[ANNOUNCER]: Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness not just the obvious symptom, our hosts James and Coby.

[COBY]: Did we lose a patient?

[JAMES]: No that’s just my lunch.

[COBY]: Hey thanks for joining us. I’m Coby, he’s James. Let’s get started with a question. How can we improve organizational change?

[JAMES]: This is a really big topic because the… and there’s so many things that we can talk about with organizational change, because unfortunately there’s a ton of things that we do wrong when it comes to effectively managing change. But what I want to focus on is really the difference between process and people, because so many of the strategies that are currently used are focused on process change. But it’s the people who will be going through the change. If you want the quick answer to how do you improve organizational change, it’s focus on the people. Generate buy-in, understand that the process of change is messy and mistakes will happen. You need to bring people along with you, not just tell them that stuff has changed once you have the paperwork in place.

[COBY]: Yeah and like you said there’s so much that we’re doing wrong with change. Like there are stats to kind of say, back in like the 90s there was a study done, I think it was by John Kotter, that said like only 30% of organizational change was successful. Then years later there was another study, I think it was like ’08 that kind of verified that, you know since like 95 it’s still only 30% of organizational change is successful. Then up until like 2021 we saw a big improvement in our success rate which went up to 34% of organizational change…

[JAMES]: Woohoo.

[COBY]: Yeah huge. But this is kind of the story, that organizational change happens all the time. I mean well even before COVID, I mean since COVID…

[JAMES]: COVID brought one or two changes to the way businesses operate.

[COBY]: Yeah but like even before 2019, change was so common. Digital adoption, new leadership, mergers and acquisitions. You know there was just so much stuff that happened on a regular basis. Maybe some things that organizations don’t think about as organizational change, or change management, like you know a new CRM, they might not think of that needing change management. Or a new leadership, or a new strategic direction, they may not necessarily think of it. But all of that is organizational change. So what’s so… it’s a sad reality if you think about. It’s kind of happening to every company, all the time, and we are only successful a third of the time. And it’s not that it doesn’t… it isn’t completed that 30%, 33% is completion. The change still happens, like you know, 100% of the time, but it’s so over budget, it’s so ineffectively implemented, it’s so scattered in its success, and its adoption is so expensive. That’s why it’s not considered successful. Even though the company is different afterwards, they are way over budget, way behind the time they need, and it’s sporadic and inconsistently implemented.

[JAMES]: And I think that’s a really good distinction. Because the stats alone are scary, right? If you hear, you know, a fully two-thirds of all change fails and you look at “Oh well we’ve gone through change and things are different, now so we must have succeeded, we’re not one of, we’re not a part of that two-thirds”. Well no, that’s not what the statistics are actually saying. It’s not that two-thirds of change fails to happen, it’s that two-thirds of it is over budget, it’s your timelines are shot, you know you haven’t generated buy-in, the adoption of the new change has not gone smoothly.

[COBY]: Yeah and you burned out your employees, change fatigue, all those other kind of stuff this is all the negative implications of it being poorly managed.

[JAMES]: Yeah I think those stats are a really great call to action, right? Things need to change, and change… and that change needs to be managed!

[COBY]: Little on the nose there.

[JAMES]: Oh I know. I’m just nailing my analogies today. Perfect. Let’s move on from my foolishness, because there’s a process to change, and we’re not going to be able to get into every aspect of it because… well if we did this wouldn’t be a 30 minute or, well we we are never 30 minutes, let’s be honest this wouldn’t be a 45 minute podcast, this would be a 21 hour course. Because we have an organizational change management course that we run. We can’t… what I want to focus on though is the people side. Getting the people ready, and when we’re talking about change management, we talk about the first stage of our change management process is Changing Minds. And it’s about generating buy-in. And I think if we can, if there’s one thing that you can take away from this talk it’s that this first stage of generating buying, of getting people prepared before the change happens, is going to significantly improve organizational change.

