🌿🧭🌳 OD24: Ten conditions for change ∙ Organizational amnesia ∙ OD goodies
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1. Ten conditions for change
There’s a lot of talk about change around us.
Question is: how do you actually enable positive behavior change in your organization?
For this edition, we picked a useful behavior change framework that
can easily be applied to practical problems by individuals and teams that are not experienced with designing behavior change interventions, and that...
can provide a comprehensive system that can account for the numerous different techniques used in practice (i.e., not simplifying the realm of consideration to a limited number of techniques), making it relevant even to experienced practitioners
The “Ten conditions for change” framework, created by Spark Wave:
About the framework
(it) provides ten "conditions for change" that are designed to be sufficient for succeeding at creating a new positive behavior. That is, we provide ten conditions that are very likely to produce behavior change if the intended person or population meets all of them.
About the phases
The framework is organized into three main phases: DECISION, ACTION, and CONTINUATION. The ten conditions together make up these three phases.
The DECISION phase refers to conditions that are sufficient for a person to decide to change their behavior.
The ACTION phase refers to conditions that are sufficient for a person to perform the various actions that together constitute a successful behavior change.
The CONTINUATION phase refers to conditions that are sufficient for a person to continue the DECISION and ACTION processes (that is, to prevent those conditions from failing to be met after initial actions are performed and as time passes).
Detailed view
In the dedicated page linked below you can find:
The introduction, overview and usage recommendations for the framework;
Explanations, examples, questions and behavior change strategies for each of the ten conditions;
Overviews of other 16 behavior change frameworks.
We highly recommend this resource to all organizational leaders and their advisers.
Organizational amnesia
Andy Polaine has inspired us to reflect about how organizations tend to forget what they manage to learn.
Given that lots of energy, money and other resources are invested in order to deliberately learn new things as a whole organization, organizational amnesia is a topic that is usually missing from the conversations of sr. leadership teams.
Have you seen org. amnesia happening in your organization?
Are there any practices that help you reduce it?
We’ve selected some key points from Andy’s article:
If you think of people and practices as the neural pathways in the organizational brain, when they’re damaged—through redundancies, attrition or “restructuring trauma”, those pathways are destroyed, blocked or fade.
Process is often used as a scaffold to rebuild the pathways. It does help to have an explicit process or methodology that everyone understands and shares the meaning of, but process alone does not preserve understanding and shared meaning.
Actually process can have the opposite effect, because blindly following procedure can be pretty mindless. People aren’t thinking about why they’re doing something, they’re just on autopilot.
Practice—a combination of craft and habit—does reinforce those pathways. Especially reflective practice, which is more than just making. It’s is also intentional consideration of what you are doing before, during and after the act of making.
The challenge for organizations is that they want the outcomes that self-reflective learners and practitioners can produce, but fail to set up an environment that helps their people learn to learn. Then the organizational amnesia sets in.
OD Goodies
Curious about more resources on leading organizations?
Here’s a section with very short descriptions and links.
We’ve recently revisited the summaries of the Drucker Forum 2019 sessions about business ecosystems.
Michael Lopp, the author of Managing Humans, has recently published The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well. ”The essays in this book examine the practical skills Lopp learned from exceptional leaders - as a manager at Netscape, a senior manager and director at Apple, and an executive at Slack.”
Tim Casasola offers his perspective on why writing matters in remote work.
The Future Today Institute has recently shared a tool that looks useful: Assumptions v. Knowledge. Colin Powell’s 40-70 rule could translate into a recommendation to make most business decisions in the familiarity - evidence range described by the AvK tool.
The OrgDev newsletter is curated by Raluca and Bülent Duagi, the team behind Sense & Change. We work as OD Advisers to high performing cross-functional teams, guiding strategy execution and increasing team effectiveness in complex and uncertain contexts.