Training Yourself as a Change Agent

 Uncategorized  No Responses »
Sep 282010
 

From time to time, people ask me for a reading list or how to get education as an organizational change practitioner or consultant.

For an extended path, here are some starting points.

Reading

Classics

  • Managing at the Speed of Change (Daryl Conner)
  • Leading Change (John Kotter)
  • Transitions (William Bridges)
  • Reframing Organizations (Bolman and Deal)
  • Flawless Consulting (Peter Block)
  • The Fifth Discipline (Peter Senge)
  • Diffusion of Innovations (Everett Rogers) [A Must Read]

Organizational Change

  • The Seven C’s of Consulting (Mick Cope)
  • The Dance of Change (Senge)
  • Getting Your Organization to Change (Dennis Jaffe & Cynthia Scott)
  • Leading Corporate Transformation (Robert Miles)
  • Viral Change (Leandro Herrero)

How People Change

  • Changing minds (Howard Gardner)
  • Real-time Strategic Change (Robert Jacobs)
  • Influence (Robert Cialdini)
  • Influencers (Kerry Patterson, et al.)
  • Covert Processes in Organizations (Robert Marsh)

Training

  • National Training Laboratories, one of the oldest and most venerable institutions in the organizational development world.
  • ProSci - I haven’t tried it but a number of people in the Cisco change community like it.

Graduate Education

And if you want to take it beyond training yourself, you can get an MA or PhD here:
Saybrook University, Organizational Systems program

Posted by Doug Walton, PhD at 12:33 pm  

Obama’s Change Consultants

 Organizational Change  No Responses »
Sep 032010
 

Last year there was an article in Time about how the Obama administration was consulting experts in the science of influence to devise campaign strategies. The work of Robert Cialdini was mentioned, and I’ve since read his book Influence and thought it was excellent.

Additionally, the article said

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. “It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it,” Moffo tells TIME. “These guys really know what makes people tick.”

I’ve got the rest of those on my reading list.

Posted by Doug Walton, PhD at 10:35 pm  
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