Welcome to Week 9!

This week we continue our interest in leadership and consulting. So far, we've looked at the following sub-themes:

1. "work": productivity and meaningfulness
2. credibility: your ability to lead/influence
3. organizational assessment: the how/what of client engagement

This week, we look at the sub-theme of change. We're interested in how an organization, team and an individual manage change. The corporate and consulting buzzphrase is "Change Management." The management of change is an important part of any organizational phenomenon.

While a bit simplistic, we can divide the perspectives on change into two main camps. These perspectives are very similar to our notions of strategy. One can see change as an event with a clear plan. This plan is usually derived from a period of study and assessment that drives a creation of solutions. We can label this type of change as "Change through Initiatives." Its yin is the "Continious Improvement" perspective that comes from Lean and Total Quality Management (Japan); this concept of change tends to reject change as an event, but rather sees change as something that is the norm -- we exist in change constantly, success is understanding it, being comfortable with it, and promoting its study to improve competitive advantage.

Note how important KM would be to either perspective; note how change plays a role in notions of sharing knowledge. We could consider knowledge sharing to be essential for either concept of managing change.

"Consulting" lends itself towards thinking of change in the initiatives sense, and usually involves a formal and substantial intervention from an internal and/or external actor (HR, KM, a consulting firm). The two notions of change management are not mutually exclusive, but they do tend to get discussed as such; in my opinion, this confuses the management of change. I would argue that "Change" is not an event or cycle, it's the reality of organizational life. Agree/disagree? The reason most change efforts fail could come from viewing change as an event which either succeeds or fails in a binary sense. Contrast this with a culture that is comfortable with change as work itself. Which perspective on change is more helpful?

PMI podcast:

http://www.project-management-podcast.com/index.php/podcast-episodes/515-ep...

Reflect on wks 1-4 again; what about (if at all) this course was different from your other classes? When we built the class, we intentionally chose tools and events to create a new experience to illustrate a change event/phenomenon. Was it helpful to experience this type of change firsthand even if it came with some initial frustration?

A position: adult learners (or clients) need to experience something firsthand in a low (but some) stress way to gain a real understanding for a given concept. If you agree, can you construct exercises and/or experiments for your clients to better manage their experience with change?

http://tribehr.com/blog/workplace-training-and-education-how-adults-learn

(there is no need to post this unless desired)

Review and think on how to read and assimilate information quickly. We're not interested in tight reads here, we're interested in exposure.

Wikipedia on CM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_management

Bristol:

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/cubec/migrated/documents/pr1.p...

Todnem:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s19/sh/a89b445f-0f7e-42e3-b620-d637bc8d3b35/...

S + B article:

http://www.strategy-business.com/article/rr00006?gko=643d0

Wikipedia on CI:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continual_improvement_process

HBR on Continuous Improvement:

https://hbr.org/2012/05/its-time-to-rethink-continuous/

CI from CQI:

http://www.thecqi.org/Knowledge-Hub/Resources/Factsheets/Continual-improvem...

CM and KM:

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s19/sh/20e443c6-8054-47b8-9c01-629f08f3c52f/...

S + B link (same as article):

http://www.strategy-business.com/article/rr00006?gko=643d0

Assert your points with evidence from the readings. Right....sorry...write well. Pay attention to detail, and act as is you were working to educate and convince your organization's top management.

A bit of a change here : D on peer grading this week. Please write a 100-200 (or more, if desired) blurb on your tumblr about if the peer grading experience has been beneficial to you. I am very interested in your thoughts. Our design was to find a creative way to break from the "respond to each other's post" usual thing. The goal remains the fostering of interaction between the students, and learning how to give and receive feedback.

Extra credit opportunity: reach out to fellow students to see who has been graded, who has not. Determine number of times each student has been graded by another student. Ask qualitative questions to gain insight about why some students receive more/less attention than others.

This week is heavy with material; do your best. Note that week 10 will be ou second reflection/break.

Who is the thinker in this photo? How might he be helpful to us?

a: H. Edwards Deming

Deming, an American engineer and mathematician, is generally regarded as the founding thought leader of Quality, Total Quality Management, Lean, Six Sigma and associated notions of change and strategy. He was instrumental in Japan's "Economic Miracle" of the 1950s and 60s. His work with math/stats in measuring business processes and human behavior has been monumentally impactful (good and bad) in the history of management.

Good: breaking behavior down to measurable activities which can be tracked and -- in theory -- improved

Bad: the cold effect on culture and human interaction; the notion that human experience can be reduced to measurable bits that reassemble to form a coherent body, IE a critique of reductionism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism

To his credit, he attempted to combine rational use of numbers AND a respect of culture and psychology. We may argue that rational oriented managers have overused his discussion of stats and metrics while discarding elements of culture and leadership they felt too unwieldy. Be careful with numbers; an over-reliance on them creates the conditions for "it's just business" type of ethics in decision-making, as if the numbers are more important than the people who create them.

Personal tangent if interested: Deming's ideas greatly impact the way the US fights wars. This was perhaps most visible during the Vietnam experience. James McNamara, then Secretary of Defense, was well known to view the war through stats: number of enemy killed, bombs dropped, etc. In military circles, the modern notion that one can "win" a conflict by measured destruction of the enemy comes from him. In my military life, we study this constantly; I am not sure it's the best way to understand the extremely (perhaps most) complex human phenomenon that is war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming