In this week’s pod, we welcomed Gary Lloyd to discuss how to cultivate lasting change in organisations.
Gary has been leading change for the last 25 years as an executive and a consultant. His roles have ranged from creating retail banking processing centres to creating an electronic derivatives exchange in Tokyo.
Alongside his change leadership work, for the last ten years, he has been an executive coach and a mentor to students and alumni from Warwick Business School. He is also a steering committee member for the school's mentoring programme, which has now helped over 1,000 executives and entrepreneurs.
Gary's core philosophy is that the world of work is an ecosystem and not a machine. To make lasting change, therefore, we need to think and act like gardeners, not mechanics. Success depends on recognising and embracing unpredictability, not pretending it doesn't exist or trying to control it.
He is the author of two books:
Gardeners Not Mechanics: How to cultivate change at work.
Business Leadership for IT Projects.
He is also the author of numerous articles in professional journals.
The main topics we discussed on the podcast were as follows:
Change management projects are about delivering value and developing relationships with stakeholders
Statistically, many project managers don’t actually have the chance to work on many projects due to their durations
There seems to be a tendency to separate the project management and change management communities. They should be the same function
Many Project Management qualifications do not put enough emphasis on relationships. Recruiters often focus on the qualifications
Machines are complicated, eco-systems are complex
Anything that involves people becomes complex. Humans are unpredictable
Projects that have lasting value are often delivered incrementally rather than big bang
Many IT project can be delivered in multiple “chunks” of lasting value
How can we test the key business case assumptions as quickly and cheaply as possible?
People have been using Kotter’s theory for over 30 years and it is too top down and machine like
“Getting buy-in" is an outdated phrase. It implies the solution has already been developed and being forced upon people rather than a collaborative approach
Businesses need to understand the ecosystem of a change rather than trying to shoehorn it into existing processes
When joining a change project, hunt down the moaners, they often have a good point!
Try to draw the project ecosystem and update as you go along
“If you approach a negotiation thinking the other guy thinks like you, you are wrong. That's not empathy, that's a projection” Chris Voss – ex FBI Lead Hostage Negotiator
Here are links to a some of the concepts we discussed:
Gardeners Not Mechanics: How to cultivate change at work: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gardeners-Not-Mechanics-cultivate-change/dp/B08S2ZXSWM/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Gardeners Not Mechanics Blog: https://www.gardenersnotmechanics.com/
Chris Voss Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26156469-never-split-the-difference
Tune in next week when we’re re-joined by Steve Wake.
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