in utility in hospitals and and banks, you know, over and over and over again.

They would come to us saying, you know, we can’t get off the dime. There’s so many things we don’t know about. And we haven’t in the our sponsors haven’t given us guidance. And so we set back how many times did we experience this?

We sat back and we said, you know, a whole new intervention is required here to effectively lead transformational change, and that is creating a change strategy. And a change strategy has 12 different elements to it. You know, that helped shape guidance for the details of project planning. You know, I remember, you know, working with NAITO and we had just a brilliant client there, Tony Johnstone Burt, and he was the chief of staff, second in command of the Allied Transformation Group.

And anyway, and he was such a brilliant man and I remember talking to him when we first started with him, and I said, You know, Tony, how are you going to? And then I was asking him, How are you planning on asking him some of the strategic questions? How are you going to govern? How are you going to get engagement, How are you going to integrate projects?

How you going, you know, walking down many of the elements and Tony said, right, we haven’t addressed any of that set back. So, Tony, would you ever, you know, as an admiral, three star admiral, the Navy, would you ever enter a battle without a strategy on it? Absolutely not. Well, do you think a business executive would ever enter a new business without a strategy?

Absolutely not. Isn’t this transformation one of the most, if not the most challenging things you’ve ever done transforming? NAITO So absolutely, I said, where’s your strategy? You know, done deal, right?

And so that wake up about it, you can’t just focus on diving in with your thinking around Scopes Capital Budget. There are so many other strategic elements that shape how you address even scopes scheduled budget, right? So anyway, this was a profound, again, awakening to have somebody so brilliant, right? So on their game actually just see the wisdom of, yeah, we got to step back and be more strategic about how we go about transforming organizations.

So what we’ve done is just said, okay, what are the 12 elements that are required for that? And that’s what this piece is all about. Yeah, it has taken on so much value for the clients that we serve to actually step back prior to really launch and create their strategy to give guidance to the project team. So a lot to learn there.

Yes. Leading co-creator, please. So strategy number three. Yeah. So this one was kind of a slow burn for me in my young younger days of saying like, what’s actually going on in the executive team that that has this not be working?

Why is it not coalescing. Right. What what’s actually in the way? And there were some obvious things that showed up which is the way the executives who often had back in those days a long history with each other.

In today’s world of fast turnover, that’s not quite so not quite the kind of merit to it, that statement. But it’s still true. We’ve got all kinds of histories and we’ve got arguments, we’ve had disagreements and we’ve got little notches on our belt about, you know, this is how you are. And therefore I don’t really listen to you because this is how you are and everybody’s carrying those things.

And what began to become very, very clear is that people didn’t know how to collaborate. That was number one. But there was a bigger issue around co-creation. And what began to surface was that there wasn’t a there there that tied everybody together is one unified kind of group, you know, And the metaphor would be, you know, if all of a sudden the spaceships came up and these were foreign aliens that were far more wise and us and had bigger weapons, and then what would we do?

Would we all go into our little political camps and, you know, fight against how we’re going to do this? No, we would align, you know, just like Nasser did when President Kennedy said, we’re going to the moon. Nasser is not a great agency, You know, And because they were so myopic in their focus, they didn’t they didn’t talk to each other, didn’t collaborate. Soon as he made that declaration, boom, they came together.

Yeah. And so the realization was that leading coach creatively means that we’re all aligned to something bigger than ourselves. And we’re going to put that first. And I’ll never forget again, back in the in the work with Detroit Edison, another brilliant CEO, that was just one of my favorite humans of all time.

Tony Early called us when he was the president before he became the CEO, and it was after the walk, the Talk of Change retreat, maybe a month or two after. And Tony called again, just excited. This is Hack, right? And he says, Ding, I can’t believe this happened.

I said, What? And he tells me the story. And so, Tony, he was the guy that all the VP’s would come sit before him and pitch their budget for the year. He said, I had two EPS, Don, donate multimillion dollars from their budget to this other EVP because they saw that his work in this calendar year is more important than their work to the larger big win we had just co-created is like mind blowing.

