In LinkedIn Change Consulting Group has been an interesting discussion about effective change management attributes. This discussion has triggered already about 200 comments from the very active change professionals’ community in LinkedIn.
In my analysis I took a rather pseudo-scientific approach. I compiled (almost) all the answers into one document, cleaned them a bit (deleting some lengthy conversations), and copied the document into word frequency counter. I got a long list of word counts which I then copied to excel for easier handling. I first omitted all generic words, like ‘the’, ‘to’ and ‘and’ which were the top three on the raw material list. Then I grouped the words having similar(ish) meaning, like ‘vision’ and ‘big picture’. (This might raise some criticism.)
The result for top ten words is below. Not a big surprise to see ‘Communication’ on the top of the list. ‘Clarity’ (includes ‘Clear’) follows next.
The third is ‘People’ which is quite generic word, but reflects, I believe, the need to encompass the whole community to the change execution. As expected, ‘Stakeholders’, ‘Leadership’ and ‘Management’ got to the top ten as well.
Analysis: Olli Laasanen, Oy Swot Consulting Finland Ltd
I personally would like to have seen words like ‘Change Agents’, ‘Persistence’ and ‘Celebration’ higher on the list, but they got only a few counts.
Based on this somewhat light-hearted study, to succeed in change management:
- Communicate clearly to all people so that they understand what is going to happen, and why.
- Use all the abilities and skills available for good planning.
- Make sure all stakeholders share and spread the vision and big picture.
- Ensure the leadership is visible and that everything is managed well.
Thanks to the Change Experts in LinkedIn. Without you I would not have been able to write this blog.
