3.1 INTRODUCTION TO PART 3

In this final Part, we get to apply the essence of NLP, established in Part 2, to the behavioural competencies required for effective delivery, established in our review of the role of BAs in Part 1. In my experience, NLP is the most effective toolset for effecting personal change and developing soft skills. Study and practice of these tools and techniques, ideally with coaching and practical training support, will help you to become even more agile in your behaviours, approach and mindset.

The soft skills described in the following sections are not only very important to BAs, but are transferable to other domains including most aspects of your personal life. Of the top 14 most searched topics in People Alchemy for Managers,¹ 13 are included in this set.

Change management is on that list, and one of the top three headline management issues for leaders in a 2014 BCS survey on IT trends² was business transformation and organisational change. As I was coaching on transformational change while drafting this book, and it was apparent that a lack of awareness of breadth and depth in change management contributes to high failure rates, I have included a large section on transformational change to give an overview of successful behaviours and tools (see Section 3.18).

It may have come as a surprise to many while reading Section 2.6, that our conscious mind is not actually in charge of what we do. I think of it as the user interface to the complex biological computer that sits behind. I wasted many years trying to intellectualise myself into changing. What we will be changing with the tools and techniques in this Part are behaviours/meta-programs long embedded in the subconscious mind. Many of us working as coaches and counsellors spend a large proportion of our time and effort distracting and disengaging the conscious mind in order to get direct access to the subconscious where we can facilitate change. Hence, when practising exercises like these, disengage your brain – do not think, just do!

3.2 ADOPTING AN ATTITUDE OF CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Continuous professional development was specifically mentioned in several competency frameworks for BAs reviewed in Section 1.4.2. In this section we will explore what that means, over and above attending talks and seminars.

In Part 1 I mapped the behavioural competencies for effective BAs onto the EI framework. In subsequent sections, I will demonstrate that NLP can be used to develop all aspects of EI, including those supporting effective business analysis.

3.2.1 Increase your emotional intelligence

Around 1995, while completing an executive MBA, I came across a newly published book on EI.⁴ I read the book with great interest and, like Victor Serebriakoff and probably most of the millions of others who read this bestseller, I became convinced that EI was the best indicator of future levels of success in the real world. This has been borne out by many studies, including the lifetime tracking of America’s most intelligent kids through school and their careers. That study concluded that, above the modest intelligence equivalent to a good college degree, your career progression is strongly dependent on your EQ rather than your IQ. This is probably true of your life satisfaction too.

In Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book, Outliers: The Story of Success,⁵ he illustrated quite convincingly that success in any sphere is mostly down to EQ and structured practice. Indeed, it was this book which established the ‘10,000 hours rule’ of experience and structured practice required to achieve mastery in any discipline (see Figure 3.1). Do you think this is true for business analysis?

Gladwell illustrates this theory with a story about Christopher Langan, assessed as the world’s most intelligent person with an estimated IQ of 200, the maximum on standard scales. (For comparison, Einstein had an IQ of ‘only’ 150.) Yet he could not complete his college studies, hold down a job or a relationship. Gladwell parallels this with the story of Oppenheimer, the scientist put in charge of perhaps the biggest and most complex of mega-projects, the Manhattan project to develop the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was no saint, and was caught poisoning his professor and thus putting him in hospital. Yet he was able to talk his way out of any situation and influence those around him with great success (see Figure 3.2).

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Figure 3.1 Many hours of experience and structured practice are necessary to develop behavioural competencies

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Figure 3.2 EQ and IQ are orthogonal

Gladwell concluded that practical intelligence includes ‘knowing what to say, to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect. It is procedural.’ Do you think that ability would be useful to you and those around you?

The last clause, ‘It is procedural’, is particularly significant. When I finished reading that first book on EI I was convinced of my need for development in this area. Unfortunately, as I turned the last page, I realised that the author was merely noting its impact, and had no practical method of improving it. In fact, the general consensus at the time was, like IQ, EQ was more or less fixed. Fortunately, they were wrong, at least about EQ.

