Many of us in the ODA community are involved in various facets of organisational change. For our July event, Paul Lefebvre, Head of People and Culture for the Faculty of Medicine Dentistry and Health Sciences at the University of Melbourne, gave us an opportunity to reflect on our experiences and answer the question: “Are we implementing or installing change?”
As a group, we identified the best and worst of change from our experience. The key themes that emerged and were followed throughout the session were focusing on the people side of change and keeping connected to purpose.
Paul gave us insight into his experience of change at numerous organisations and guided us through the Accelerated Implementation Management (AIM) methodology. We used AIM to address the question of whether we are implementing and installing change by considering key success metrics. Success in change installation can be measured by time, budget and technical objectives. Change implementation, in addition, considers business objectives and people objectives. We reflected that installation aligned with our worst of change experiences, and implementation aligned with our best of change experiences.
Paul also talked about the importance of the history of change. In organisations that have a challenging history of change, the ‘ghosts of changes past’ may impact the success of future changes. Understanding this history can help you to support and navigate people through upcoming change.
It was a very engaging and informative session that used the AIM methodology to investigate the challenges of change and consider how we can work to successfully implement change.