Tips for Change Facilitation

Changing Dojo [Editor]
ChangingDojo
Published in
5 min readDec 22, 2016

--

Changeability is one of the most important characteristics for companies in the 21st century. As Peter Senge pointed out "Organisational change combines inner shifts in people’s values, aspirations, and behaviours with outer shifts in processes, strategies, practices, and systems”.

However, most of the time, the people do not know how to foster this ability inside the corporation. They need help. They need some facilitation to overcome the obstacles during the change journey.

A Change Facilitator is someone who helps the organisation to identify the opportunities to improve and foster collective strategies to maximise the success of the change efforts.

After several years facilitating organisations in small and large change initiatives, I have collected a set of brief lessons to help Change Facilitators in order to maximise the chances of success in a change/transformation initiative.

See below the visual summary and the description of each tip.

  • Develop a shared vision — Everyone in the organisation must see, understand, and support the vision of where we want to go. A good vision must give the directions and inspire the people’s actions toward the change.
  • Focus simultaneously on the hard and soft sides of the organisation — The organisation has two unseparated faces — the soft side and the hard side. The soft side is about values, beliefs, motivation, perceptions, etc. The hard side is about capabilities, behaviours, metrics, results, growth, scale, etc. Change Facilitators must look after both at the same time.
  • Develop a network of committed people — Commitment is a vital characteristic for everyone in the change team. However, to achieve a good level of success, the change team needs support from other enthusiastic key groups of people throughout the organisation.
  • Find the MVI — Where can we start the change? Sometimes, we need to start the change process by a counter-intuitive place because it is the most effective lever. The most successful changes begin with small and evolutionary experiments. In order to maximise the chance of success, change facilitators have to support the organisation to define the Minimum Viable Improvement (MVI). It is a set of small actions that need a low effort and can produce a congruent and noticeable improvements in the company. It is a smart way to create quick wins to strengthen the change process.
  • Foster the SEE-FEEL-CHANGE cycle — Changes can be harder if you try to convince people only by using logic arguments. One of the most effective ways to cultivate change is to put into practice the SEE-FEEL-CHANGE cycle. This cycle helps people to see and become aware of what the problems are, feel why it is important to solve the problems and create actionable insights to put the change into practice. Change facilitators must build a toolkit to help the organisation to handle each stage within this cycle.
  • Maximise enablers and Minimise blockers — It is a sort of universal law — we always have driving forces (positive forces) and restraining forces (resistance) to achieve any goal during a change initiative. For this reason, we need to reduce the resistance and take advantage of the positive forces. However, be mindful when you are trying to reduce the resistance because companies are like organisms — they have an immunity system to prevent threats. In this case, the resistance is a natural response to protect the system. It is an essential element to help the organism to survive and to grow. If you try to remove this immunity, the system may crash.
  • Monitor and adjust strategies in response to problems — The corporation is a living system with complex behaviours. We cannot predict and determine the effectiveness of our actions in the change initiative. For this reason, we need to put into practice a strategy based on continuous inspection and adaptation in order to reflect on what is working well and what needs to be enhanced in our change management approach.
  • Walk the talk — Practising what is preached and leading by example are important characteristics for change facilitators. Probably the better way to inspire people is to be congruent about what you say and what you do. For instance, it is harder to help someone to stop smoking if you smoke every day.
  • Sustain and Reinforce — Most of the time, transformation produces wins and losses. The art of successful change is to create a balance between the two over time. It is also about how we can create beneficial improvements for as long as possible. In order to reinforce any change, the change facilitator has to keep updating the organisation about the quick wins; and in order to sustain these enhancements for a longer period of time, the change facilitator must prepare the organisation to sustain the new behaviours without external interference.
  • Be a cultural mixer, not a cultural imperialist — Most of the change facilitators fail when they attempt to replace an old culture with a brand new culture. It happens because cultures are not like machine parts — we cannot substitute the old ones for the new ones. Great change facilitators are not “trying to shove new practices down people’s throats”. They do not act as a cultural imperialist because they understand the current practices and values and create links and combinations with new behaviours and thinking.

These tips are just a kickstart to support your own change management strategy. They are not a sequence of steps or a methodology (unfortunately, there is no silver bullet regarding change facilitation). This article is based on my field experience and supported by several references (as you can see below). I hope this compilation of thoughts may help you to gain success in your journey as a change facilitator.

About the autor:

Manoel Pimentel is a Catalyser of changes, Author, Speaker and Agile Coach at Elabor8 (Australia). He has been working in the IT field for the last 18 years and has helped pioneer the Agile methods in Brazil.

He has a vast experience helping organisations to get interoperability between Agile (Scrum, XP, FDD, SAFe, Kanban) and governance models.

He’s a Management 3.0 facilitator and one of the first Learning 3.0 Facilitators in the world. Manoel also holds the following certifications: SPC, SPC4, CSM, CSPO and CSP.

For further reading

--

--

Changing Dojo [Editor]
ChangingDojo

I’m the curator of the Changing Dojo. We provide a space to share ideas and experiences about organisational change management/facilitation.