In this book I outline a very effective approach of developing all the areas of the EI framework. The following sections illustrate techniques for developing your self-awareness, managing your emotional state, helping you to be more aware of what is going on around you including other people’s drivers and levers, and how to influence others through your use of language, all of which will help you to be a more effective BA. These aspects are mapped out in Figure 3.3.

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Figure 3.3 Skills for knowing and managing self and others

Of course, as we set out, we need to do this in an agile way, cycling through capability levels and embedding new behaviours. As described in Section 1.4, we can even base-line EQ using established methods and demonstrate quantifiable improvements (see Figure 3.4).

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Figure 3.4 Emotional intelligence can be improved through a structured approach

3.2.2 ‘Sharpen your tools’

In Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,⁶ his last habit was what he refers to as ‘sharpening the saw’. I put it as my first behaviour because if we cannot motivate ourselves towards personal improvement then the rest of the book is wasted reading. I relate it by paraphrasing his story:

In my professional life, I often see people who are too busy with the day job to invest in making the day job easier, that is, by developing themselves in parallel through new skills and tools. What proportion of your time do you spend ‘sharpening your tools’?

In my work with the professional bodies, we spent a lot of voluntary effort bringing in a wide range of quality presenters to pass on their substantial experience, but statistics across professional bodies show that engagement with members is consistently below 10 per cent. So, some 90 per cent are always too busy sawing the tree. Bearing in mind that membership of professional bodies is low in the first place where it is not a de facto standard, this means that only a small percentage are actively seeking ongoing development. But do not worry, you picked up the book and so are in the few who want to sharpen the saw. NLP is sometimes called the search for ‘the difference that makes the difference’, so here is the opportunity to really sharpen your saw!

3.2.3 You are the project

Having spent so much time in change management, I often think of myself as a change management project. As with many change management projects, it is a journey rather than a destination, with many ‘meta-states’ along the way where we pause to consolidate improvements, having achieved our outcomes for the current phase.

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Figure 3.5 The DIY change project

The more naive recruitment agencies ask for BAs who have worked on exactly the same type of project in exactly the same sector, using the same solution vendor, and so on. In NLP we refer to the sameness / difference preference meta-program. People preferring sameness make good operational managers but are not so good at facilitating change. People sometimes say they have 10 years’ experience, but in reality they may have been doing more or less the same thing for 10 years and learned little since their first year.

To develop your potential, seek out challenges and stretch your zone of comfort. It is not necessary to change sector or even employer to get variety, just seek out novelty and set yourself personal development objectives at the start of every assignment.

Active engagement with professional bodies and communities of practice help enormously to structure your development and provide resources and mentoring.

3.2.4 Believing in yourself and removing limiting beliefs

Dale Carnegie said: ‘In order to get the most out of this book, you need to develop a deep, driving desire to master the principles of human relations.’⁷ That is good advice, but how do we develop a deep desire? Reading that statement on the page will not change our identity, beliefs, motivating values, behaviours or meta-programs. So how do we develop that motivation and take away our limiting beliefs?

Beliefs are not fixed, but are plastic and fluid. If we choose to, we can change them at will.

In Section 2.7 we discussed beliefs. These are usually buried deep in our psyche and we are not aware of them ourselves. They are often evident to others via our language and behaviours. Expressions like ‘I am bad at exams’, ‘I am not good with stakeholders’, or ‘I will never be a good business analyst’, do not just fall out of our mouths, but actually represent deeply held beliefs. We all have these types of thoughts in our psyche to a greater or lesser extent at some time or other.

3.3 KNOW THYSELF – DEVELOPING SELF-AWARENESS

Self-awareness was specifically mentioned in the review of competencies for effective BAs in Section 1.4 under the description ‘understanding how others see us’.

