change management 10, “inspire change”

The last in the series of the change management seminars was presented by Jaap Boonstra, professor of management changes in organizations @ Amsterdam University. He works primarily for organizations in financial services and government.
Jaap’s seminar was titled “to inspire change.” It was very nice Jaap welcomed everyone (who was in time;) personally when entering the conference hall. He shook my hand and I immediately told him I liked that. It creates an immediate opportunity to talk, to share information about previous seminars and what I liked about it.

As I was almost the first person to arrive and was very near the open door, I could see the reactions of the participants when they too were personally welcomed by Jaap. It struck me that many women, like me, expressed they enjoyed this way to get to know each other, while men were almost all (pleasantly) surprised but said nothing about it, except a few single “O’s”.

It was not only pleasant but prevented a long introduction, because Jaap could immediately begin his presentation, which had an informal character during the entire evening. Instead, the public was ‘characterized ‘. The participants in the seminars, 265 in total consisted of:

• 104 line managers
• 42 directors
• 41 project managers
• 40 staff and
• 38 consultants

They work in services industry, financial services, consultancy, health & education, production, local and central government.

The content of the seminar was about the subjects of management changes:

• why changes are difficult,
• choosing a change strategy and
• dilemmas and successes

And it was about leadership and change:

• about paradoxes and transformative leadership perspective,
• about open-mindedness and ‘appreciative’ search and
• strategic communication.

The subjects were underlined with real case examples, some so aweful they caused me a stomach ache.

Besides the emotional impressions which I had to digest, some hard facts remained in my mind:
a. That, in accordance to the bell curve of change, 5% of all people are against any change, 15% is critical negative, 5% all for, 15% is positive critical and 60% neutral. That would mean that, if you have 15% of the critical positive with you in the process, you have sufficient critical mass to begin change.
b. That your organization can best be treated as an integrated system where everything is connected to everything, and that change is not possible if you do not take all aspects into account.

The main aspects why changes fail, is if you do not take into account (in order of importance):
1. culture,
2. unclear strategy,
3. politics,
4. staffs labor uncertainty
5. classical (hierarchy) structure,
6. technology and
7. your own clumsiness.
So, before you start with change, you first stop to think before you go ahead.

Jaap talked about the difference between design and development, between acting and reflecting, denominating and researching , aspects and objects of change and, support patterns and action patterns ( system & spiral dynamics). And he spoke of ‘places of difficulty’.

I really enjoyed Jaap made references to viewpoints and approaches from professors of the previous seminars like Beulens, Stoker and de Caluwé. And of course he linked to theories of gurus like Senge, Quinn and Kotter. Thus connecting the one to the other.

Unfortunately I had to leave a quarter of an hour before the end of this session (18.45 uur). I had agreed to meet a friend in Hilversum to travel to Ghent in Belgium together for a two day Open Space Conference.

This seminar was a worthy last session of the series, in my opinion. Am very curious what the “day of the change management ‘ on April 7th 2009 will bring. Looking forward to it.