Stretching the elastic

There's a neat metaphor for understanding the delicate relationship between a change maker (be they in a formal leadership position or leading from the middle) and the rest of the people in an organisation. Imagine you are connected to the rest of the organisation by a big elastic band.  As you move off in the direction of more ambitious, radical change, the elastic stretches.  The pull on the others may be just enough to get them moving and bring them with you.  You stay a bit ahead, to maintain momentum.

But if you go too far ahead, and they aren't ready to move so fast or such a distance, then the bounce goes out of the elastic, the tension rises and -ping- it snaps.

As a result, there's nothing holding you back!

But, unfortunately, there's no-one moving in your direction any more, either.  And, if you look back now, you'll see that you're alone.

This article I wrote for Croner helps you check that you're involving people properly.  They're happy for me to include the original here, as long as I say this:

"This report was published as part of Croner's Environmental Policy and Procedures, a resource designed to guide organisations through setting up an effective environmental management system.  For more information on this and other products published by Croner, go to www.croner.co.uk or telephone 020 8547 3333."

Which I'm happy to do.

IEMA Conference 2009

I was delighted to be asked to run a skills-based session for IEMA's 2009 conference (London, September 22nd), because it's a chance to help environmental specialists get better at the soft stuff.  I'm going to be sharing three different skills which change agents really need if they want to influence other people, and I'll blog about how it went when it's done. The skills are - developing rapport, asking facilitative questions, and understanding six key sources of influence.

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Later addition:

The handouts from this session are available here, and the 'how it went' entry is here.

IEMA Change Management Workshop

This Autumn's IEMA workshop, Change Management for Sustainable Development, will take place in Leeds in November.  As you'd expect, the contents have evolved over the four years since I first ran one.  But the approach is still one of making selected bits of change theory as accessible as possible to people, and giving them time to work on their own particular situation during the workshop. And everyone still gets a free copy of the workbook, so they can carry on making their own notes and using plenty more exercises and frameworks at their own pace.  They can also use these exercises with colleagues and in teams, to help get insights from a broad range of perspectives, and to build a coalition of change agents.

OD for SD

I love it when I can cross-fertilise.  When I can bring a gem of insightful knowledge from my work on organisational change, learning and development and pass it on to my passionate, committed and somewhat geeky colleagues in the world of environmental management, policy and general eco-knowledge. This article about OD - organisational development - explores how some different practitioners have drawn on ideas about change to help them push the environmental boundaries.

Raw data - consultants in business sustainability - OCAs only

"Organisational leader or part of a wider change movement? How sustainable development change agents see themselves", Penny Walker, EABIS Colloquium 2008.

Raw data used in this paper is available in this document. This page replaces the link given in the paper (http://www.penny-walker.co.uk/sd_change_agents_survey.html) which is no longer active.