Self-awareness means understanding ourselves and our emotions and is the fundamental step to gaining emotional intelligence. Unless we have deliberately studied them, we are mostly unaware of most of our own core behaviours/meta-programs, or the fact that people have markedly different ones from ourselves, as we usually develop them subconsciously at an early age.

Here are a few descriptions from various texts which relate to self-awareness:

• reflective, that is, learning from experience;
• open to candid feedback;
• open to new ideas and perspectives;
• aware of our strengths and weaknesses;
• knowing our limitations, and knowing when and how to ask for help;
• able to admit mistakes;
• able to laugh at ourselves (before others do it for us).

In my straw poll of stakeholders, self-awareness was rated the number one characteristic for effective delivery. Hence it sits here, before any other aspect of personal development. If you do not appreciate it yourself, know that people who pay for your services do appreciate it. So do not run away.

3.3.1 To see ourselves as others do

The technique of JoHari Windows¹⁰ is used to help organisations form a fuller picture of themselves. We can also apply it to ourselves.

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Figure 3.6 JoHari Windows

In one of the four boxes in Figure 3.6, we have what we and others agree about ourselves, that is, largely factual. Then we have the stuff that only we know about ourselves, some of which we may want to keep private. Then we have the more interesting area of what people know or think about us, but we do not know or realise ourselves. This would be what our stakeholders know or think, but want to keep to themselves, or just that we have not got around to asking them. Companies spend a fortune on market research to find out what people think about them and their products. You may think that a company should know everything about its own products, but most realise that ‘the only reality is perception’. Companies also spend a fortune on consultancy, many to confirm what their own employees could have told them. Why?

Aren’t we supposed to get feedback from our managers? How many managers loathe the annual ritual of giving feedback for fear of causing a scene, and often resort to selecting the middle performance marking and writing something mundane. Why? Because they assume that we do not know how we come across. Is it not much better to get into the routine of seeking feedback at the end of each piece of work rather than waiting for the dreaded annual review?

I was fortunate enough to be in a large multinational that adopted 360 degree appraisals for senior staff. This is where you ask peers, subordinates, managers and customers to give feedback via a standard process/tool and the results are fed back in a structured form. The results can be most illuminating, especially if you treat the exercise as a development opportunity and choose people to respond that you have had misunderstandings with, rather than only people you get on with in order to engineer a flattering score. (Hence it is a bad idea to link 360 appraisals with performance pay, as it ceases to be a development tool, which was its original purpose.)

There are many other tools that can help us to understand ourselves which all have value, including: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI),¹¹ occupational personality questionnaire (OPQ), de Bono’s Thinking Hats,¹² and so on. There are also a number that are useful to understand our natural role in teams, including Belbin.¹³

3.3.2 Behaviours as meta-programs

What does NLP have to contribute to all of these different types of assessment? Fundamentally, tests such as Myers–Briggs are assessing some groupings of behaviours/meta-programs. More than 60 meta-programs have been identified from composite behaviours.¹⁴ The basis of meta-programs was introduced in Section 2.8, but to recap a few points:

• Meta-programs are one of the sets of filters that we use to create our worldview and deeply affect how we interpret things, for example, whether the glass is half empty or half full.
• They are systematic and habitual, not random.
• They can be context specific; that is, different in work or in the home environment.

3.4 DEVELOPING AGILITY IN APPROACH AND STYLE

Speaking to colleagues about the trend towards agile development, we concur that, although some people, perhaps more detail, process and logic/AD oriented, are promoting defined methods for agile, it is more about having an agile mindset, as per the Agile Manifesto.¹⁵

In discussions with other coaches while developing the contents of this book, we reflected on what the most useful behaviours would be for effective BAs. We concluded that it was not particularly any part of the role, but, rather, the attitude and approach to the role itself.

If we could wave our magic wand, we would help BAs to recognise context and flex to the big picture at will from a natural bias towards detail. The main advantage of this would be when presenting to executive audiences. We cover techniques for ‘chunking up’ to big picture in Section 3.5.

