Putting the I into Change

This book is about change. Personal change and organisational change, and, more importantly, how, we as individuals, can go about understanding, managing, coping and living with and, just possibly, loving the change were in.

My focus is on the person rather than the organisation and how we see change, our options and what we can do about it to come to terms with, and accept, it (and how to make our journey more of a success and less painful).

In my experience, most books on change look at the meaning and implication of changing for the organisation as a whole and hence how to manage that organisational change from a systems perspective. I find one of the problems with most change models is that they tell what needs to change rather than how you need to implement that change! Another problem, for me, is that the individual, their needs, drivers and values are almost totally ignored. Change happens around them and not with them as a contributor to that change.

However, again in my opinion, its always people who change!, and its only once enough people within that organisations culture sphere have changed that an organisations can, and will, change.

According to one of the leading thinkers on change management – John Kotter, in his book Leading Change, "The central issue [of leadership] is never strategy, structure, culture, or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behaviour of people." George Kelly is reported to say that you can change anything, but you must first change yourself. Also J P Garnier, when head of GlaxoSmithKline, reputedly said that "getting people to change – one by – one is the only way to change organisations. After all every change is personal."

The main focus of this book, therefore, is on the individual and how they see, act, react and adapt to change. In many ways this book is about "Whats In It For Me" or "WIIFM". In my mind this is one of the strongest, if not strongest change drivers (or should that be change blockers!).