[COBY]: Yeah and I mean, so like again to backtrack a little bit. So again, this is something that we talk about in our organizational change management programs, we have  a course… just to drop a little bit of information, so it’s called Organizational Change Management Practitioner or OCMP and we work with, like often people managers, but usually kind of executives in different organizations to certify them to become OCMP,  Organizational Change Management Practitioners to help them effectively manage change, to move beyond the 30% to 34% success rate. To actually be successful. Because a lot of this is speaking to the fact that there are tools have been out there for a long time and a lot of them are very good at some aspects, but very few see the whole picture. So part of what we try and do is to try and make sure that we’re taking a more collaborative approach to change. Because it’s often because it’s siloed and segmented. And that we tend to miss the concepts, and usually it’s about, like James said, it’s not about capturing as much of the people side, or when the people’s side happens it happens too late. So part of the way that we that we break down organizational change in our OCMP course is the four stages, that we talk about, is Changing Minds, Changing Thinking, Changing Actions, and Changing the Measurements of Success. And you’re right, we’re not going to be able to get into the whole thing in the 40-ish minutes we’re probably going to be talking. But that first part of Changing Minds is where the biggest improvement needs to happen. Because you’re right, it has to happen before anything changes. And it needs to kind of be where the process really starts, but before anything happens that people have to adapt to, It’s that preparation side.

[JAMES]: It’s the Bedrock that everything else is going to be built off of.

[COBY]: Yeah and because one of the things that we talk about in our OCMP course is the idea of what we call the Three Villains of Change. and the Three Villains, just to kind of give an overview, are Complacency, Fear, and Lack of Support. And when it comes to Changing Minds and the creating buy-in as an action to focus on the people, it’s addressing Fear. That’s where that needs to happen.

[JAMES]: And I want to talk more about that. I think there’s a good example from my own work history that kind of illustrates this well. Years ago I worked in a not-for-profit setting that was part of a large government funding. There were something like 50 some organizations across the province that were delivering these types of services. And the government decided that they wanted to streamline things, they were going from, however many there were, 50-55 organizations down to like 15. They wanted to shrink the number of providers and funnel the services and standardize things. Which good, like a responsible approach. They wanted to make sure that every part of the province had the same access to services, that you know things were standardized, that everybody was getting the same standard of care. Which honestly, the fact that, that wasn’t happening already for decades is kind of terrifying, but government waste is an entirely other podcast topic. But the transition, the way that it was handled… although the goals, and the goals were good, and the ultimate outcome was a good outcome, that they were trying to achieve. The process that they employed was terrible, from a people perspective. And being employed in that system at that time, and going through that process, that change what happened, there was no communication with staff. Staff knew what was happening, and they knew that there were already 50-55 organizations delivering these services and that after this change happened there would be 15. They didn’t know who, what 15 would be chosen. They didn’t know whether they would have a job at the end, they didn’t have any information that was communicated with them on an official basis, everything from the transition team felt like…. Looking back on it now I suspect that they were waiting for the information to be Rock Solid before they shared anything, right? Which I understand, I understand you want to make sure you’ve got all of your ducks in a row, that everything is… that you can stand on every word that you say. However the Villain of Change, the Fear. Fear of Loss and Fear of the Unknown created so much anxiety throughout the organization. It created resentment in the staff for the way that things were handled. It created fear of “am I going to have a job at the end of this?” Months of and this process, took months to go through, and it was months of people not knowing whether they would have a job. Not being communicated with, and when you don’t have any information around a huge topic that has a direct influence on you, you are going to speculate. You don’t want rumors flying in this type of situation, but that’s what happens when you fail to communicate effectively, and generate buy-in, and bring people along with you. What ended up happening as a result of this is that in the organization that I worked in alone, there were at least half a dozen long term, long serving staff who quit. Who when this was… when this process was going through, and when the communication, and the way that was handled was so bad, people started looking for work. They weren’t going to wait around for another six months to find out “Oh sorry, you don’t have a job anymore”, right? The organizations lost a lot of talent because, not because of the change, but because of how poorly the change was communicated, and how poorly they… and how poorly the people were prepared to go through the change.

