How can you learn from past change initiatives?

Collecting feedback and data is something you should also do for the change at hand, before it's a reality. Get the feedback of the expectations that people have going into the change. That way it's so much more easy to evaluate the success of the outcome in the end in terms of employee satisfaction or dismay. Because then you have tangible data that supports their evaluation at the end. And you may be more able to "control" that evaluation in the end meeting it with actions and communication along the way. Or be ok with a low satisfaction since you know what expectations there were and that they were never in scope.

Data, data, data. I've seen projects get shut down or deprioritized with little to no data. Always ensure you have a way to capture data, and that it is accurate.

A sign of leadership insanity is repeating the same failed change implementation approach and expecting employee change adoption. The reality is another missed opportunity, wasted time and resources that could have been put to better use, no sustainable change & no return on investment. Worse, you have allowed your competition to get ahead. All too often, change professionals discard hard-won lessons and recycle ineffective approaches. I use a change history assessment© to analyse the outcomes of previous change programmes within an organisation. It provides organisational insights that can increase the likelihood of successful implementation through the analysis of lessons learned, mitigating previous weaknesses & enhancing future success.

Change Management is an art to convince your team about the need to adapt to a new environment. In my learnings, the following helps; - Highlighting the benefits - Engaging with your team and invite inputs - Describe the situation and the steps required to overcome that - Create mini groups to bounce back ideas - Encourage team to do SWOT analysis and present their findings What I have learnt is that by engaging your team in decision making and highlighting the intended improvements works wonders. I managed to successfully roll out a new CRM purely on the basis of having an open communication, engaging my team on every step of the way, allowing them to brainstorm, do a comparative analysis and sharing the financial gains for the business.

It’s important to gather the history of prior change within an organisation and/or team, before embarking on new change - especially if you are a new change practitioner to an organisation. You can gather this information through: - Stakeholder interviews - Reviewing previous work and retrospectives - Pulse survey feedback - Yor HR BP is also a good avenue for fact finding / checking I would also ask questions on, if change in the past has brought up any psychosocial hazards that need to be considered, to lessen the likelihood of them coming up again. It is important to consider your finding in context though, as not all learnings will apply.