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 catalyzing organizational energy for change. This is part two of my overview of organizational energy and how to identify it and work with it to align its forces for change and produce your desired results. In part one of this series on organizational energy, I defined energy and organizational contexts and described its elements sources, channels, fields, environmental forces and patterns.

I recommended doing an energy scan of your organization, the results of which enable you to generate strategies for reinforce sourcing and strengthening your positive energy dynamics, and then unblocking the negative and aligning and mobilizing all of it towards a more positive outcome for your major change initiatives. This is, again, a very unique perspective. It’s different. It’s not project management.

It’s not even change management. It’s managing organizational energy to produce the results of your change efforts. And so today I’m going to discuss several strategies for changing the energy dynamics that you have in the organization, particularly those that may be inhibiting your organization’s ability to make a change. So lots to cover here.

I’ll cover each of the elements and strategies for changing them. But to refresh first, what I’d like to do is just give you the elements again very quickly. Sources of energy are people, events, announcements, or goals that generate energy for action. Maybe it’s major spokespeople or people with authority a new vision, a declaration, something that gets people’s attention and ready for them to take action.

Channels of energy are pathways or processes through which energy flows or moves like communication pathways, decision making pathways or processes. Workflow and relationships are all channels. Fields are the widespread impact created as a result of some action, some message, or some information that has been shared. Morale is an example of a field.

An energy field, culture is an energy field, that influences how people act within it. Like a magnetic field, it has major impact, major influence. Environmental forces are outside of your organization, but they absolutely can have a major influence like regulations, social pressures the economy, new technology like AI happening. And so environmental forces have to be taken into consideration, even though we may not be able to control them.

Pattern’s are huge. These are observable ways you detect energy movement or blockage along the way towards your goal. They’re indicators of what is influencing the flow of energy positively towards your goal or negatively resisting inhibiting it. patterns are typically created by the structure of the organization or by people’s behavior.
They’re best described by analogy. I shared many of these in my part, one of talking about organizational energy. Analogies illustrate them visually. For example, getting stuck in a vicious cycle, creating a bottleneck, railroading a decision, sending up test balloons.

These are all energy patterns. So in all of this, once you identify the elements and dynamics that are at play from your energy scan, those that are supporting your project or inhibiting it to get to your desired outcomes, you need to plan strategies for how to deal with them. Strengthening the Positive. Reducing.

Minimizing. Inhibiting the negative. In order to catalyze them to support your ultimate goal. So I’d like to share with you strategies for each element ways of influencing them that can support your ability to build into your change strategy actions to get to your desired outcome.

Let me start with strategies for sources of energy. Our intent is to catalyze energy sources that are supportive of your outcomes. Your scan will reveal existing sources that are either working for or against your outcomes, or you may reveal an absence of positive sources that are going to be needed, like how you would go about creating a critical mass of support. This needs to be addressed as well.

If positive sources exist. Like an inspiring leader. There are a series of questions to ask yourself. Is this leader aligned to your outcome?

Are they in a position to be able to further support it and make it visible? Are they strong enough to mobilize energy for action around your desired outcome? Do you need to reposition them? Perhaps put them in a special or more visible role so they can have more of an impact?

Maybe give them extra resources that are necessary to have the positive influence you need. If your sources are negative, how might you sideline them? How might you neutralize them or remove them? These might be rumors or resisters that have influence.

How might you actually reduce their impact if any sources or positive sources are absent? How do you identify what would be needed and then create new sources to play the mobilizer or role? That’s really what is underneath the idea of sources. It’s mobilizing the energy, feeding it, fueling it so that you are able to move ahead with your project.

Now, strategies for channels channels are pretty interesting. What kinds of channels are necessary to achieve your goal? What must strategically and practically happen to reach your outcome? Do you have the following?

These are examples of channels clear process plans, important meetings that define actions to take decisions, communication pathways, working relationships, production processes, engagement trainings, integration mechanisms. These are all channels. There’s a long list of what you could potentially need to make sure you have in place to achieve your goal. If channels exist that are contrary to your outcome, like a poorly designed process or broken relationships, how can you redesign them or repair them?
The example I gave in part one about the defense contractor where the relationship between engineering and design and the production line was nonexistent. It wasn’t just bad. It didn’t exist. They didn’t talk to each other.

They didn’t like each other. That was a broken channel, absolutely essential for what they were attempting to do. So if channels are blocked. How can you clear or redirect them?

How can you resolve the conflict that is stopping action or clarify decision? Authorities? What might be the remedies to blocked channels? You may need to design or create new channels to help achieve your change outcome.

In conscious change leadership approach, we use temporary systems, policies, procedures, processes that are designed just for the purpose of supporting the change. For instance, temporary policies. No one will lose money. Everyone will have a job, even though it may not be the same job.

What kinds of policies might support people to stay in the boat with you on the way to achieving the outcomes of your change effort? Other temporary structures like a parallel change leadership structure change governance structure is a temporary structure that can support the achievement of your changes. Outcomes. In one organization, we created a rapid job placement system that accelerated the selection of people for a new structure that was going into place where previously that channel could take six months.