[COBY]: Yeah and when it comes to these types of big… like again change is so prevalent that the anxiety that comes from not having the buy-in, and not having the communication and the transparency, is one of those things that is so hard on mental health. And is such a high cause of burnout. That, you know, because even if it’s not as big as like those kinds of like mergers, that you’re talking about. Even when it’s smaller things like you know new technology or new leadership, the Fear of the Unknown and Fear of Loss, fear of losing what you have, or fear of just not knowing what’s happening to you, is such an anxiety inducing concept, that it majorly impacts wellness. And that’s, again, not just on big things, even on small things because it kind of piles on, and kind of  increases exponentially. Because the thing too is to not forget that when

 we have these changes in place, when we wait to tell people something once the processes have changed, we can articulate exactly what it is. That time between the acknowledgment of something happening, and the what’s happening communication, people don’t sit on pause and just go amongst their day happy and go lucky. “Oh I’ll just wait until I hear that news”. That doesn’t happen. The human brain doesn’t work that way. Then you replace facts with speculation. People will start to…

[JAMES]: And that’s dangerous.

 [COBY]: Yes, and people will… and then that speculation turned into rumor, and then that creates its own almost like momentum. Then you may have to spend some more communication time and efforts dispelling the rumor. when you know instead of actually telling them little bits here and there, and being as transparent, and making them interested and excited… maybe not excited but willing to accept might be a better way to put it, that this change is necessary, and where how it’s going to benefit them. That’s where the buy-in comes from and again because people will replace facts that they don’t have with speculation if they have nothing else. So it’s one of those things where you’re right, it makes sense you want to wait till it’s firm and not tell people until you can stand on it. But people will not wait, they will start to replace that lack of information with rumor.

[JAMES]: Yeah and just because it makes logical sense, doesn’t mean that it’s the best course of action. So the natural question that kind of springs to mind as we talk about this, is how do you generate buy-in? How do you avoid that situation that we’ve just talked about? Because as somebody going through that, it was a terrible situation to be involved in. From a staff perspective, management team had no idea what was going on, even our executive director, couldn’t say anything right or didn’t know what was going to happen, and like everybody at all levels of the organization was stressed. And yes it is a bit of an extreme example but this is what can happen. How do we avoid it? So how do we actually manage change better by creating buy-in? And I think I’m going to answer my own question. I’m just teeing myself up. I’ll let you speak eventually. The biggest things that I can share, that I want to share is it is about communication, but it’s communicating with intent. One of the best lessons that we’ve pulled from, well I originally learned it with learning about marketing, and helping with business development and coaching businesses on their own marketing processes. About creating your ideal target demographic or your ideal customer profile. We can use that same lesson of crafting audience profiles when we’re talking about internal communications as well. Or communications in regards to managing change. In marketing, it’s essential because if you don’t understand the people that you’re talking to, and what motivates them, you are never going to influence their buying decision making process. In managing change it’s the same principle. If you have not clearly understood who you have around the table, who are the stakeholders, your employees, whether a management team  needs information in a slightly different way, or whether you have different work sites that need to be communicated in a different way. One shot broadcast is rarely the right approach, and the idea of really nailing down the your audience profiles so that you can actually communicate directly to them is a very simple but very effective tool for improving how you communicate with your teams.