Where does that ever happen really? But when they had the mindset that we had to Pluto, the thing we’re all trying to achieve first and they really were committed to it, well then they were sacrificed their own myopic agenda to what was best for that. And those are so brilliant egos out of the way. Part of the self-mastery work, these build these, these strategies build on each other.

So they had they were able to set their egos aside. My budget, in order to give to what was larger and what they were all contributing to. That was great. And so this whole strategy is and how do you actually begin to set that up in the organization, The quality of being and what it is, you know, what it takes to actually step into that role.

So the the next change process strategy is clarify my governance structure and roles. Now and again, I want to say this is perhaps in every single project that we’ve ever engaged in, there’s confusion about who does what, whose kind of authority for what, who’s responsible for what. And so many things falling through the cracks from the lack of clarity, especially at launch. So clarifying governance, which has there are two major pieces to this that we talk about in LTC.

The first is the the roles that are required from sponsor project teams, project leaders, initiative leaders, consultants, etc.. And so we talk about ensuring you have the right roles because they frequently are is understood and whether or not you tailor the names or the responsibilities or how many people you have, at least you’re consciously attending to the work that requires oversight. It also involves good decision making. And so, so often we see we don’t know how to make decisions or we make decisions in the old state way, and it’s not allowing us to move into the future, especially if there’s no co-creating happening.

So decision making is conflicted because we’re not all serving the same outcome, right? So there are two major, what we call paradigm shifts in this particular strategy. The first is setting up out of all of those roles clarified, setting up a parallel governance structure. What that means is you have an ongoing operational structure running the organization and you set up a change governance structure that runs in parallel.

So a lot of leaders have to wear two hands, and we talk about the importance of the coordination between running operations and running the transformation. I’ll never forget introducing this concept at an Army retreat. And I had, I don’t know, 100 officers and of all ranks in the audience. And I introduced the notion of a parallel structure.

And one general in the front row turned to the side of his seat and crossed his arms, jutted his chin out, and looked at me and said, I don’t believe in ad hoc ism, saying, Wow, okay, so was this perceived as an ad hoc structure? And so it was insightful for me to understand how to share the power of being able to do both and to have run the organization and run the change. And by the end of the program, exploring all of that, he was an advocate, fortunately, but that was insightful to me. And the other major paradigm shift in this is the creation of the change process leader role, which is very unique in our approach to transformation.

Consider the words change process Leader And so who designs the process of transformation From the very beginning, all the way through sustained business benefits, we frequently think of identifying a project manager. Well, project management starts after a launch and ends at deployment, but it’s not the whole process, nor does it incorporate all the human dynamics that are required. We saw over and over and over again no one’s looking after the process. How are you doing this?

Is it working? Is it not working? What’s required for the people in the culture as well as the content? We created the change process leader role and the leading transformational change program goes in depth about what this is, what it requires, and how to set it up.

Many examples about successfully identifying a line leader, not a human resources person, a line leader to be the change process leader and orchestrate the transformation and always required. That leads us into the next strategy from you, triggering a story for me that ties these two things together so that the next strategy is all about leading. It is leading and ensuring leaders are committed and aligned, but it’s leading leaders into that realization. And I remember tying this to, you know, governance is I remember working with one of the biggest cities in Canada.

And we were I was you weren’t on this project. It was me working with this the h.r. Group, and they were trying to transform h.r. And when i started, we did a three day, you know, the our our onsite version of ltc node leading transformation course and in the middle of that, I started to ask questions around how they’re integrating with other projects in the organization. Well, come to find out their h.r. Transformation was about moving towards centralized support services where they were integrating literally i.t communications, h.r. And finance and they were going to have software to do all of that, including i.t. And i said, well, where are the other project teams?

Well, they’re all doing their own thing, right? And so their whole upset was about how there was lack of alignment across these groups. Well, they had no structure, no process, no clear governance, nothing. And so how are they are going to get leader alignment?

