Change Services

Working Better Together in Teams

A Profile

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Our Change Support Services...

Need a helping hand to handle change?

As our name suggests, The Change Forum's business is about the business of change – addressing it, managing it, designing processes for it... guiding, facilitating and leading people through change... We provide a range of skilled change management support activities in-house, to suit your specific work setting, cultural context and change challenges.

Whether it’s helping an executive team plan it, setting up a change team to get started on it, preparing people for it, working out ways to manage resistance to it or building change leadership capability to manage it better – when it comes to change, most organisations can use a hand with it.

Whatever shape your change takes – a new work design, a new structure, a new piece of technology, new directions and programs, merging work units, or making workplace improvements – at some stage, people need support to help them do their change-work well, even if you plan to handle implementation mostly by yourself.

Learning for Change...

Learning is at the heart of successful change. Our change-work capitalises on the close connection between change, leadership, and learning - and building the conversational, relational and team-working capabilities to support them.

Whatever direction your change takes, 'learning how to change' is critical to successful implementation. No change happens without a change in thinking. People need new tools, new concepts and new ideas to help them change.

With over 20 year’s change management experience, we have proven capabilities for both project managing "the big picture", facilitating "at the workface" and dealing with the practicalities to "make it happen". As long-standing practitioners and exponents of ‘learning organisations’, our change approach is based firmly on learning organisation values, concepts and principles. The 5 Learning Disciplines first popularised by Peter Senge – Shared Vision, Mental Models, Personal Mastery, Team Learning and Systems Thinking – inform all of our workplace change and improvement programs

Our Change Support Services...

Our change services cover areas like change facilitation, strategic visioning, redesigning teams and work processes, cultural revitalisation, mapping change plans and processes, transferring change leadership skills to your people and conducting key action-learning workshops at crucial, crunch-points in your process. Here’s a few things organisations frequently ask us to do to help out with their workplace change and improvement processes (follow the links for more information)...

	Plan and Design Change Processes: Whether it’s with executive teams, projects groups, change teams or intact work units, we can help you scope change, develop specifications, design processes and jointly plan strategies and learning programs to support your change initiative. We facilitate a range of different strategic change and action-planning workshops to help you systematically think through all the steps in your change process...
	Preparing People for Change: The way people personally respond is critical in determining how much, how well or even whether, they’ll change. Individuals often feel overwhelmed or powerless facing major change over which they feel they have little or no control. **Preparing People for Change and Preparing Yourself for Change are awareness-raising sessions for leaders and staff respectively that focus on the personal side of change – providing skills and support to help people understand the dynamics of change, engage with it more constructively and increase their level of personal 'change-ability'**...
	Building Change Leadership Capacity: Change leaders are instrumental in setting the tone for, leading and modelling change. The capacity to initiate, lead and sustain change through learning is a major foundation for creating better workplaces. We run a popular 2-day program on *Learning to Lead Change* to equip change leaders with the tools to manage change for themselves...
	Change Communication Plans: Most change suffers ‘under-communication’. Every change effort needs an ‘over-communication’ plan. Behind a good change communication plan is a will to get out there and really talk with people, not at them. We help teams plan for the crucial communication events, engagement strategies and consultation issues around their change...
	Shaping a Shared Vision: Shared vision plays a pivotal role in successful change processes. The natural tendency is to resist or ignore change until someone helps us see the destination clearly and the significance of being there. Shared vision educates, awareness-raises, inspires and gets buy-in. Most change efforts pay lip service to having a shared vision but gloss over the ‘shared’ bit. But you can’t do it alone. Unless people sign on to your vision - your change won’t attract ‘take-up’ in the long term. We facilitate various vision-setting interventions for different levels – mixed cross-organisation sections, senior management teams, individual work units or stakeholder groups...
	Talking about Change: Change happens first and foremost through conversations. Behind all good workplace change and improvement programs is the need to learn how to have better conversations – to be able to raise issues/problems and talk about them openly. Through change conversations we shape a shared vision, reduce resistance, gain commitment, share ideas, tackle problems and talk over strategies, goals and actions. We run a *one-day intensive coaching clinic on Change Conversations* to get your change-talk up to speed**...
	Working with Change Teams: Change teams are the main vehicle to plan and action change. They’re the link between designing a change and implementing it. Making sure they have the right knowledge, tools and know-how is one of the keys to change success. We help set up workplace change and improvement teams, get them started, then provide a series of learning modules to support them in their change work...
	Managing Change Resistance: In our change consulting work, one key concern always seems to be at the forefront of people’s minds: “What do we do with the resistors?” Sometimes, this almost eclipses their ability to focus constructively and systemically on the change itself. While resistance is natural, left unchecked for a prolonged period it can spread and infect others and become a big block to progress. We conduct a *1-day clinic on Engaging with Change Resistance* for change leaders, who need to learn how handle these difficult change moments better**…

In addition to our more structured change support services, we can also write you a customised change guide or toolkit and help you facilitate ‘hard-to-handle’ crunch-points – those difficult bits in the change process it’s crucial to get right before you can go further.

Our Change Experience...

We’ve been helping senior executives, managers, facilitators and workteams navigate their way through change for over 20 years.

Bill Cropper, our principal consultant, has an impressive track record undertaking strategic change in different organisation settings and cultural contexts and a wealth of experience designing, facilitating and implementing innovative workplace improvement processes on both small and large scale projects, where organisational learning, leadership and change management are the keys to success.

Here’s just a few of the organisations we’ve given a helping hand to handle change:

	NSW & Queensland Departments of Health
	Department of Education, Science & Training
	Metropolitan Construction Engineering (Syd)
	Hervey Bay City Council
	Department of Families - Queensland
	NSW Office of State Revenue
	NSW Department of Corrective Services
	Disability Services Queensland

Arrange for a Quote...

Our contribution to your change effort can be delivered in a number of ways. From a multi-faceted major change project with a combination of strategic interventions to delivery of structured 1-day change support programs like “Engaging with Change Resistance” or “Preparing People for Change”, 2-day programs such as “Learning to Lead Change” or perhaps one-on-one coaching for leaders wanting individual help to work through particular aspects of implementing change

Our programs are inclusive of comprehensive change guides or toolkits, designed to support ongoing learning and back-at-work change implementation activities following the facilitated learning event and pricing varies according to the nature of our assistance, the extent of the project, location and numbers of people involved, content customisation and whether you look after things like venue, equipment-hire and catering, or we do.

The ability to manage change and make it happen rapidly and smoothly is one of the keys to organisational vitality, renewal and success... So if you need a hand handling change, get in touch with us now to discuss your change challenges...