Building on this would be practising adoption of the other person’s perspective. This is a true life skill and occupies much of the territory of the third quadrant of the EI framework on social intelligence. Not only are there benefits in understanding the other person, but also in being able to relate to them more effectively. We will practice tools for adopting the other person’s perspective in Section 3.24.3.

These two aspects together also help us to shift the focus from asset or process to business benefit, which is now included in the scope of BA competency frameworks. As in the current IIBA definition of the role of an effective BA, you need to act as a translator between the business and the delivery capability. To do this you must become fluent in both positions and adept at flexing between the different world-views, behaviours and language patterns. IIBA’s definition of the role of business analysis in v3 goes even further:

Business analysis is the practice of enabling change in an enterprise by defining needs and recommending solutions that deliver value to stakeholders. Business analysis ultimately helps organisations to understand the needs of the enterprise and why they want to create change, design possible solutions, and describe how those solutions can deliver value.¹⁶

When you ‘help the organisation to understand’, and ‘describe how solutions can deliver value’, you should provide the translation to their map of the world.

3.4.1 How to assure an agile approach by looking at behaviours

When I was a board member of the professional body, my remit was to sponsor and develop best practice groups, and we launched one on Assurance in 2006. Some excellent work has come out of the group since then, but the growing popularity of agile methods poses some problems for traditional thinkers. For a waterfall approach, assurance is quite straightforward in that you develop a specification and then deliver to it against an agreed plan and budget. For agile, however, the timescale is fixed, our resource pool is assumed fixed, but our scope is variable, and we do not have a forward plan showing all of the activities and when they are supposed to happen. So, how can you and your client have confidence in an agile approach?

3.4.2 Becoming agile – adapting style to context and environment

One of the presuppositions of NLP, based on the field of cybernetics, is: ‘The person with the most flexibility in a system controls the system.’ This is not about stopping what we were doing. As another presupposition states, ‘All behaviours are useful in some context’, otherwise we would not have embedded them in the first place. When we have problems with behaviour, it is usually that we are transferring a strategy that was successful in the past to a context where it is no longer useful. ‘Choice is better than no choice’; wouldn’t you agree?

Having worked out where your natural preferences are in Section 3.3 on self-awareness, you now have a picture of where you are naturally strong and where you might want to develop flexibility. Alternatively, you could just focus on your strengths and natural preferences.

Figure 3.9 illustrates the cycle in which we can start to develop flexibility in behaviours.

Once I have identified a situation in which I am having difficulty, then I identify someone who has achieved success in a similar situation. Ideally, I will look for several people that have solved similar problems in different contexts and in different ways and try to identify common elements to form a new strategy. We can then feed this new strategy into the TOTE model described below, test if it works in a non-threatening environment, and go around the loop until we have sufficient improvement. As we shall see in Section 3.10 on modelling, it is something innate in our nature – NLP just helps to make it more explicit.

3.4.3 The TOTE model – a strategy for personal change

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Figure 3.9 Adapting style to context

As human beings, we have strategies for doing everything in life, whether it is motivation, learning, relaxation and even finding love. When things do not work, it means that our strategy is not working in that context. For example, most of us would not talk to our boss in the same way we that talk to our kids, as the context and purpose is different. The TOTE model can help you to understand the current strategy you have, and if it is not working in this context, how you can develop a new strategy. The strategy may be one that is successful for you in another context, for example dealing with your spouse, or from someone that you observe as having success in this area. You may recognise that the TOTE model is widely used in testing, for example whether the code in a computer program actually achieves the desired outcome in real life situations. Here we are applying TOTE to your own strategies/programs to see if they are effective in the context you are applying them.

