Here is my takeaway #9 from a book that makes organizational project work worthwhile, “Change Management that Sticks: A Practical People-centered Approach, for High Buy-In and Meaningful Results”:

9) “In change management, the word ‘change’ is used as though it’s simultaneously a noun AND a verb. A change manager will talk about ‘the change’ and mean both the transition the people are going through and ‘the thing’ being delivered. People ‘go through the change’, but they also ‘receive the change’. It is a process, an event, and a key character in the unfolding story of delivery and adoption.”

Note: This comes from the Introduction (page xxvi).

I like how this book introduces the topic of change management. It gets to the basics and keeps it simple. We often overcomplicate things that can be explained plainly.

I love definitions. Of course, language is not perfect. I have often laughed with my colleagues over the challenges of the human language. Learning anything new in business starts with terminology. Getting on the same page with what we mean, in the context of our working environment and current practices, goes a long way to acclimating each other to working together, especially on project teams that are temporary and often involve different players.

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STORY TIME

I have changed industries multiple times, or better said, worked on projects from multiple industries. That’s kind of the nature of project work. In theory, project managers can lead any project. I have learned so much about other’s disciplines, but I am taking more opportunity to teach others in organizations about my discipline.

Project Managers are generalists and specialists. We do not expect to know the most in the room about “the thing being delivered”. That’s why we have Subject Experts on the team creating “the change”. But we do know more about “the change” when it comes to the project process. And Change Managers know more about “the change” when it comes to the adoption process. There are many layers of change that can easily go awry when experts from different areas (or levels) of work don’t understand (or respect) where each other are coming from and how the work and the interactions uniquely affect each area of the work.

I remember one particular instance, sitting in a room of Engineers I had gathered for an impromptu “huddle”, who were painstakingly trying to tell me why “the change” was engineered the way that it was. That wasn’t the problem. For the life of me, I couldn’t explain how “the change” I was inquiring about was more about unique challenges to our process and its application in the database. The issue was preventing me from proceeding with my part. I figured we all needed to put our heads together to figure out a solution, but maybe I should have stuck with just going to the one other person in the group who might understand the ramifications in the database. I understood the overriding engineering philosophy they were giving me, but ultimately, I had to come up with a solution on my own when the Engineers never did understand the actual issue this situation posed for us in the database.

Unfortunately, I went away from that conversation feeling like meeting with that group about such questions was not so smart. They hadn’t attempted to adopt using the new capabilities of the database in their work. They thought that was exclusively my job. They came away from it feeling like I didn’t know engineering principles that they felt they had taught me, and then probably determined that I was the weak link on the team altogether. In some environments, it doesn’t feel like it pays to speak up and/or ask questions to the group and/or attempt to work through relevant problems as a team.

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For those organizations that know that there is a difference between “the change” being delivered and “the change” process and its application and adoption, they will respect the different experts involved in managing knowledge, projects, and changes into reality, and they will become more mature and capable as a business entity to make improvements. For those organizations who don’t understand how to use your dynamic professionals, they will lose out on great opportunities to progress their business with that expertise. The sooner a business realizes this the better off they are, because they are better able to course correct when changes are minor adaptations rather than major transformations.