And so that was a graphic example of the need for both those things. But what it what I’ll say kind of where it led us over years was, well, we do now as we roll out what we call an Expedition Day. So after we’ve done the work with leaders to get them aligned in terms of them working on their own personal issues around self-awareness and mindset, as they begin to become more co-creative and they create their vision for their organization. If it’s a revisioning the company or they’re actually launching their transformation and either of those two things, how do you then get the rest of the organization aligned?

And the idea of an Expedition Day is then to roll all of that out in a high engagement way that then has people realize, because this is a declaration from the front of the room, we’re all in this together. And again, it’s that to builds on your hat, right orientation where I still have my functional role, but flip my hat around, I have a change leadership role. And given my sphere of influence and my position and where I live in the organization, I have a responsibility for making this transformation successful. Just like if I was in Nassau or when Kennedy says, We’re going to the moon no matter where I am and in that agency, what’s my role to make that happen?

And I’m as equally responsible to that as everything else I do. Yeah. And so this whole idea of building leader alignment, it goes contrary to what leaders usually do, which is they kick it all over the fence to either the project management team to drive it or the change management team to handle the people issues or whatever it is. A little group of 12 subject matter experts to push this new agenda in the organization.

That doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work because pushing our big agenda is in the 21st century requires everybody to be aligned to it so they can contribute. And so this for me is a real pivotal strategy. And I believe, quite honestly, that without this being a very forefront strategy, your chance of success is minuscule.

And another quick example of that is the idea when in an organization that’s unionized, if you have, you know, labor relations issues and you’ve got a history of union and management fighting, how do you ever expect to transform? Right. It has to be done as a partnership, right? And so how do you build that partnership for the sake of that big win?

Right. So there’s a lot to this strategy. Absolutely. I don’t know how many times we go far, far enough into a project in the leader sit there and we’re attempting to have them go in one direction and they look at each other and say, I didn’t sign up for that.

Right? I don’t think that that’s what this meant. And it’s like, there it is. You know, the lack of really understanding the impacts, which is an underlying require.

Yeah. And six months earlier, when the project was launched, all the executives said, yeah, that’s a great idea. And then six months later, when the project teams marching through their functional area saying, We need to get your people engaged in this way, they go, Wait a minute, we’re too busy. It’s like, Well, you agreed to this.

Well, I didn’t agree to this. Right? Right. I agreed that you guys go do it.

I didn’t agreed for me to actually participate. So what a difference it makes when you actually do get full commitment in alignment across leadership among all of the projects. The only way it’s the only way you can’t unleash the human potential of the organization without people aligned. Absolutely.

Well, I’ve already mentioned the importance of process. So the next strand is consciously designing your change process from the very beginning to sustained business benefits. So project management comes in with the process, which is very effective and needed to identify the right solution and get it deployed. It doesn’t start at the beginning of the insight of we need to make this change happen or end at achieving results.

Change management typically comes in to address the people dynamics, but it doesn’t start at the beginning, influencing leaders in their ability to lead or ending up so frequently with beyond adoption to really achieving results. So we need a process that starts at the very beginning and ends all the way through the sustainment of of business results. The way the one that we use and have designed is the Change Leader’s roadmap, a nine phase model that does all of that with a particular emphasis on the upstream part. We call it upstream midstream and downstream at the upstream part where so many decisions get made, the change strategy is made and governance is clarified and the outcomes are identified with attention to the process of upstream requirement.

So many, many, many, many examples of the absence of upstream attention that’s required. And so consciously designing the process is not just what do we need to do with all of these things, but what are the implications of where leaders are? Are they for are they against, Do they participate? Are they aligned?

And so looking at all of the human dimensions as well as for stakeholders, all the human dimensions, as you design the steps required to go from a all the way to Z. So it’s not just action planning the tactical, it really is looking at the dimensions, the human dimensions of culture and mindset and behavior as well as the work that’s required to get the project moving ahead effectively. Really essential to having a good process. Yeah, Yeah.

