We know change is hard, but let’s stay positive about it. Let’s think about why people and organisations succeed at change, and how you can succeed at it.

There are 3 things you need to know about change if you want to become much more successful at it.

First, change has its own success pattern. This is like a recipe – if you follow the recipe you are much more likely to be successful. Sadly, most people don’t even know what the success pattern looks like; which is telling, given how much change we need to cope with.

Second, you need fitness for change if you want to succeed.  The concept of fitness has two meanings. One meaning relates to adapting to the changing environment – like survival of the fittest. When the environment changes, as it has done with COVID, people and organisations that can adapt quickly are more likely to survive than those who struggle to adapt. The other meaning of fitness relates to well-being, being energetic, and having power. Someone who is super fit is full of energy and power and is able to achieve things that people with less fitness cannot achieve. So, people with lots of change fitness have more power to change things in their environment – to shape the environment to suit their needs.

Third, you need change readiness. Simply being fit doesn’t mean you are also ready. You might be fit enough to run a marathon, but that doesn’t mean you are ready to run one tomorrow. You need to get ready for change – organisationally ready, and that involves doing some specific things.

What we have been thinking about is a positive, strengths-based approach to change; both personal and organisational change. If you approach it in the right way, you are much more likely to succeed. If you want help with this, reach out to us.

Our approach is shown in the diagram below.