3.5 SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE WHILE MANAGING THE DETAIL

We often hear people talking about ‘needing to see the big picture’, but what are they actually talking about? Well, some people at work would naturally see a ‘helicopter view’ of a project, such as purpose, global budget, key stakeholders, rough duration and likelihood of success. Often, they will see this all together in a holistic picture with half a dozen key features. Others would ask to look into the detail of requirements and functional specifications. We need both types of behaviour to deliver a project, though these could be in different team members.

Before you read on, look out of the window for 30 seconds. Now quickly write down the first five things that you remember. Did your words show a clear preference?

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Figure 3.10 Finding your preference

3.5.1 Chunking things up and breaking things down

It does not matter where we start from in terms of preference for chunk size, as we can arrive at the same place. In NLP, the process of chunking is used extensively to get to the right level of information; for example, chunking up to arrive at a motive in order to establish alternative strategies, or chunking down to arrive at sufficient detail for an action plan. Both have a time and a place.

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Figure 3.11 Chunking up and down

In general, project management tools and techniques cater for the two perspectives, especially phasing of a project and use of work break-down structure. Indeed, on reviewing the UK nuclear industry’s £100 billion life-cycle base-line decommissioning program, the whole could be viewed as one entity, important to establish overall budgets and resources for approval, or drilled down through seven layers of work break-down to reveal individual discipline-based work packages in any one of dozens of programs.

3.5.2 Changing meta-programs

We have spoken about the need to develop flexibility, and nowhere is this more apparent than in relation to the meta-program for ‘big picture/detail’. Not only are some tasks more suited to one option than the other, but you will need to reflect the bias of your senior stakeholders when reporting to them and also balance this with the preference of your team.

Do not worry, though you probably have a strong preference, it can be changed at will. (Nearly all of us have a strong preference for using our right or left hand, but you can learn to brush your teeth with the other hand with practice, even though you would never be inclined to do so and it does not feel natural until you have made it routine.)

3.5.3 Communicating with big picture and detail

Do your key stakeholders have a preference for ‘big picture’ or ‘detail’? You are likely to have a mixture of both. You would normally expect to get more ‘big picture’ people higher up the organisation, but this is not always the case, especially where people are promoted within a discipline, for example IT, engineering or finance. Similarly, you would expect to get more ‘detail’ oriented people doing delivery, but I have been caught out by this when working in creative sectors such as digital media. If you do not communicate with them according to their preferences, then it is going to take a while to develop rapport. Have you ever tried to give a 20-page progress report to your sponsor, or five bullet points to an accountant?

Find out what your client’s preference is and communicate with them in their preference, both with written and verbal communication. If you cannot work out your client’s preference, then ask them: ‘How would you like me to present x?’ ‘How much detail would you like me to go into?’ Remember, if you are communicating with a detail oriented person, make sure that you do a thorough spellcheck or your credibility will be severely questioned. (When getting this book reviewed I picked a mix of types. Some advised that I was missing a section while others would pick up on grammar and spelling – we need both.)

3.6 GETTING RESULTS WITH DIFFERENT CULTURES

Cultural and political awareness were specifically listed in the review of behavioural competencies for BAs in Section 1.4. The wider topic of social awareness is one of the quadrants of the EI framework.

3.6.1 Better together

One risk affecting more projects is increased off-shoring, near-shoring and on-shoring, leading to miscommunications from different language and behavioural styles.

Professor Rodney Turner reviewed data on the abilities of different cultures to perform projects,¹⁷ and noted that the Western philosophy of project management did not fit with some cultures. Using some standard parameters for measuring cultural differences, he established that different cultural outlooks were more suited to different phases of the life-cycle. I like this perspective as it reinforces the fact that a diverse group, as long as they have mutual respect and work as a team, creates a stronger entity. He noted that Eastern cultural attitudes were much more suited to initiation and roll-out phases, while Western cultural attitudes were more suited to delivery phases. So, from the table in Figure 3.12, an ideal scenario might be to think like a Latin woman for the initiation stage, turn Anglo Saxon for planning and execution, then Arabic for termination. In other words, you are going to be more successful the more flexible you are.

