What are the tools that can be used to initiate breakthrough change?

My first question is what are you doing now? My second question is what kind of business / processes are we talking about here?

Perhaps "what" one is trying to change is not as important as "how" one goes about initiating, processing, and sustaining a change. From the smallest business process improvement to large scale application development, people are not into solutions to problems they do not understand.

And therein you have the second step: define the problem or what you are trying to accomplish (the objective of the change) and then communicate it in terms that the target audiences will understand. I say audiences, plural, because there may be different levels of the organization you will be conveying information to (executive to non-executive) and each level will require a different "kind or type" of information.

The first step is sponsorship at the management level of your organization. If the boss doesn't want it, it will show and staff won't follow willingly and unwilling followers kill initiatives.

Is this a beginning that you can work with?

There are some wonderful books on the topic, one of my favorites is: The Change Management Handbook, A Road Map to Corporate Transformation by Lance A. Berger, Martin J. Sikora with Dorothy R. Berger (Irwin Professional Publishing - 1994).

More to come,
Calisto




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[This message has been edited by Calisto (edited 05 June 2001).]