Change Management Toolbook

"Are you personally ready for change? Is your team in serious need of new ways to work together? How can your organization deal with a change project which lacks focus or direction? Do you want to know why change is inevitable but hard to achieve? Do you want to surf on the waves of change? You will find some of the answers to your questions in the new Change Management Toolbook website.

"The Change Management Toolbook is a collection of more than 120 tools, methods and strategies which you can apply during different stages of personal, team and organizational development, in training, facilitation and consulting. It is divided into three principle sections: Self, Team and Larger System.

"Self
Change Management starts and ends with individuals. As the system theory says, you cannot really predict how a person reacts to a certain stimulus. So, if you want to introduce change into a system, you will most likely need to think about what skills, behaviours and belief systems the members of the system will need to be part of the change effort.

"Team
At the heart of modern organizations are teams that share the responsibility and the resources for getting things done. Most projects are too complex to be implemented by one person, most services need different specialists and support staff to be delivered, and most products are the result of the work of a larger resources team or supply chain. We know that teams can either perform at their peak, or can be terribly inefficient.

"Larger Systems
Change processes are mostly initiated by either individuals or small teams, but the focus of change is one which goes beyond that small unit. It is directed towards the entire organization, or towards other organizations. A change project might be related to a community, a region or an entire society (and, yes: to the world as a whole)."

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the Change Management Toolbook

"Change Management is the process, tools and techniques to manage the people-side of change processes, to achieve the required outcomes, and to realize the change effectively within the individual change agent, the inner team, and the wider system.

"There are a multitude of concepts on Change Management and it is very difficult to distil a common denominator from all the sources that are applying the phrase to their mental maps of organizational development. But obviously there is a tight connection with the concept of learning organizations. Only if organizations and individuals within organizations learn, they will able to master a positive change.

"In other words, change is the result from an organizational learning process that centres around the questions: 'In order to sustain and grow as an organization and as individuals within; what are the procedures, what is the know-how we need to maintain and where do we need to change?', and, 'How can we manage a change, that is in harmony with the values we hold as individuals and as organizations?'

"Change Management has also to be seen in the light of the discussion on Knowledge Management, which took several turns during the nineties. When the establishment of an intranet was suddenly feasible to any large organization, IT and management scientists declared the beginning of the 'knowledge society'.

"The immature anticipation of knowledge management was that every member of an organization would be highly motivated to share information through a common platform and a quality improvement process would be enabled more or less by itself. It took only a couple of years to realize that this assumption was false. Up to now, there are no examples of a company in which transformational learning is facilitated by an IT system only, because the early protagonists forgot that information does not equal knowledge and that human knowledge is in the muscles of the persons who make the parts of a larger system.

"Back to square one. How (and whether at all) change can be "managed" or facilitated?..."

Are you personally ready for change? Is your team in serious need of new ways to work together? How can your organization deal with a change project which lacks focus or direction? Do you want to know why change is inevitable but hard to achieve? Do you want to surf on the waves of change?

You will find some of the answers to your questions in the Change Management Toolbook, a collection of more than 120 tools, methods and strategies which you can apply during different stages of personal, team and organizational development, in training, facilitation and consulting. It is divided in three principle sections: Self, Team and Larger System. You may wisht to begin with Introduction to Change Management from which the quoted portions of the foregoing were taken.

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