Organizational Change: Creating Change Through Strategic Communication

9

Applying the Model in Practice

You don't learn very much when you yourself are talking

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

The secret to managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided

Casey Stengel, baseball player and manager

Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right

Jane Goodall

This chapter is written with the practitioner in mind. After reading the preceding chapters and learning about the research and theory that informs the general model presented throughout this book, practitioners may be left with the question – so how to I use this model and this background to effectively and strategically participate in a change process? This chapter directly addresses that central question. The advice and frameworks presented in this chapter are aimed equally at implementers of change; those who resist a change; and those who aim to steer a change in a new direction. Any practitioner confronted with organizational change should be able to make use of the ideas in this chapter.

In this chapter I discuss a simplified way to understand the major activities that any practitioner needs to manage in order to successfully influence change in his/her organization. I also discuss four general tools that can be useful in doing so. To illustrate these tools, I will turn to a fresh, hypothetical case, that will be used in this chapter to illustrate how a practitioner could intervene, direct, ...