As a sage lyricist schooled in the ancient teachings of hip-hopcrates once famously said…
‘Guess who’s back, back again…guess who’s back, tell a friend…’
No seriously… tell a friend and they’ll tell some friends and so on and so on…
Can you believe that my last blog was in February 2010? That was 20 months ago… well (insert 4 letter word) happens I guess…life…I meant life happens…What did you think I meant?
It seems like a whole lot has transpired during my absence…
We had an explosion of a volatile volcano in Iceland and the implosion of a volatile economy in Greece.
We had previously contained oil leaking into the gulfstream and previously contained classified information leaking into the main stream.
We had miners trapped deep in the middle of a mountain and the middle class trapped deep in a mountain of debt.
We had a change inducing wave in the middle east and a wave inducing change on Japan’s coast.
We had the birth of a popular innovative technology and the death of a popular technology innovator.
We experienced moments of exhilaration and jubilation as well as agitation and repudiation. We witnessed inspiration and desperation coupled with admiration and expostulation.
Of all the ‘ations’ we experienced over the last several months, the one continuation that we can all be assured of is….change.
How should organizations effectively handle change?
Preparation – ensure the organization is ready for change by aligning key stakeholders, outlining the strategic goals and objectives and clearly communicating the benefits of the change throughout the organization (See SNERGY blog Did You Know that Transformation has 3 R’s?)
Translation – ensure that there is a common understanding of requirements, scope and schedule as well as a standardized lexicon across all functional groups implementing or affected by the organizational change (See SNERGY blog How Many Languages Do You Speak?)
Negotiation – ensure that change agents work closely with affected resources to help align skill sets with new roles and apply a tiered process implementation that progressively builds on foundational knowledge (See SNERGY blog Winning isn’t everything…or is it?)
And finally, the most important ‘ation’ is consideration…change is scary for most and terrifying for some. With a little consideration and empathy we can help mitigate organizational risk by reducing barriers to change and increasing employee buy-in and productivity.
Well I’m done…there seems to be some debate as to whether we actually hit the 7 billion population milestone however…after an accumulation of Heinekens, there is absolutely no debate as to what ‘ation’ milestone I am about to hit.
I think I am going to go start an Occupy the Bathroom protest.
Now where did I put my zombie outfit?