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Figure 3.12 Preferred cultural approach at different stages of the project life-cycle

In her book on the power of the introvert, after pointing out that a cult of the extrovert has ingrained its way into Western societies in recent decades, Susan Cain points out that the role of the quiet, introverted expert is still well respected in Eastern cultures.¹⁸

We should not pre-judge individuals by their cultural stereotype, but if we treat cultural differences as if they were not there, we will end up disappointed at best. With the growing reliance on multi-country and multi-cultural delivery, I am being asked to facilitate workshops helping teams to work better together, a kind of ‘project kick-off +’ workshop, though they have usually already attempted to kick off and re-started when difficulties have emerged.

The effort required to integrate teams can be overlooked when we are asked to migrate diverse organisations onto common platforms and systems. How can you start to resolve differences in your team and find accommodations?

Think about where your preference lies, then think about where that of other parties might be. Better, why not do it together. The simple act of exploring it, working together and appreciating difference will work magic. Better still, put a motivating frame around it such as: ‘In order to work even better together, would you like to explore our different behavioural preferences and how we might make a stronger team?’ How would that make you feel?

3.6.2 When yes might mean no

I was speaking to the head of delivery of an international telecoms company recently who was saying that he was having trouble trusting the on-shoring team because, although they always agreed, sometimes they did not deliver.

Compare ‘Will this be ready by tomorrow?’, with ‘Given your expertise and experience, when could we guarantee this will be ready?’ Which question type is likely to give the most reliable answer?

Do you think there are different shades of ‘yes’? Usually, I am sure that when you say ‘yes’ you fully intend to deliver on your promise. Sometimes, perhaps out of a work context, have you ever said ‘yes’ while perhaps not being fully committed? How about imagining shades of ‘yes’ from:

Yes, absolutely – I will do my best – I will try – if I can make time – I will add it to my list – yes, I hear you – yes, please go away and bother someone else – NO!

Knowing this, how might you tell which yes you are getting?

We run this as an exercise in workshops where you think of how you might say ‘yes (definitely), yes (maybe) or yes (not likely)’ and your partner has to guess which one you are saying. How successful do you think you can be when you really focus on listening to the other person instead of assuming the answer you want?

3.6.3 Cultures within organisations

Of course, we do not have to cross national boundaries to find different cultures. Cultures vary across sectors, organisations and functional groups. How different do you think the cultures of departments for finance, HR, marketing and IT might be? Do we ever implement projects across these boundaries? Of course we do, but how do we go about encompassing these different cultures in our communications?

The first stage is to recognise that, without crossing international borders, we are entering a different cultural group and should modify our language and behaviour to get quicker and easier engagement.¹⁹ The approach remains constant in becoming inquisitive as to their map of the world and how it differs from ours and then tailoring our message to it. Using the techniques described for developing rapport quickly in Section 3.20, especially looking for common ground, is an essential preface to get off on the right foot.

What makes up our maps of the world? Aside from differences in our meta-programs and our preferred representational systems, our values and beliefs really shape how we react to things. If you trespass on someone’s belief system, then they are likely to get emotionally involved. How do you find out about people’s maps of the world quickly?

You do not have months or years to work out your stakeholders’ maps of the world as you might in operations, but you do have a lot longer than 30 seconds. How might you go about it? What kind of questions are you going to ask? How about some questions like these:

• What is it you value about the work of your department?
• How do you believe this process/system/project might help you?
• What is it specifically that you are interested in?
• Is there anything we could do to help you to create more value?
• How would you like us to involve you?
• How would you like us to keep you informed?
• Will you help us to spread the word to your colleagues?
• Is there anything else we should know?

If you were asked these questions by someone who had already established some measure of rapport with you, how would it make you feel? That you were involved? That they were trying to be helpful? Would you be tempted to contribute in some way?

