I have been working with a number of organisations lately developing their internal capability to be responsive to change. One of the key leverage points for building and maintaining change readiness capability is skill change agents working across your business.

The literature on human resource and organizational development, contains numerous models of competencies necessary for practitioners in the field of organizational change and transformation. My review of this field and the practical applications suggests that there is an intricate and complex web of skills necessary to efficiently and effectively engage in a complex organizational system.

I have been able to identify 8 key capabilities and over 100 associated competencies, tools and techniques that will allow an individual to engage effectively as a "change agent" in an adaptive organizational environment. The 8 key capabilities that I discovered included:

• Improved personal practice
• Build and nuture team effectiveness
• Effectively interact with clients and the organizational system.
• Understand, plan and enable organizational change.
• Establish a vision of possibility and the means to achieve the result
• understand and use the key elements of continuous improvement in performance management.
• Collect and interpret information.
• Ongoing inquiry.

I will now explore in greater detail each of the capabilities that make up an effective and efficient change agent in complex, adaptive environments. I wanted to start by discussing how change agents can improve their personal practice.

In terms of creating a dynamic and adaptive change agent capability is essential for change agents to improve their personal practice. The literature in this area is quite clear, researchers such as Arygris have spent the last 25 years developing a theory of individual and organizational learning in which human reasoning, not just behavior, becomes the basis for diagnosis and action.

Argyris is an American organizational psychologist, whose special area is the personal development of individual and organisaitonal learning and the defense mechanisms that managers and team leaders, often unwittingly use to resist change.

Argyris's pioneering work in the field of action science offers a strong and sound basis for the skills, techniques and tactics to improve personal practice. The key skills and competencies for a change agent, based on Chris Argyris's work include being able to recognize and intervene in real-time. The two important personal development tools here are left-hand column technique and ladder of inference.

These two techniques are fundemental to an effective change agent as they allow the agent to intervene in real time and openly challenge individual, group and organisaitonal norms and defensive mechanisms.

Leading Change Effectively

I see too many people trying to lead major change program with no way of knowing if their leadership is actually adding any value at all. I love to use the Stages of Concern model outline below as a lead indicator of how people are progressing throug a change process. I have outlined some of the thinking and issues with the stages of concern model below.

Stages of Concerns model was developed by Gene Hall and associates at the Research and Development Centre at the University of Texas at Austin to study and describe how organisations and individuals adopt innovations. Hall and associates discovered that change takes place as a process, rather than an event, and that each individual goes through predictable stages, each of which is characterised by specific questions, anxieties, or uncertainties about the particular innovation.

Stages of Concern makes several assumptions about change. It assumes that change:

• Is a process, not an event

• Is made by individuals first, then organisations

• Is a highly personal experience

• Entails developmental growth in feelings and skills

Stages of Concerns also assumes that intervention must be related to people first and innovation second.

There are seven stages on concern, they are:




In the Awareness Stage (0), there is little concern about or involvement with the innovation. A typical expression of concern at level 0 about the innovation would be “I am not concerned about it (the innovation)”

The Information Stage (1) involves a general awareness of the innovation and interest in learning more detail about it. The person seems not to be worried about self in relation to the innovation. There is an interest, in a selfless manner in substantive aspects of the innovation such as general characteristics, effects, and requirements for use. A typical expression of concern at stage 1 about the innovation would be “I would like to know more about it.”

In the Personal Stage (2), an individual is uncertain about the demands of the innovation, personal inadequacy to meet those demands, and your own role with the reward structure of the organisation. There is also uncertainty about decision making commitments. Financial or status implication of the program for self and colleagues may also be reflected. A typical expression of concern at stage 2 about the innovation would be “How will using it affect me?”

The Management Stage (3) is by the focus of attention on the processes and tasks of using the innovation and the best use of information and resources. Issues related to efficiency, organising, managing, scheduling, and time demands are utmost. A typical expression of concern at stage 3 about the innovation would be “I seem to be spending all my time in paperwork.”

In the Impact/Consequences Stage (4), attention is focused on the impact of the innovation on associates in the individuals immediate sphere of influence. The focus is on the relevance of the innovation for associates; evaluation of associate outcomes, including performance and competencies; and the changes needed to increase associate outcomes. A typical expression of concern at stage 4 about the innovation would be “How is my use affecting my associates?”

The Collaboration Stage (5) focuses attention on coordination and cooperation with others regarding use of the innovation. A typical expression of concern at level 5 about the innovation would be “I am concerned about relating what I am doing with what other managers are doing.”

In the Refocusing Stage (6), the focus is one of exploration of the more universal benefits from the innovation, including the possibility of major changes or replacement with a more powerful alternative. The individual has definite ideas about alternatives to the proposed or existing form of the innovation. A typical expression of concern at level 6 about the innovation would be “I have some ideas about something that would work even better”

Thinking error #1: How to confront people who use “The Shoulds”

I find that when I am working with groups of people there are a number of common thinking errors that occur and go unchallenged in group life. I thought it might be useful to outline some of these errors in the next couple of blog posts and some of the strategies and tactics I have used to overcome them when dealing with groups.

The first thinking error that I often see is when individuals tell other people in a group what they should do. People use the shoulds as the only way or the only right way things can get done. Albert Ellis defines the shoulds as rules or beliefs that we hold about the way things must be.

Some of the shoulds focus on our own behaviour and performance, while other shoulds focus on the way we believe that other people ought to behave and how the world should be. The shoulds can make us angry because our life experiences do not always match them. For example, when you prepare a change management plan everyone should be engaged in the change effort. This should is just plain irrational and defies logic.

