Creating change

Disciplines > Change Management > Creating change

These are techniques for creating change in any organization. Here is an alphabetic list of some of the methods you can use. 

• Boiling the frog: Incremental changes may well not be noticed.
• Burning bridges: Ensure there is no way back.
• Burning platform: Expose or create a crisis to get things going.
• Challenge: Inspire them to achieve remarkable things.
• Coaching: Psychological support for executives.
• Command: Tell them what to do.
• Destabilizing: Shake people of their comfort zone.
• Evidence for change: Cold, hard data to show need for change.
• Evidence stream: Show them time and again that the change is happening.
• Education: Learn them to change.
• Facilitation: Use a facilitator to guide team meetings.
• First steps: Make it easy to get going.
• Golden handcuffs: Keep key people with delayed rewards.
• Institutionalization: Building change into the formal systems and structures.
• Involvement: Give them an important role.
• Management by Objectives (MBO): Tell people what to do, but not how.
• Management causality mapping: Helping a team see its own role.
• Open Space: People talking about what interests them.
• Re-education: Train the people you have in new knowledge/skills.
• Restructuring: Redesign the organization to force behavior change.
• Reward alignment: Align rewards with desired behaviors.
• Rites of passage: Use formal rituals to confirm change.
• Setting goals: Give them a formal objective.
• Shift-and-sync: Change a bit then pause restabilize.
• Socializing: Build it into the social fabric.
• Spill-and-fill: Incremental movement to a new organization.
• Stepwise change: Breaking things down into smaller packages.
• Visioning: Create a motivating view of the future.
• Whole-system Planning: Everyone planning together.

These are also available, sorted by Lewin's freeze phases, as:

• Unfreezing techniques to get them going.
• Transitioning techniques to get them to the right place.
• Refreezing techniques to keep them there.

See also

Creating a Positive Culture, Creative methods, Conversion techniques, Objection-handling