[COBY]: Yeah and when it comes to kind of figuring that stuff out, so again, one of the things that we talk about in our OCMP certification program is… well so we have this thing we call the Perfect 10 miscommunication techniques. And this is kind of how we teach the audience profile pieces is these are the things to avoid when you’re kind of building out your profiles. And you’re figuring out how you want to again generate that buy-in. And one of the elements in there we call it The Kitchen Sink Technique, which is what most people use when they’re trying to commute when they’re trying to generate buy-in or they’re trying to get the communication out there. They put it all out in one blast or they make it all available on one place to go to. Like “Go to this website on change”. And then it’s this massive wall of text and the information is in there, and if you have the ability to find it out, then what you want is there. But that’s not going to work, especially because the stress that kind of comes with all this is something that people are not coming into change at their best. And this is a hard fact and this is one of the things we really get into in our program is to say people are not going through change at their best and brightest. They’re usually going through change at their most stressed and burnt out. So you can’t expect people to be finding the information that’s relevant to them. You really have to give it to them in a way that will speak to their needs. Because you’re right James, it has to be about understanding your audience, and segmenting the audience down into very small groups can be very effective. How small is depending on the change and the groups, everything like that. But like, you know, what you tell your evening shift might need to be different than when you tell your morning shift. What you tell your your new employees, you’re under two years employees, may be different than what you need to tell the longer term employees. Not that the information has to be different, but the how it affects them, how it’s good for them, how it’s going to address their concerns, and how you’re going to try to remove Fear of the Unknown and Fear of Loss, that is going to be… Different priorities are going to require different ways of communicating. Maybe it’s not… maybe it’s the same content in different formats. Maybe it’s using, you know, SMS messaging to some populations, maybe it’s making it available on websites. But like when it comes to workplaces that have non-desk work. Email blasts don’t do a thing. If 70% of your workforce doesn’t have a desk, or a computer, they’re on the floor, they’re out… they’re on the work sites, and email is not going to mean much to them. So part of it too is you have to generate buy-in through the methods it will speak to the different audiences, in both the content and topic as well as the medium that will actually allow them to fully process it and be able to  get on board, while they’re at their most stressed and burned out.

[JAMES]: Yeah and I just want to touch on the Kitchen Sink Technique again. Because we’ve also seen this play out. We’ve seen… this is the exact approach that municipalities that we were working with took. There was… we were working with municipalities during a transition period where they were, where two municipalities were being amalgamated. Now they’ve avoided the word amalgamation, but that’s what was happening. Calling it something else and having the exact same process and outcomes doesn’t actually do anything people. Okay, right. Off my soapbox and back onto my topic. Okay the biggest challenge that we saw with them was the same thing. They spend all of their time, energy, and effort making sure that the processes were ready to change. That the administrative pieces were ready to change. So that the buildings were ready to change. There was a ton of work that was done, but the only thing they did for the people was a “go to this site and here’s all of the information, figure it out yourself”.

[COBY]: “Go to the webpage, go to ourchange.com, and it’s on there somewhere, just go find it, and you’ll be completely satisfied.”

[JAMES]: But the information that a staff member is looking for is very different than the information that a constituent is looking for. And is very different than the information that a business owner might be looking for of how is this going to affect me? And if people can’t easily find that information, they’re going to assume either you don’t know and/or you’re hiding it from me, right? Neither one of those options are good. Neither one of them will lead to a good outcome.

[COBY]: Yeah and what they often do is they pour jet fuel on Fear of Loss and Fear of the Unknown. And that is just the reality of it. That again speaking to your audience is such a valuable skill, like I mean and it’s something that… and part of it comes from… Okay we talked about in a previous episode, we talked about the most overlooked management skill, which is managing expectations. This kind of goes hand in hand with that. The ability to manage expectations often comes down to speaking to your audience. Letting them know again what is happening, what is realistic, how transparent you can be, and be accountable for what is happening. And it’s something that, again, if you’re going to be great… if you’re going to improve your management skills by managing expectations, you also may want to develop the ability to speak to your audience. Understand different audiences need different things. How we communicate can’t be based on our preferences as the broadcaster, we have to communicate to the preferences of our audience. And if you’re not doing that, then hopefully that just gave you an AHA moment,  and that will be something that will fundamentally change how you both do communication but also ultimately how you are involved in managing change. And another thing too is that we saw this the audience profile piece, the mistake of not thinking about different audiences, we saw this with a client a little ways back too, didn’t we?

