Change Agents are often asked to draft and deliver specific messages as a part of stakeholder communication. Whether a given communication event will take place by sending an email, posting website content, releasing a video or conducting a meeting, it’s easy for the details to fall through the cracks without proper planning and diligence.  Hence [...]

theBigRocks Pictures of the Week! Photography is a side hobby of mine. While my hobby might not apply to helping teams through change in a text book sense, sometimes I notice little things when looking through the lens and it just clicks for me… I snapped the following pics during the Fourth of July Parade [...]

I’m a huge fan of Freakonomics. In their books, blogs, films and podcasts, co-authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt regularly explore what they call “the hidden side of everything”. They research cool topics like aligning incentives to motivate behavior, proving or disproving causality and digging into data related to all matters of systems theory as [...]

There’s a time to fall in love and a time to fall in line. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but while some changes are perceived as being a good deal for everyone involved, sometimes change is needed for less-then-positive reasons. In the world of implementing change, the chances are good that you’ll see both [...]

Change Agent Tip #27: Look Under the Wrapper The Easter holiday season has just wrapped up. Last week was one of the peak periods of the year for chocolate sales. Store aisles and end caps were stacked high with bunnies, bars, baskets and all sizes and shapes of chocolate delights. Anyone who stuffed an Easter [...]

Change Agent Tip #26 A wise man once told me that one reason people struggle with change is that it often means we’re going to lose something. It’s Personal: Consider the last time you were impacted by a significant change at work (or in life). You may have been asked to give up something in [...]

 Change Agent Tip #25 One of my favorite parts of helping people deal with change is the chance I get to work with some incredibly talented leaders at all levels of my client organizations. One such leader had a great way of boiling complex behavioral expectations down to simple phrases that I like to call [...]

Before you pull the trigger on your big culture change – consider answering a few simple questions… So far in this series, I’ve suggested a few ways that Change Agents can start the process of moving their culture in a specific positive direction. I started by recommending that they choose very carefully what elements of [...]

I love college basketball. My favorite team is my alma mater, the University of Illinois Fighting Illini. Coach Bruce Weber’s over-achievers had just clawed their way into the Top 25 this past week only to lose to a feisty Penn State squad. While the loss was tough for me to watch, I did hear a [...]

Most of us have heard the old adage “Change is Good“. As regular readers of this blog know, I don’t completely agree with that cliche.  After guiding changes for dozens of clients and tens of thousands of stakeholders, my version of the cliche reads more like this: “Good change is good and bad change is [...]

It’s Thanksgiving week and like many Americans, we’ll be cooking up a huge feast with turkey and all the fixings at our house.  As I think about that once-per-year process of browning the perfect bird, I’m reminded of how much better the results turn out when I follow a recipe …and how some of my [...]

I watched New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s big press conference the other day. For those who missed it, the popular politician announced that in spite of heavy pressure to run, he would not be a candidate for President of the United States in 2012. The Bottom Line: He summed up his decision by saying: “Now [...]

This world lost the ultimate Change Agent yesterday when Steve Jobs passed away. I’m completely enamored with Apple products but I’m even more of a fan of the man who dreamed many of them up. In honor of his genius, here are 20 of my my favorite quotes from a true master in the Art [...]

This is Wendy Appel. She’s one of the world’s foremost experts on a tool called the Enneagram which sheds light on people’s underlying core beliefs and motivations. Even more importantly, it can help people use this understanding to be more effective in nearly any setting that requires humans to interact. So What’s an Enneagram? The [...]

In this final post of a 4-part series, I’ll wrap up a recipe for change success based on the notion that Change Agents should treat their work like a project. The first three posts suggested you apply classic project management discipline to: … clearly define and manage change activities, … execute change adoption plans based [...]

In an earlier post, I advised Change Agents to treat their change like a project in order to give it the structure and discipline needed for successful execution.  I also described a set of four “must haves” for Change Agents to deliver these projects. The list of key ingredients in my recipe for change project [...]

People often ask me the difference between “Change Management” and “Change Leadership”. In my last post, I answered the question with the old axiom: “You manage things and you lead people…”. I also listed some of the critical things (such as work activities, budgets and schedule dependencies) that Change Agents need to manage. Today I’ll [...]