Target Audience: Leaders of teams, business units, organizational functions, or those with enterprise-wide leadership responsibility

Call to Learn: Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, wrote that change is the only constant in life. In The Prince, Machiavelli wrote "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." John Kotter, the best-known and most widely published change management researcher, routinely opens his seminars with "The rate of change is not going to slow down anytime soon. If anything, competition in most industries will probably speed up even more in the next few decades." Yet, despite centuries of caution and the production of thousands of books on the topic of business change, change management, and change leadership, the evidence clearly indicates that a super-majority of change initiatives fail to achieve even a fraction of their potential. Why? Experts like John Kotter (HBS) and Dave Pottruck (Wharton) point to breakdowns in managing the human side of change. Specifically, they suggest that when people perceive themselves as simply the powerless victims of a change initiative, without any mechanism for inquiry, discourse, or feedback, the initiative will not only fail to gain support, but that it will be vigorously opposed.

Therefore, business leaders have a choice to make. A, proceed with the status quo and hope that traditional change management techniques will produce some modicum of impact. Or, B, find a way to leverage the potential of digital communication platforms and engage employees in dialogue to significantly improve and accelerate: understanding of the change (i.e., Why change? Why now? Why me?), commitment to the change (i.e., WIIFM), preferred ways to implement the change (i.e., crowd-sourcing suggestions and best practices), obstacle identification (i.e., crowd-sourcing barriers to change), and broad adoption of the new and better ways of doing business (i.e., the reason for change in the first place). 

This three-week course is designed to help leaders at any organizational level learn why and how to effectively execute choice B.