[JAMES]: Yes, yeah I’d forgotten about them. We worked with the CEO of a community organization. Okay, several of the challenges that the organization was facing was one, right off the bat, the CEO needed more administrative support. Just hands down. The guy was run ragged but one of the big responsibilities on the CEO was a stakeholder engagement. And because the weird nature of the organization, they had a Board of Directors that they were responsible to, they had community partners who they would partner with on delivering initiatives, they had community funders who actually contributed to the funding model of the organization, they had community stakeholders which they, like businesses that they would deliver services to, and they had an internal team that needed to be kept up to date as well. That’s a lot of different people to try to keep informed while you are doing the job of keeping an organization running, managing your team managing, the initiatives, and delivering value to your community. And the big challenge with that this person was experiencing was, largely due to necessity, that they would create one general update and they’d give the same presentation to the board, and they’d inform their staff with the same presentation. They’d inform the community stakeholders ,the community partners, the community funders, using the same method. Because honestly at this point that’s all they could do. Without that additional administrative support it would have been half this person’s job just crafting a their monthly updates. But being able to get that extra support for them and being able to work with them to actually craft an audience profile. And when we’re talking about speaking to your audience we’re not just talking about the actual act of speaking. We mean you need to understand your audience profile, you need to know what actually motivates them, what information are is most relevant to them. Because the information, like in this situation, the information that one of the businesses that would receive services from this organization wants, is going to be different than the information that one of the community stakeholders wants. The outcomes that they care about are different, not all of the information is going to be relevant to all of the people. So rather than making somebody sit through or endure information that they just don’t care about, and they filter it out anyways. Be targeted with the information that you’re providing. Why are you providing this information to this group of people? And helping this person to actually craft those audience profiles went a long ways to being able to craft the narratives differently. So instead of one Kitchen Sink Approach, general. Here’s all of the information that anybody might ever want. It was, here’s the information that I have to give to this group, I know this group is going to want something slightly different, so let’s modify it a bit. And they were able to do that once they had the profiles and the extra administrative support to actually pull that off.

[COBY]: Yeah and I mean, so this is again, this is really helpful just general advice for professionals and for businesses to kind of help generate buying for whatever. But it’s a fundamental component to effectively managing change. Because going back to your point at the beginning, it’s about focusing on the people, because one thing that we do badly, or we don’t do well enough to move beyond the 30% or 34% success rate, is we focus too much on the process side of it, and the people side is becoming a bit of an afterthought. What we’ve talked about up till now is to not make the people in afterthought, is to make them almost like the initial thought. But I think we should almost take a bit of a step back and focus more on the relationship between the process change and the people change. Because I think that if you can make it clear, their interconnectedness, and their role and value, it might make it easier for the efforts people put into buy-in to be a little more clear. So one of the things that we saw like, because again, we hear about this a lot in our OCMP training, but we also see it with some of the clients we work with that are going through like mergers, and amalgamations, and acquisitions, and all that kind of stuff, is that when the change happens it is the process side that gets the most focus. Because a lot of the components of change happens by process focused positions, so like accountants focus on merging the books, and lawyers focus on the business entity, and project managers will often talk about about the physical parts of the project and parts of the building and the concepts, IT is about merging the tech. And those are very process focused, and we see that, when it comes to a lot of the mergers and acquisitions that’s where the focus is, because they kind of think it’s the building, it’s the accounts, it’s the technology, it’s the legal entities, that is the business. And then the employee side is the afterthought.

