Broad-based organisational change is a factor of life in many organisations today, as they adapt to the demands of the 21st Century world of business. As the rate of change grows increasingly faster, the importance of incorporating agility into everyday work life has never been greater.
Organisational capability to effectively deal with such an environment requires change-agile leaders and employees at all levels, throughout the business. Metaco’s Change-Agility Immersion workshop is an effective way to galvanise this capability.
Defining Change Agility
From an organisational perspective, change-agility is defined as the ability to quickly and effectively focus on new challenges as they present themselves, rapidly implement and integrate new learning or practices, or even change direction resourcefully within a short space of time. Organizations that continually improve their change-agility enhance the likelihood that their strategies will be fully implemented and achieve their expected benefits and outcomes.
On a personal level change-agility refers to an individual’s ability to anticipate upcoming change or presenting challenges and adapt swiftly to the requirements of the situation . It represents a competency shift from only changing when required to, to the enabling of an environment that fosters personal agility.
Most of the first workshop content is focused on enabling personal change-agility competencies and will apply across all levels of employee. A Leadership version of the standard workshop also includes a component to assist leaders to support their teams in developing their own change-ability tactics, as well as relevant skills to engage with their broader stakeholder environment.
The initial two-day workshop is designed to explore, and experience the various factors related to change-agility. These concepts include resilience, growth mindsets, flexibility, emotional intelligence, cognitive biases, change adaptability, responsiveness, mindfulness and capability for uncertainty.
This will create opportunities for participants to:
• Identify and create their own personalised strategies for dealing with change and setbacks (people process differently);
• Practice their skills to develop these; and
• Develop longer-term action plans to integrate their chosen strategies into their everyday lives
A further one-day follow-up workshop one month later encourages ongoing top-of-mind thinking and accountability for practice, thereby building sustainability. We assess the implementation and effectiveness of personal action plans that have been put in place and identify any further support that might be required.
Developing a Culture of Change-Agility
It is anticipated that shifts in the way that changes and setbacks are managed will already be noticeable at the point at which 20% of your employees have participated in the workshops. Once approximately 60% of employees have participated in the workshops, a natural tipping point will occur and an empowered approach to ongoing change and frequent setbacks at all levels will be systemically visible in the culture.
As the diagram below demonstrates, there will the ‘laggards’ representing approximately 20% of employees. A few employees will continue to actively resist the new culture, however as change-agility becomes embedded in ‘the way we do things here’, these employees will come under increasing pressure to adapt, or may choose to leave the company if they cannot.