Breakaway Planning - 8 big questions to guide organizational change_2
17 August 2012
The subtitle of this book: “8 big questions to guide organizational change” sums it up fairly accurately.
The subtitle of this book: “8 big questions to guide organizational change” sums it up fairly accurately. Written as a training manual for teams about to embark on a large-scale organisational change programme, the author, Paul Levesque, assumes that senior managers tend to delegate the task of implementing organisational change to internal change agents. The book therefore aims to provide a step-by-step guide for these change agents on how to mobilise the entire organisation.
The eight main chapters of the book cover topics such as communication - both internally as well as with customers - overcoming obstacles, measuring progress, and celebrating successes. Each of the main chapters contains a planning exercise in relation to each of the eight “big questions”. These how-to guides will help change agents run workshops aimed at generating ideas, challenging people’s assumptions, and planning how to implement the various stages of the organisational change. The exercises are not in themselves surprising or particularly innovative, but they are well-written, jargon free, and given in sufficient detail for even fairly novice change agents to run. Overall, the book is written in an easy-going, almost chatty style. The introduction is full of very short (or even one-word) sentences, everyday slang and bang-up-to-date metaphors that readers will either find accessible and enjoyable or immensely irritating. For example, it begins: “It’s a given: Planning is one big pain in the neck. A real drag. Right?” However, the tone of the book does become a little less flippant in later chapters. While the book aspires to be read by anyone aiming to “reduce costs, enhance quality, increase customer satisfaction, maximise market share, improve safety, or something else”, the book is basically most suited to novice change agents. You might be a fairly experienced line manager, but lacking in experience of organisational change. Or you might be a management consultant in your first job. Someone who is undertaking organisational change for the first time could do worse than to start here. Nothing in the book is cutting edge, so seasoned practitioners will probably not learn anything new, although I did like the book because it lays out the basic process of planning for organisational change in a very readable fashion. Dr Rob Yeung Nicholson McBride Business Psychologists
The eight main chapters of the book cover topics such as communication - both internally as well as with customers - overcoming obstacles, measuring progress, and celebrating successes. Each of the main chapters contains a planning exercise in relation to each of the eight “big questions”. These how-to guides will help change agents run workshops aimed at generating ideas, challenging people’s assumptions, and planning how to implement the various stages of the organisational change. The exercises are not in themselves surprising or particularly innovative, but they are well-written, jargon free, and given in sufficient detail for even fairly novice change agents to run. Overall, the book is written in an easy-going, almost chatty style. The introduction is full of very short (or even one-word) sentences, everyday slang and bang-up-to-date metaphors that readers will either find accessible and enjoyable or immensely irritating. For example, it begins: “It’s a given: Planning is one big pain in the neck. A real drag. Right?” However, the tone of the book does become a little less flippant in later chapters. While the book aspires to be read by anyone aiming to “reduce costs, enhance quality, increase customer satisfaction, maximise market share, improve safety, or something else”, the book is basically most suited to novice change agents. You might be a fairly experienced line manager, but lacking in experience of organisational change. Or you might be a management consultant in your first job. Someone who is undertaking organisational change for the first time could do worse than to start here. Nothing in the book is cutting edge, so seasoned practitioners will probably not learn anything new, although I did like the book because it lays out the basic process of planning for organisational change in a very readable fashion. Dr Rob Yeung Nicholson McBride Business Psychologists