[JAMES]: “Yeah we’ll get to that once the important stuff is done”, and I understand why that happens. I mean, I don’t think there’s really fault to be had in all of this. It’s more we need to approach it differently, we need to be thinking about this differently, because at the end if after you go through all of that hard… Like change is hard. The process like,  changing the processes, the paperwork, all of that stuff that you were just talking about is hard. None of this is particularly easy, but what we are saying is that you don’t want to get to the end of a really tough change, and then have to deal with incredibly expensive and challenging people issues. You don’t want to go through all of this work of implementing whatever new solution, new Idea, new technology, new business entity, you don’t want to go through all of that process just to realize that you now have a team who’s supposed to use all of this new great wonderful things who are just pissed off because nobody ever talked to them. Because they’ve had months of “I don’t know how this is going to affect me, nobody is telling me anything, nobody’s communicating with me, I’m left on my own to figure things out”, right? And this, we’re still only talking about the first stage of our change management process. But that’s because it if you, if you don’t generate buy-in at the beginning, if you don’t prepare people for the journey to come with you, then you’re going to be trying to drag them along at the end, and people resist that.

[COBY]: Yeah you’re right. Because so much of the current change strategies are about do it, implement the change, then tell people after the fact “this is how it’s going to be now, now that it’s put into place, here’s how you use it, and here’s why you should want to use it” and it’s so reactive. And this is one of the things that, again, I’m going to get a little bit on a soapbox here, because so it’s funny… I just did a interview with Authority Magazine, we talked about this idea of managing the people side of change better, because it’s something that HR  and HR professionals need to be more involved in. Because a lot of it has to do with some of the unfair expectations, or the misuse of, HR professionals that a lot of organizations tend to fall into, almost accidentally, in a lot of ways. Because they put the role of HR, and the people side of productivity, of change, of all this sort of stuff, as a very reactive type of  place. So the analogy I used in the interview with Authority Magazine was that it’s the idea of putting people… If a change happens, if something happens we tend to almost think of the HR people and the CHROs as almost like the maintenance department, they’re about fixing the problems, kind of like putting out the fires… And actually that reminds me of a really great analogy, it’s actually better than what I’m about to give. I saw on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, I forget who said it, I apologize to the person I’m not citing them, but they kind of said that they kind of see HR and positions like this as firefighters. They’re about putting out the fires or but dealing with stuff after has already happened. When we need to be shifting how we view HR and People and Culture as more like fire inspectors. Who are identifying the problematic areas, helping you reduce, fires from happening, and maybe even the idea of both. Having them put the fires out on stuff that has to happen, because there’s always going to be a reactive component to HR. But when HR is pigeonholed into only being reactive, and not being proactive and helping address the things, like a fire inspector, identifying the area’s weaknesses and putting things in place, creating buy-in before change happens, all the sort of stuff. Then it really does set ourselves up to fail, or we’ve decided to accept the cost of of the problematic issues that come as only being reactive. Because the reactive piece with HR is what leads to higher burnout, when you’re always having to put out fires. When you see problems coming and you can’t do anything about it you have to deal with the mess afterwards. And you’re just the maintenance department, cleaning things up afterwards, after the mess has already been caused, even though you saw the mess coming. It’s very hard on HR Professionals in general, but it’s a big misuse of it. Because so much of our companies are people, like you said , “the important stuff”, you know the accounts, the IP, the buildings, you know all this sort of stuff, that’s not what the company is completely. Those are part of the company, but the biggest portion is often the people. Your payroll and your HR costs are usually like what, 50% to 70% of your entire overall expenses? So I mean, you have to consider the fact the people’s side of it needs to be treated with a more proactive, fire inspector type of view. Rather than just being resorted to putting out fires.

[JAMES]: And I like that firefighter/fire inspector analogy. Because, I mean, how many times have we heard working with HR professionals that they’re putting out fires all day? And that’s the language that they use. They’re putting out fires and we see this most often in organizations that prioritize, well it’s can’t even call it prioritize, they look at HR as keeping me from getting sued. What’s the bare minimum that I can do to maintain my legal compliance? Whether that’s your health and safety legislation, or your employment standards legislation. You know, HR’s job is to get that stuff sorted so that the company’s not in danger of getting sued. And when problems come up, HR deals with it because I don’t want to be bothered. That is the mentality that we see in unfortunately a large number of organizations and that is not a healthy approach to treating your staff, your HR professionals who are responsible for all of these things. So I like that firefighter/fire inspector analogy. I’ll have to steal that and claim credit for it at some point.

