What’s the problem we address?

The problem we address is disengagement in the workplace and resistance to change caused by deficits in personal change fitness and organisational change readiness.

Disengagement and resistance produce decreased productivity, increased costs, and increased risk. These can be avoided or minimised by building change strengths.

Building capacity

We’re not used to thinking about change strengths. We’re used to deciding to change, making a plan, and doing some training. Or maybe not even doing that.

But we can improve our capacity at something really fundamental – our personal ability to succeed at change without being overly dependent on others to keep us going. That’s called ‘personal change fitness’. And we can also improve in something else – the ways organisations orchestrate and harmonise their change strengths to enhance their readiness to succeed. That is called ‘organisational change readiness’.

When we build both of these into the way organisations and individuals approach change, we get better outcomes, lower risk, less disruption, and decreased costs.

How can The Change Gym help?

We have the know-how to help you deliver better change outcomes by assessing and enhancing your change fitness and change readiness. We do this for individuals and companies. And we train coaches in how to do it.

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Mistrust, resistance, and disengagement

It seems that we often get far less than we pay for. We prepare for change and pay the price, but the outcomes are often worse than expected. They cost more and take longer to achieve than we planned. Instead of a smooth road to success, we encounter mistrust, resistance, and disengagement from workers who don’t support the change. We even end up with more disruption, having to replace employees who leave because of the change. And on top of all this, there’s a real risk that change could do long-term damage to the organisation’s culture.

Personal change

Change presents similar problems in our personal lives. We have goals and ambitions, but it’s hard to succeed and many people just lose hope and give up. But we can’t succeed if we won’t get uncomfortable, step outside our comfort zone, deal with uncertainty and complexity, and grow. Success is not easily won. If we give up too soon, we lose.

The real problem

So, what is the real problem here? Is the problem that there’s too much change? Hey, this is the 21st century – change isn’t going anywhere. No, the problem is with us – as individuals and as organisations. We’re just not that good at handling change.

Most people don’t like change that much – and the reason why might surprise you. It’s because they lack change fitness. Just think about that for a moment. Say you were physically unfit. Would you be resistant and disengaged if you were forced to carry a heavy load up a steep hill? If you’re anything like me, you’d be whinging and complaining about it – not a ‘team player’. It’s the same with change. We can force people into change, but if they lack the fitness for it, they will resist and complain. No amount of pep talks will change that.

And organisations don’t fare any better. According to a recent Optus study, three quarters of Australian businesses are not ready for change. Not really all that surprising when organisations consist of people – many of whom don’t handle change very well.

Low change readiness might not be a problem if change happened slowly. But we all know it doesn’t. Low change readiness adds to the costs of change, compromises outcomes, and adds to risk. It isn’t something to be proud of.

Our goal

The Change Gym’s goal is to help individuals and businesses solve this readiness and capacity problem. We’re not just having a stab in the dark about this – we are specialists in change fitness and change readiness. If you’re interested, you can read about that here.

So, how do we work? We start by taking a snapshot of where you are right now in terms of your change fitness and change readiness. In other words, we do an assessment. For organisations, we assess 3 things – your Capacity to succeed at change (group change fitness), your Communications and their impact on change readiness, and the Competency of your change leaders/managers.

The first benefit of an assessment is to make better, more informed decisions. Assessments produce data, and this data can help you decide how to proceed.

The second benefit is that if you don’t know what’s wrong, you don’t know what to fix. In other words, knowing your weakness is the first step in fixing it.

The third benefit comes from knowing your strengths. Knowing what you’re good at helps you to be more strategic in how you approach change.

Better decisions, fewer weaknesses, and strategically using your strengths leads to better outcomes. Every time.

Our goal is to get you out of the dark in terms of change readiness and fitness and to put you in a better position to win. And isn’t that what you want too?

So, take a look around this website. Read, learn, and talk to us. It’s time to get ready for change.