One of the key constraints to the shoulds is that it dramatically limits our mental capacity to be flexible and adaptive. Life is constantly challenging us to be flexible. When things don’t go the way we would like , we can make ourselves totally anxious by demanding things should be different or we can choose to think in a more flexible way.

Below I have outlined an example from a group I was recently working with where the shoulds occurred and what I did to confront the thinking error.

I was engaged by a manager to help his team be more productive. The manager informed me that his team should be more motivated by the project they are on because it is a major implementation of a new CRM system. He felt that the team was lucky to be working on such a high profile project and should be delivery results on time, if not before the agreed time.

I conducted a workshop with his team and before long the manager started with the shoulds. Some of the team members agreed with the manager and suggested they felt disappointed with their performance, other look for opportunities to blame the project management timeline or the lack of resources for not meeting the managers expectations. As the manager continued to rollout the shoulds, I intervened in the discussion and asked the manager if he was aware at how often he used the word should when he was discussing his team’s performance? He replied he was unsure.

I then inquired into his experiences in setting and managing performance expectation and with his permission I invited the team to provide the manager with feedback on his process for establishing and maintaining performance expectations.

At first the group was reluctant to provide feedback, but it soon became clear that the manager used the shoulds all of the time and he his use of the shoulds was actually a de-motivating factor for the team as they felt like their effort where never good enough and measured against a criteria that the manager was never good at articulating.

The manager was unaware of how often he used the shoulds and as a result realised that his thinking error was actually constraining his team performance. Based on the feedback from his team, he started providing the team with clearer performance expectations. Furthermore, he was able to start to work with his team to monitor the effectiveness of the performance over time, instead of telling them what it should be like.

Interpersonal Relationship: Trust

The concept of trust in interpersonal relationships is critical in effective communication.

How important is trust for change agents and consultants? In a study of 8,985 associates of Human Resources (HR) professionals in 908 businesses, Dave Ulrich found that the single most important competency in the management of change was ''Establishment of trust and credibility in relating to others." Trust was rated far ahead of all the rest of the competencies found in the study.

Every intervention undertaken as a change consultant will depend for its success on open and authentic communications, among the people the consultant helps to implement the change. If there is not a satisfactory level of trust among those people, there will not be open and authentic communications and the change effort will probably fail. Establishing more trusting relationships among people also makes more energy available for problem solving - energy that was previously being used to guard against other people who couldn't be trusted.

In interpersonal relationships, trust is built on a foundation of two ideas. In order to have trust in another person, you must have positive expectations about both that person's intentions and that person's competence. One without the other is not enough.

Trust in intentions is a positive expectation that the other person will act benevolently toward us. You are concerned not so much that other people will always go out of their way to do the most possible good, but that they will not intentionally do harm. You use many cues from past history to decide if the person in question has good, or at least not hostile, intentions. How have others that you perceive as like the other person to be trusted, acted in the past? You may look at the other person's integrity - whether or not they cheat on their income tax and brag about it or whether they are dishonest in some other way. We use cues from the environment to help us. When confronted by a person wearing a mask and pointing a gun, we don't normally assume they are collecting donations for the local orphans' home! We also use the history of the interpersonal relationship itself as a guide to whether or not the other person's intentions are good. But, even if all of the past history and all the' environmental cues indicate that the person's intentions are good, that still is not enough.

You must have positive expectations about the other person's competence as well. If someone says that they can turn lead into gold, you will not trust them - not because they do not have good intentions, but because they do not have the competence to turn lead into gold. This is a critical point. You must have positive expectations about the other's competence in order to trust them. We do not normally take a fine Swiss watch to an auto mechanic for a cleaning, because positive expectations about an auto mechanic's ability to clean a watch are lacking.

The reason that distinguishing between trust in intentions and trust in competence is so important, is that we seldom do distinguish between them. All too often, when feeling a sense of discomfort, a lack of trust, we do so without thinking about what the negative expectations are. Obviously, it makes a difference whether it is another's competence, or another's intentions that we do not trust. The difference is critical to decisions about improving the situation.

Everyone wants to improve the situation. Not trusting someone is a lot more trouble than trusting them. Trust reduces complexity. If you trust someone about something, you only have to deal with one outcome of the situation. But if you distrust them about that thing, the possibilities of what the outcome may be are endless. That person may do anything, and that can lead to a complex set of possible futures. So, normal human beings would rather trust than distrust. And, if one wants to trust, one has to do something about those situations in the work environment where there is less trust than is helpful for doing the job.

Interpersonal trust works two ways. By definition, it has to in order to be "interpersonal.' Therefore, not only must you trust the other person, but they must trust in return. Also, in order to be trusted, you must trust yourself. Although you seldom think about it consciously, when someone enters into a reciprocal trusting "relationship, they evaluate not only the other person's intentions and competence but their own as well. Even if unconsciously, you will evaluate competence to trust and be trusted. If you are unaware of incompetence to keep a bargain, the chances are excellent that you will not make the bargain in the first place. Likewise, if you do not intend to keep the bargain, you will normally not undertake it

The concept of trust, then, is made up of a general trust based on an ordered universe, and more specific kinds of trust, like interpersonal trust, based on intentions and competence. This way of thinking about trust will help everyone to trust more effectively, and not to distrust unnecessarily or for the wrong reasons. In work life, trust means that within work groups you can devote more energy to productive relationships, and reap the benefits of people working in harmony with one another.