3.6.4 Co-creating a team charter to help bridge the cultural abyss

Co-construction of a team charter is an excellent way to get any initiative off to a great start.²⁰ I have seen very wordy documented team charters, but I much prefer something created in real time using mind-mapping software or even whiteboard/flip charts.

I focus on getting participation and buy-in. Ask questions which help to reveal differences in world-views to make this apparent to all parties so that they realise we are looking for understanding and accommodation, not a set of house rules. I ask questions such as:

• How do you feel if someone doesn’t remember your name?
• How do you feel if someone is late for a meeting with you, or forgets?
• How do you feel when someone doesn’t supply you with information when they promised?
• How do you feel when you can’t seem to get sign-off?
• How do you feel when your team members turn in shoddy work?
• What do you like most about working on projects and in teams?
• What things annoy you most when working in teams and projects?

Notice, I ask a lot of questions based on ‘how do you feel...’ as no one can argue with the way you feel.

I am looking to construct, in some form or another, information similar to that captured in the table at Figure 3.13. But the content is not important once it is written down; the most important thing is to co-create it in order to get buy-in. Better, if you get a physical copy in draft during the meeting, even if on a flip chart or whiteboard, and each person commits to physically signing up to it. It is your contract and understanding as to how you want to work better together. This approach has been very successful in co-creating a joint team from different partnering organisations to help resolve different organisational drivers from parent organisations.

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Figure 3.13 A simple team charter

Our brand and identity statement:	‘We are…’
Common values	Behaviours we expect to observe supporting those values
Value 1	Behaviour x
	Behaviour y
Value 2	Plan
Value 3

Do you see the value in co-creating a team charter? Do you have a team charter? Do you want one?

3.7 FLEXIBLE APPROACH TO TIME – HOW TO BALANCE BEING ON TIME AND ‘IN THE MOMENT’

Have you ever noticed how some people always seem to be behind the clock, constantly rushing, often late, while others seem to cruise through life? Have you noticed that some people get reports in on time while others have to be chased? Some people produce a schedule, while others are reluctant to even rough a plan, let alone work to one? On the other hand, which are the people that you would pick to engage a difficult stakeholder, or speak to the unions about a change program? Maybe some of the same people who do not plan?

The essential skill for time management is to be able to assume a ‘through time’ position. The irony of many time management courses is that they are written by ‘through time’ people for ‘through time’ people. They make little sense to people who are predominantly ‘in time’, yet they are the ones who really need time management tools. (If operating ‘through time’, you are mismatching people who are ‘in time’, out of rapport and so the communication is likely to fail anyway.)

In this section we will look at our natural orientation to time and practise techniques for changing orientation to context.

3.7.1 NLP timelines

Timelines were briefly introduced in Section 2.16. The NLP meta-program for time helps us to determine which groups people naturally fall into (see Figure 3.14). Like all meta-programs, however, note that they are context-based, so you may behave differently in work situations than in leisure situations. If so, all the better, as you have a good basis for flexibility.

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Figure 3.14 Different timelines

3.7.2 How to be in time, on time

So, now you know what your normal timeline is. Rather than just give you an excuse for not planning, or not being good at one-on-one situations, the main purpose of NLP is to develop flexibility. Wouldn’t it be good to choose which timeline you are operating on depending on the task? Well, you can change your timeline because you created it in the first place and can recreate it if you choose.

You can change the orientation of your timeline so that you can experience a different mindset without changing any of the individual memories and events that your timeline is made up of (see Figure 3.15).

I personally found these exercises very useful, but was taken aback by the widespread sharing of techniques to be ‘in time’, that is, ‘in the moment’, more of the time. Maybe it is something about the world we choose to live in, or its impact on our lives outside work.

