Why Organisational Change Rarely Delivers Expected Value

Do you want to make lasting organisational change... but you know that change rarely delivers its expected value?

Most change falls short because organisations use zombie ideas and recipes that have been failing for thirty years. Ideas whose assumptions have been proven to be false but keep on coming back from the dead, often through training courses and consultancies trading on old ideas.

The problem with the most commonly touted ideas is that they treat the world of work as if it is a predictable machine. Those ideas and recipes assume that the same inputs will produce the same outputs, time after time. If your organisation's approach to change comprises a sequential set of steps, with words like "buy-in" and a wavy dimensionless graph showing "the stages of change" then you're in zombie territory.

The world of work isn't at all like a machine. So it's no wonder that those popular approaches continue to fail. The pandemic has shown all too clearly that the world of work is not like a machine, it's an ecosystem, characterised by:
 

• ​Unpredictability

• Interdependence

• Limits of Control

So, if you want to make an organisational change, you are more likely to succeed if you approach your change as a gardener not a mechanic. 

There is Another Way

In my new book Gardeners Not Mechanics: How to Cultivate Change at Work I describe:

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• Why popular "change management" recipes have failed to deliver the sustainable value.

• The three key characteristics of ecosystems:unpredictability, interdependence, limits of control..

• A framework for thinking like a gardeners, entitled The Elements of Gardening.

If you're a listener rather than a reader, I have a YouTube playlist of 2-3 minute video bites that summarise the key ideas in the book.

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But if you really want to experience how to think differently, I've created a workshop based on the book to coach and mentor teams to think and act like gardeners, applying a gardening mindset to a real change you want to make.

The Workshop

My workshop, based on my book, will show your team how to think and act like a gardener, applying my gardeners' thinking framework to a real change that is important to your organisation, not a case study.

By the end of the workshop not only will your team have increased the probability of making a real change stick, they will also be equipped with a mindset and thinking framework that they will be able to apply in any situation in the future...even to their own careers!

The workshop can be delivered online or in person. The graphic below illustrates how it can be delivered online, over a period of six to eight weeks. Apart from the obvious benefit of convenience for distributed teams, the online version has is deigned to have gaps between sessions enable the teams to go away and apply what they have learned, and build on it in the next session.

Follow-up consultancy, mentoring and coaching is also available, post-workshop.

If you are interested in the workshop or any other services, just drop me a line at gary@gardenersnotmechanics.com

Or if you are genuinely serious about exploring further, you can book an online conversation with me using this link.