Also, I invite you to view my blog and posts at http://mrsdbarron.typepad.com/slinginstones. My website: http://www.dorothybarron.com .

Thanks,

Mrs. Dorothy Barron, Author

Thank you for this post.

I agree completely that there is a lot of talk about change but also that in many instances that the talk is not transforming into actions – though the tide may well be turning a tad in the UK on that front.

From my personal experience, resistance to change is a natural and commonplace phenomenon which can typically only be overcome when those involved understand, at an emotional/intangible level, that change is a necessity.

In support of that, research (I can’t remember from where) highlighted that new CEO’s recruited from outside a company typically have a pretty short shelf-life unless they are brought in in response to a crisis. Absent that, the internal currents typically prove too difficult to overcome. There is simply not the appetite to accept the change the new CEO seeks to introduce.

John Kotter, of Harvard Business School, has also written expansively on this subject having found that 70% of change efforts fail. More pertinently, having originally focussed on the “eight steps of successful change”, his latest work “a sense of urgency” singles out a “true sense of urgency” as absolutely critical. Note not fire fighting urgency, or “false urgency” cloaking complacency, but instead “a positive and focussed force…altertness, initiative and speed”.

So, a la Kotter, and as with scenario planning, strategic reviews etc, I wonder if the real challenge is not engaging in discussions on a theoretical basis, or approaching issues incrementally, but instead somehow getting lawyers to look outside of their current “view of the world” and engage in alternative outcomes on an emotional level. As for sure, it is only when that consideration moves from the “interesting but on with the day job” complacencey to that real level of personal involvement that real change has a hope.

As for how you do that, and alongside your other proposals, I wonder if the answer is in scenario planning – not the 1 day course type but the detailed Shell-esque model over a number of months based on (1) the identification of real uncontrollable unknowns (as opposed to uncertainties that everyone knows is coming e.g. regulatory reform) (2) the construction of differing outcomes with one reflecting the “business as normal” view (to promote real engagement by participants) and then others, by dint of the process, taking those same participants into credible “new worlds” for which they will then (hopefully!) be willing to plan.

Regards

James