And so what I’m hearing in the way you’re describing processes, what it means is how do you integrate everything so that it’s not piecemeal? And so, you know, if you if you got scope, schedule, but budget as the orientation is very tactical or how do you integrate strategy if you’re focused on content? Right. We’ve got to get the right solution and you put your well subject matter experts together and they come up with the solution and then you hand it off to an implementation team.

Well, that’s not integration, right? Or if you’re thinking about content and you don’t even think about people until you’ve got the design and then you give it, kick it over to change management, to go deal with the resistance. Right. Which naturally occurs, by the way, when smart adults are left in the dark about what’s going on.

Right. And so but you don’t have an integrated process around content in people and you don’t have an integrated process around engagement and communication happening right from the start and carrying all the way through. Right? It’s all piecemeal.

That doesn’t work and transformation just fundamentally doesn’t work. And so the idea of a conscious process design, right, it means I’m putting all these things together and able to see it. All right. So next is directly addressing culture must start out with a story.

Think this was another one of those landmark moments in my own career. And I’ve told you this story a couple of times, but it was years ago and maybe like it was a couple decades ago, I got a call from a CEO of a big ag business in Canada since and it’s a business most people know. And the CEO says, Hey, you’re on the phone. Not Zoom, didn’t have Zoom.

Then we’re on the phone. And CEO says, hey, I hear you guys are, you know, pretty expert around culture change. And I said, well, thanks for the compliment. But yeah, you know, that’s what we do.

We’re we’re pretty good at it. And he said, Well, can you tell me what the best culture should be for me to install or do? Doesn’t work that way, you know? Yes, there are qualities of culture that seem to be right.

Pretty foundational, like empowering humans, having a level of trust and openness in your communication, engaging people so they can contribute. But you can’t just install that because it’s a good idea. You know, the only way culture changes is when you engage your executive team, then along with your rest of your organization. Over time in the conversation about who are we and who do we want to be and who do we want to be, because it’s vital to being that from the inside out.

And our market is actually asking of us of this. We have to step up like more customer service as an example. And so the point about this was how absurd that question was. Right.

And here’s this guy who’s making lots of money because he’s running this business that’s quite large and very successful, doesn’t have a clue about addressing culture. And so it was a sidebar to him. There’s something you just plug and play as opposed to what we’ve come to discover over these years is culture is a part of everything. Absolutely.

There’s nothing in the organization that culture doesn’t touch, and so we have to directly address it and how And it’s back to what you were just talking about, about an integrated change process. It’s not something where you work on content and then you think about people and, by the way, how is our culture in the way or supportive, but rather what’s the cultural component, an interface that’s going to enable us to succeed in this, and how do we amplify it? How do we actually begin to see the limitations in our culture so we can put into our change process efforts to actually move the culture forward?

Absolutely. And that’s part of the change and have strategies, specific strategies to do so. That’s right. Not as an adjunct no later, but as an integral part.

Right from the beginning. Right, right, right. I just want to briefly add to another story about this. I was working with a defense contractor and they’re charged was to rapidly accelerate the production of fighter jets.

And I did. Yeah. And I did an assessment of, okay, current state, what’s going on? How would we shape or change strategy to support them to do this?

And I met with the executives of that part of the organization and began sharing some of the strategic elements. And I had recognized in the organization a massive conflict between an engineer who were designing what had to happen for the new fighter jets and production manufacturing to produce the the jets on the production line. They didn’t talk to each other. They didn’t like each other.

They wouldn’t work with each other. And so our meeting with the executives and I said, so there definitely has to be a cultural aspect to our strategy here. And the executive, the Chief Chief Financial Officer just threw up his arms and he said, We don’t deal with that namby pamby touchy feely culture stuff. We have no place for that in this organization.

I, you know, deer in the headlights. I was like, wow. And so I stepped back. You got to change your mindset that deep breath and said, okay, I got it.