And in this case, we accelerated it to take just a few weeks so that we could get people in place. So temporary channel might be necessary now. Strategies for fields. So fields are created by some event or communication that impacts people emotionally.
They’re not easy to change if it’s well entrenched an existing field has deep roots. It depends upon how entrenched it is, how aware people are of its effect on them, or how skeptical they are of the new reality you want to entice them into by your change effort. Media plays an important part in creating fields, both internal communications and clearly external communications. You want media on your side to support the creation of the kinds of fields you need to able to implement your change effort.
If an alteration of a field is needed, consider how to source a new field, maybe a new announcement of a new direction, a celebration, removal of a leader that’s been blocking the new decision, new incentives, addressing rumors. All of these can potentially help you alter the existing field, if at all possible. Directly engage with the people in the field you want to change. Sometimes just getting people to recognize they’re at the effect of something helps them to move off it or make a judgment as to whether or not they want it or not.

in one case, we used what we called listening circles where the leaders sat with people who were negatively impacted by what was going on. In this particular case, it was a bank merger and the newly identified CEO was found to have been doing some illegal things. And so the new brand new CEO of this new merger was removed and the new CEO that was named went absolutely every square in that organization. It was widely dispersed.

He went everywhere and sat with people who were negatively impacted by the CEO’s actions, the merger, whatever. Just listening. Just helping people to clarify their perceptions and assumptions, judgments they were making about what was happening. The leader was there to hear their feelings.

No blame, no shame. Not to make anybody feel that they need to feel differently than they do. But being able to receive their feeling helps them to recognize, Ah, this is the reality I’m living in. Perhaps providing new data or facts or examples that support your goal of how it can be better, how it can improve people’s lives or their work experience.
Perhaps you can change a field with a bold action. In one example, we had working with a police organization. Was the demotion of a fairly public assistant chief who had been doing things that weren’t aligned with the organization’s values. the effect of that on the field was making accountable laity front and center.

Overcoming Alexa Desigual attitude. A bold action created a very different field in that organization. Perhaps you can get the people in the field engaged in some action that they aren’t typically asked to do something new, something edgy, something admiring, something they could be proud of. It’s important to be persistent and repeat where you’re going over time.

You’re creating a different reality for people, and that reality has to stand on its own. For the field to have the impact it needs to have now, shifting to environmental forces, what strategies do we have here? These are outside of the organization and typically outside of our direct control. So environmental forces need to, one, be identified how they impact achieving your goal.

They’re outside your boundaries. But what are their impacts? Examples. Economic trends. Media. Government regulations. Unions.

Technology Trends. It changes like AI, competitors, different customer needs, legal mandates. Lots of external forces that may impact a major transformation. Even though they may be out of your control, you must be aware of them and build their influence into your strategy.

If there’s any way that you can influence them, or protect the organization from them, that needs to be a part of managing the energy impact they have on your change. How can you use media to influence the stakeholders of your change? Here’s an interesting example. We worked with a bank that was dramatically altering the role of its tellers, its face to the public, the tellers that met with everybody that came into the bank.
They made a television ad about the New and expanded and positive, powerful role of the tellers. That ad was intended to influence the tellers more than the customers so they could see in action what the new change was going to be about the bank. Leaders used media to help support shifting the impact of the external environment. So strategies for patterns.

This is an important one. recalled that patterns are repeating. Behaviors are events that will help or hinder the flow of energy towards your outcome. Patterns are observable ways you detect energy movement or blockage on the way to your goal.
They’re indicators of what’s influencing the flow of energy, positive or negative, and created by the structure or people’s behavior. As I said earlier, they’re best described as analogies that visually illustrate them like needle in the haystack. The snowball effect overcoming a vacuum. A time bomb.

Any of these might be patterns existing in your organization affecting your ability to make a change. So changing existing energy patterns is key to aligning the flow of energy toward your outcome. once you identify and assess patterns that are positive or negative, consider these strategies for changing the negative ones. Let’s start off with ensuring people participating in the pattern.

Clearly see the pattern they’re in and its effects. This is really important. Do you get what’s happening here? Once they see it, they may be inclined to alter their participation in it, their attachment to it, if given a choice.

By all means, stay neutral. Do not make judgments. Paint the larger picture of what’s intended to happen here, that the pattern is complicating. Paint picture of the implications.

The long term or short term implications of the pattern. Emphasize choice, even though pressure may be needed at some point. You can intensify a pattern, perhaps as an example, give to people who are at odds with each other. Give them a task that is shared.

They need each other to do the task. So to succeed, they have to find ways to work better together or fail. You can also intensify a positive pattern, by the way. You can overload a pattern If someone’s a bottleneck try increasing their workload so they’re forced to clear the path or move work elsewhere, overloading their pattern.

You can directly break up a pattern, remove the obstacle, or give a hard deadline to people who cannot make a decision. Break it up. Find some way that it can’t sustain. You can change the motivation of a pattern, alter the rewards.
Change the goal or priority. Give an alternate choice. A realign the outcome of the pattern. Alter the conditions surrounding the pattern.