[COBY]: But I think though again, going back to you know how can we improve organizational change? Well, one. In your organization, are the people side of productivity and change considered, or empowered is a better way to put it, to be proactive? To be able to identify problems before they arise? Be able to handle this stuff ahead of time? If it is great, then you’re already on the right path, Then it’s about creating buy-in and putting the people side of change, in our opinion above the process side of change as far as you order, but at least on par with the process side of change. If your organization does not empower the HR People and Culture, or the people’s side of stuff to be proactive, then I guess start there. I mean because we really need to make sure that we either have to accept that we have to do better at allowing the people side, the buy-in side,  the human side of our businesses to become a priority, or we have to accept that we’ve chosen to deal with the expensive delays, the expensive… the costs of poorly managed change, the long timelines, the insufficient adoption, the inconsistency in use, and all the problems that kind of come with it. We have to accept that we want to be in the two-thirds of unsuccessful change, rather than the one-third of success. And I think that’s just something that we kind of have to decide, either we have we choose to to empower the people side of change or you’ve chosen to just accept that we’re going to be in the majority of failed change programs.

[JAMES]: Ignoring choice, is making a choice.

[COBY]: Yeah and that’s just the reality. Because, I mean, a lot of the time we talk about… we talked about in a previous podcast about the Strive part of growing our businesses and on the Strive part of the Hierarchy, growth, customer acquisition, and change, and collaboration, Innovation, that if we’re choosing to not do the things that we are we need to do, to actually to have sustainable change, then you’re right, absence of… choosing to do nothing is an active choice. Not have the success we want in those areas. That’s just the reality of it. It’s not pause and wait. If things keep happening, while you wait to make the choice or if you ignore it. So this is the reality, is that this stuff’s happening now, we either need to accept that we have to do something, or accept the costs and the consequences of not. Just reality. So all right I think I might just wrap this up. I kind of did a little bit there, but I’ll give it a bit more of a wrap up. So how can we improve organizational change? Well our organizational change is something that we are currently not doing well. Studies from John Kotter and Gartner, over like a 25 year period, if not more, have been saying that we are continually not being successful with change. Yes change does happen, but it happens over budget, with poor adoption, and with extremely longer timelines, is considered unsuccessful. Because we are not looking at the whole picture, we prioritize the process side of change, and we often forget about the people side of change. And a lot of focus and how you can address that is by focusing again on the creating buy-in before change happens. Because for change to be accepted, and in order for people to not push back against it, they have to see why it’s beneficial to them, why they should care, and be able to at least, if not accept the change, at least not be in opposition of it. Because if you don’t… and often that can be done through communications, because if we’re not communicating effectively, we create the Fear of Loss and the Fear of the Unknown. Because a communication void is filled with rumor and speculation, so if you want to make sure that we’re empowering the people side of our organizations, that we are empowering the people side of change, by maybe shifting how we empower our internal operations, and the HR departments and people, to maybe move from being firefighters to fire inspectors. Because we want to make sure that we’re seeing how we can be proactive, and get ahead of a lot of this stuff, and put these things into place. And not just sort it out as we’re going. And a lot of that can be done by speaking to our audience. Understanding and speaking to the people, and the audiences, that will actually have that meaningful engagement and components. Because you really want to make sure…this stuff is expensive, it’s important, and change happens to companies all the time, so why not be good at it. So that about does it for us. So for a full archive of our podcasts and access to the video version hosted on our YouTube channel visit our website at roman3.ca/podcast. Thanks for joining us.

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