What we need to do is figure out a strategy to get the engineering organization to work better with the manufacturing organization, the production line, because right now they don’t work well together. And he looked at me and he said, Can you fix that? We need to fix that. And it was like, okay, don’t mention the C word, but do the work.

Yeah, right. But at least he got to the point of doing work right? And that’s the point is that in every project there are cultural impairments, just like there are cultural benefits. Yeah.

So how do you leverage the ladder and begin to mitigate the former, Right. Awesome. Awesome. So next up is set up conditions for success.

So every leader would want the right conditions in place to have a transformation go effectively. My story around the actual creation of the strategy took place at Pacific Gas and Electric. Huge utility, and this was very early in my days where they were going through a massive transformation, altering how they delivered service and moving from I mean, let’s put a timeframe on this. Okay?

Right. This is you beginning to see, say to this 40 some years ago, this is the early eighties. See this gray here? I started this, you know, three years ago.

No, no, this is not drill. Anyway. So they were going from 60 different districts to six different divisions, major changes in a lot of the mechanisms there. And we wanted to identify an executive, a leader to lead this.

At the time we called it a transition leader. Today it would be a change process leader. And so the man who was in charge of the largest district volunteer was three years from retirement. He volunteered to step out of his role, open it up for development of someone else, and take on this transformation and how to orchestrate it.

Day one he had a job. We opened up an office for him at corporate headquarters. Day one. I walked into his office and I looked at him and written all over his face.

Was buyer’s remorse. Like, What did I get myself into to do this? And I said to him, Vern, you’ve been through changes throughout this entire organization for your whole career. I mean, you’re ready to retire.

You know how this organization works. Why would we have to have in place to have this actually succeed? A light went on in his eyes that never went off. He was one of the most extraordinary change leaders I have ever worked with.

And he said, You mean we could actually do that? I said, Why would we not? And so why would we set ourselves up for failure, really? He said, I can identify a lot of stuff, but this is how good a leader he was.

He said, I want to put together a team and ask them what they see. And so we put together a project team and we met with them to help launch them and we asked them the question, what are the factors that have to be in place? The condition is that have to be in place for this to succeed. And we made this great list.

It was very energized and they said, these are so important. We need to make a poster of them and hang them on the wall. And we said, Great. And so we made a poster and hung them on the wall.

And about a month later, things started to fall through the cracks and I met with the team and I said, What happened to your conditions for success? And to a person, they all looked at the poster on the wall and said, There they are on the wall. And we realized they hadn’t done any work to inform anybody, to establish them, to get agreement, permission to license resources, resources, the whole bit. So the chain, the conditions for a success strategy is not just identify them, it’s actually establish them, monitor them and sustain them, which ultimately is what we did there.

And so let me just add to that as so that whole poster on the wall thing is so classic, right about everything, cultural norms, where in culture arms are on the wall, where are you living? I mean, we don’t let them we just put them on the wall. Right? But the point that I’m taking from the first story is that the effort to actually install, you know, bring into being your conditions for success have has to be part of your change process.

Right. So now it’s actually not again outside of it, just like we don’t put culture outside or people outside. It’s all integrated in the change process. And so the strategy of setting up conditions for success are one of the key things you do Phase one of the change leaders roadmap, you know, and then you can say, okay, how are we going to put him in place?

And now that is factored into or change process. So change teams and everybody else you’re engaging are all doing the work of that, right? Just like you’re doing the work of engaging people, just like you’re doing the work of culture change right from the beginning, right through this whole massive effort that actually brings it to fruition. So your successful.

Yeah, what a novel idea. Yeah, that’s powerful. Very powerful. Yeah. So next. Yes, we want to engage stakeholder ears to maximize commitment.

So this is again one of the key strategies and I guess I would just kind of led into that with my last statement, which is it’s not something in our world that you do later. You do it from the beginning. And so one of the core pieces of building a comprehensive change strategy is ask the strategic question, who are the stakeholders? We need to engage given the scope of the effort and how are we going to engage them and when and what vehicles, etc..