This is interesting one. If two functions cannot work together, give them an interdependent task and reward them for a joint solution. Rewarding teamwork, not individual effort that will strongly get people’s attention that they need to work together or create a larger context or frame for the pattern. This is an interesting one.
In one example that I’m aware of, a US based organization was trying to divvy up new U.S. geographies for all of its business units and they couldn’t decide who would get what territory. Then the executives decided instead to go global. Suddenly, the local territories weren’t as much of an issue as the global territories, and the larger context really shook up that particular pattern. So I’ve described a lot of different things that you can do to change sources and channels and fields and environmental forces and patterns.

All of this is in the context of how do we create the conditions for the flow of energy. That’s what we’re after here, to keep energy moving in the organization. So one of the things that I did historically was to ask hundreds of leaders what conditions were present for them to have optimal experiences where they individually and collectively created a positive field for performance. This is what they were after, is how to have the flow of energy be at its height, what had to be in place for that to occur.
Here are their answers. Having a clear and heartfelt sense of purpose and desired outcome so people have a sense of where we’re going and why. It’s important knowledge that each person is needed for the best outcome. It isn’t a hierarchy of I’m more important than you.

Each person has a part to play. Willingness to try something new and different and the safety to risk and learn. Freedom to choose the method by which the outcome is achieved. So they own the process moving forward.

A sense of urgency, a heightened sense of dramatic tension, but not threat, but just urgency. Having others see them as confident and trustworthy, waiting for them to do their best work to achieve an outcome. An obvious one. Adequate resources for them to do what they need to do.

Being protected from organizational constraints, protected from red tape so that they can actually function effectively. Having clarity about why each person was selected to the task. If it’s a special team, perhaps why each member of that team was selected and what they bring to the party. Again, as a team.

The teams being started up with really powerful team building to generate a trusting and co-creative environment or having no hierarchy within the team working in a military environment. So when a team was created, no uniforms, no stripes, no stars. Just everyone showing up to do the work. Very powerful.

Give the team some special attention space to meet a logo for the work they’re doing. News articles about their work or progress being made public. Or special rewards and permission and license to course correct the process when needed. So they’re not on a straight path that may in fact be a discovery process.

And so how can we support them to be able to make course corrections when needed? And of course, the open flow of information, everything they need to know they have access to, it’s given to them. If it alters alterations are given to them so they can stay in the know about what we’re asking them to do. So think about the impacts of creating these kinds of conditions for the flow of energy.

These are not just words on a page. They really are fields, channels, sources, forces that and patterns that are supportive of the movement of energy, aligning the energy towards your desired outcome. So in conclusion, today I’ve presented strategies for how to change the energy dynamics you find all on behalf of aligning them to be able to achieve your desired outcomes. We looked at strategies for changing each element of energy sources, channels, fields, environmental forces and patterns, always increasing positive dynamics and reducing or removing negative dynamics.

These strategies need to become ingredients in your overall change strategy so they’re legitimized as things you need to do in order to achieve all along the way. Your milestone events to achieve your outcome. You know, energy scanning is an ongoing effort. It’s never a static field.

It’s always moving. So the energy dynamics are always dynamic over time. So staying on top of what we’ve tried, what’s working, what didn’t work, try something else. Staying really on top of it is essential for achieving a complex change effort.
Now, I’ve always promised you a pro tip and a personal reflection. My pro tip for you today is to consider that doing an energy scan is akin to doing an organization assessment. It’s not weird. It’s not unattainable.

It’s called something different an energy scan. But you could call it an organizational assessment as well. Find a relevant context for your scan and produce results in words or metrics so that leaders can relate to. This can’t be foreign.
It can’t be odd. It can’t be out to lunch. It has to be relevant to the leaders. You are interested to sing to all of this.

In fact, your scan is a doorway, a vehicle for introducing leaders to this perspective. Sensitizing them to the energy dynamics in the organization that are affecting their change process and their results. It’s also sensitizing them to the dynamics they are actually creating or enabling themselves. So the more aware they become of the impact of what they’re doing and the conditions for high performance or achievement of results in the organization, potentially they can expand their leadership repertoire to support more positive dynamics once they get to see the power of this.

My personal reflection for you Where is energy stuck in your life? Which elements are not supportive of your goals and well-being? This takes your own personal energy scan, identify them and then attend to changing them with clear strategies. It takes some discipline to do this.

Perhaps share your findings with others that you trust in your personal sphere and pursue support for realigning stuck energy. This is a commitment to yourself. More than likely, you deserve more flow in your life. I hope you’re able to craft it, achieve it, and sustain it.

So I hope you receive some value out of today. You’ll be able to change those energy dynamics standing in your way in your life and certainly in your work, in your change projects. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Today’s subject is one of the key topics that we feature in our leading transformational change online program.
If you’d like to learn more about leading transformation social change, go to beingfirst.com/LTC. 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 askdrchange.com.