Weekend
Change Management #2
By Terry Freedman
Fri, 13 Jul 2007, 23:56

You might wonder what qualifies me to write about cultural change in an organisation. Well, I’ve done it several times, and I thought I’d set myself the challenge of trying to describe some of the success stories I’ve enjoyed in 250 words or fewer.

My main motivation in writing these vignettes is that I keep meeting depressed people: people who are in such a dire situation that they have started to believe that they will never be able to change it.

So what I should like to do is provide very brief case studies comprising the before and after, but not the during: my aim is to uplift, rather than instruct, in these stories. That's why I aim to publish them on a Friday: so you can go home full of hope rather than despondency!

Last week I wrote about the transformation of the educational technology provision in a school. This week, I focus on the change in working practices I brought about in a Local Authority.

Imagine trying to drag 200+ died-in-the-wool colleagues wedded to their paper-based systems into the 20^th, let alone the 21^st, century. Part of my role was to do just that.

So how long do you think it took to achieve? A year? Eighteen months? Never? Actually, it took me about two weeks to achieve the bulk of it, and 6 months to achieve almost all of the rest. I say “almost all” because it seems to be a fairly well-established rule that around 15% of any group of people will never touch a computer, whatever you do to encourage them.

When I first arrived on the scene, paper diaries were the order of the day – and there wasn’t even a team diary. Each team member had his or her own diary and message book, and I was expected to check through them every day.

Messages were also paper-based in the worst possible way. Each morning I would go to a meeting, only to return to a computer festooned with sticky notes, and memos all over my desk and, occasionally, even my chair.

Like I say, that had all changed within two weeks for myself and my team, and had changed for most of our other colleagues too.

The important message from this story is that, no matter how entrenched human behaviour might be, backed up by the “we’ve always done it this way” argument, it can be changed.

And sometimes much faster than you might believe possible.

Have a great weekend!

Much of my work is in helping to bring about transformation in the use and management of educational technology in schools and other institutions. To find out more about the sort of work I do, and how I could work with you, look here. You may find it useful to scroll down the left hand side and click on the page about the assignments I've undertaken as an independent education consultant.

© Terry Freedman Fri, 13 Jul 2007