And one of the fundamental understandings around building commitment on organization is that you don’t sell commitment. You do have to do that. Here’s what we’re doing, here’s why it’s benefit. That’s the sales job.

You know, hope you actually approve, hope you agree, hope you’ll contribute. But then there’s actual put people to work. And that’s how commitment is built, because a lot of people will carry a conditional commitment like the executive story earlier. Yeah, I buy into that.

Let’s go do that change. But then six months later, the change team walks through the organization. Now we don’t have time for you, you know, And where’s the commitment? Right?

And so the idea of engaging people is not just communication where you’re telling them what we’re doing and then maybe selling them off the idea, but actually finding a way for them to contribute. Because when people contribute and they have their own fingerprints on something, they begin to integrate the reasons why it’s so important to be building this thing right. Plus, they got their fingerprints on the building, so now it’s their building. And so there’s various and actual practical reasons to engage people early.

And again, I want to highlight that this means finding a way for them to do something that supports the effort rather than just telling them. And the metaphor for me is always, where do you want the maximum number of people? Do you want them in the stands watching the game, or do you want them on the playing field actually playing and contributing to the outcome of the game and the ladders? The answer in the challenges.

Sometimes that’s far right. It’s easier to say, you know, I just the you are smart subject matter experts. We’ll figure it out. We’ll push it will drive it.

And everybody else then sits in the stands and judges you’re doing and generally you’re keeping them in the dark. So now they have negative judgments because they don’t know what’s going on. So they always make up the worst stories of the boogeyman is in this project. Bad things are going to happen, but as soon as you bring them onto the field now they have line of sight to what’s happening.

They got their fingerprints on it. They’re inputting good ideas and now it’s theirs. And so when you do this strategy, well, by the time you get to midstream where you’re upstream, design midstream implementation, by time you get to implementation and excuse me, downstream, upstream planning midstream design and downstream implementation, by the time you get to implementation, people are saying move out of the way, we got this right as opposed to dealing with resistance. And so this is the way you maximize commitment and minimize resistance to things that I want to share here.

One of the most important things we’ve learned is that a lot of leaders believe they’ve engaged stakeholders with their big launch communication for us in case, you know, engagement is task driven. The change leader’s roadmap in all nine phases has all kinds of tasks multitudes where stakeholders have a contribution. And so I learning enough about the various tasks from planning, design, impact analysis, implementation, sustainment, etc. there are all kinds of things your stakeholders can do.

So really, really important. Yeah. The only thing I want to mention is, is that over three is that there is another episode in this podcast on creating critical mass and what Dennis just described, talking about engaging your stakeholders in where they sit supportive on the fence or against has everything to do with creating your critical master energy. So find that episode and it’s very insightful for actually doing what you’re talking about.

Yeah, and I’ll add one more on the one more thing that it speaks things up. Absolutely. You know, so the the mentality, the old mindset that is basically misinformed is that if we engage people, it slows things down, but it actually doesn’t when you engage people. Well, let me step back.

What’s the slowest thing that can occur is when you deal with resistance. And so often many change projects get designed well, They even might get implemented, but they don’t get sustained because there’s never the overcoming of that resistance. So people just don’t use the new thing that was installed. That’s a good example.

And so that means it never actually gets to the finish line. So that’s pretty slow. But when we get people engaged, the basically resistance goes away because their commitment gets built by the engagement. And so this is a great acceleration strategy.

Absolutely. So the 10th strategy we want to introduce you to is establishing a course correction mindset and system. So understanding transformational change and how emergent it is, how messy it is, there’s so much that we’re figuring out as we go. It’s it does not fit a classic project plan from here to there.

It’s not the nature of transformation. So in order to succeed, we need active and frequent course correction, in order to see what’s working, what’s not working, what we need. So the first time I actually introduced this Major Man Electronics manufacturing organization. So working with the leader major change effort and we got him to realize, I need to make a course correction in how we’re launching.

And he did. And it was in a major communication and in the audience there was this incredible ripple. And what we heard were people saying, You’re changing again. You don’t know what you’re doing.

Well, you know who is leading this thing. There’s no leadership here. You haven’t figured it out. And what we realized in that moment is we hadn’t ever established the expectation for the need for a course correction and the organizational cultural norms and mindset.

That course correction is a positive move in leading transformational change. So engaging everybody to be able to identify where we need to do things differently around the future. Steve Designer The process, how we’re dealing with people and having them safely raise those issues is a positive contribution. It’s not a statement that we don’t know what we’re doing, it’s that we’re figuring it out as we go.

It’s what I call getting smarter by the day. Yeah So if I can just ground that statement for a minute, Linda said, you know, when you make it real and people understand that transformation is nonlinear, right? It isn’t a straight line, which means there’s going to be multiple of these. And when they got that mindset and then you actually put a system in place and a process and in today’s world technology to back it, which means, okay, now we agree, we’re all co-creating this together.

We’re all early warning signal potentials, right? So we’re all got our eyes. We call them scouts, right? We’ve all got our eyes on what’s happening.

And so if a condition for success goes awry or if we get new data because some stakeholder group now has a different agenda than we thought or resistance levels go up, that all that gets fed into the system now, in today’s world again, technologically makes it very easy. But then we’ve got a team that looks at that data, Hey, we got a course correction that brings it to the change leadership team. And in every change leadership team meeting, part of the agenda is, is there any new information that requires us to adjust course? Yeah.

And so now in all that’s in place, when those natural things arise, they just get handled and everybody goes, Girl, these people are smart. Look how they handle all the issues. So now you build credibility, right? As opposed to who’s leading this thing, right?

Right, right, right. Awesome. Yeah. So we hope that we’ve communicated with you how much Dean and I have to share about all of these strategies that we have found so profoundly impactful on the success, especially of transformational change.

So we want to talk with you a little bit about finding out more. This there’s link in the podcast going to being first dot com forward slash LTC standing for leading transformational change. That’s where much more information about the course. It’s an online course that runs over 12 weeks one day a week.

Lots more information about the details of it at that link. you know, the bottom line is what you’re you’re offering to people, you know, come to this course. So just a little bit about this course is that, you know, the ten strategy course leading transformational change is really the foundation to this body of work. Yes.

Right. Or somebody who’s interested in conscious change leadership and how you lead an organization through transformation, you know, there’s a foundational understanding. And the reason that we put this course together is because our other offerings historically have all touched on these things, but never wrapped them into a package yet. And so the idea of this course is that we want folks to have the foundation of what these ten strategies are and then dive deeper into the paradigm shifts are required to actually implement them and how they actually, in their implementation begin to shift the paradigm in the organization.

And so that there is what is the foundational equipment, if you will, for any conscious change leader, because if we don’t know these strategies and how to work with them, then we’re going to into the same holes and potholes that we were falling into. Yeah, years ago until we began to see what is now so obvious to us. Absolutely. So the program is highly interactive.

It’s case applied, You’re bringing your live work, you’re working with people literally with people around the world who are working on, thinking about learning, about sharing their experiences around executing and tailoring these ten strategies for the success of their transformations. At this time, we’re beginning a new LTC starting in September. Because you listen to this podcast, we’re extending the Earlybird 20% discount to you via a special coupon code. That’s DRCHANGE. This coupon code is good through September 6th because the course begins on September 17th.

The discount rate for government remains at 25% at all times, and the discount rate for nonprofits and NGOs is always 30%. We have a two tiered group discount process as well for three or more or six or more people. So we hope you will consider this for your own work. And Dean and I hope to see you on September 17th.

Thanks for spending some time with me today. I hope you gain some valuable insights for your work. Please send me your questions and challenges by going to ask drchange.com.