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Figure 3.15 Choosing timelines

3.7.3 Gaining rapport through matching timelines

Have you realised yet how much easier it would be to gain rapport and understanding with other people if you could match their timeline? It is difficult to explain to someone who is ‘in time’ while being ‘through time’, and vice versa. Some of the give-aways for which timeline people generally operate in are shown in Figure 3.14. You can find out a lot about how people think about time, together with their critical sub-modalities, by listening to their language, for example:

• It was in the dim and distant past.
• He has a bright future.
• I am looking forward to a holiday.
• Put the affair behind you.
• Time is running out.
• Time is on my side.

Think of one of your key stakeholders. Recall how they behave and what they say. Do you think that they operate in time or through time? How could you check? What might you do before your next meeting?

3.7.4 Use of future pacing and ‘as if’ reframes to aid problem solving

In several of the exercises in this book you will see the final stage being to ‘future pace’, that is to imagine yourself in the problem situation in the future and imagine how you would react with the clarity and changes of mindset from the exercise. This is similar to one of the exercises on reframing, where we act ‘as if’ something has already happened, then test our reaction while looking on it with a different mindset. The advantage of going to a future state is that it dissociates the individual from difficult situations. Just as we can have 20:20 hindsight, it also allows people to move past obstacles that they cannot resolve when the obstacles are in front of them.

3.8 PLANNING FOR SUCCESS – LOOKING BACK FROM THE FUTURE USING PRE-MORTEM

Too many projects fail, but most of these can be avoided by a simply using a pre-mortem, adopting the NLP concept of future pacing.

As a ‘Gateway Reviewer’ for mega-projects and high risk projects across the UK plc estate, as well as spending a lot of time on intervention and turnaround, I see more than my fair share of project failure. Often I am surprised that the high failure rates which are widely reported are not even higher. The saddest part for me is that the reasons for failure were probably knowable and avoidable from the outset.

This means that when projects do fail, sacrificial lambs are easy to find. When your project has failed, you will probably do a post-mortem to find out what went wrong anyway, so why not do it up-front instead and either save your resources by not starting or manage-out the risks that might knock your train off the rails?

How can we implement the lessons learned before we start the project? In the NLP world we often use the technique called ‘future pacing’ to get our clients to imagine themselves in the future, both to mentally rehearse going through the steps to get there and also to look backwards to help the imagination create insights about what must be done to get them there. Imagining we are in the future beyond the problem helps to set our thinking free and unleash our imagination.

The process of ‘future pacing’ helps us to gain emotional distance to speak freely. If you are new to this game it may sound fanciful, but the results are well researched by Daniel Kahneman.²⁴ If you are not yet brave enough to try it out, you can start with a tame version from the Harvard Business Review²⁵ based on research at the University of Colorado in the late 1980s.

When working in the automotive industry we carried out an engineering technique with some similarities called Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA), where you predict what symptoms a failed component might display, once built and in operation, and then work backwards to identify candidates for the root cause. From there you go into re-design, and work out tests to identify and eliminate root causes should symptoms manifest in operation.

Do you or your sponsor or any of the other senior stakeholders have an uneasy feeling about any of your projects?

Would it be useful to give yourself and your sponsor assurance through a technique like this? So that you can honestly say after the event, ‘it was not foreseeable’?

3.9 DEVELOPING FLEXIBILITY IN LEADERSHIP STYLE

‘Leadership and influencing’ is one of the three core skills assessed for the ‘Expert BA’ qualification. Leadership invariably comes up when I ask audiences for the key behavioural competencies. But that label means different things to different people, in different cultures, and indeed morphs over time. Historically, in most cultures leaders were born into position, and in the past our military officers could only gain that rank through birthright rather than ability or experience. Note how such world-views have moved on in the light of overwhelming experience over the last century. Now, it is widely appreciated, and readily measured, that high scores for EI make for better leaders as well as all round better performers.

3.9.1 The rise of emotional intelligence in leadership

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Figure 3.16 Schools of leadership

Professor Rodney Turner observes that there is little work setting leadership in projects within the context of the emotional intelligence school, but there is a significant relationship between project success and inner confidence and self-belief.²⁸ The latter element is what NLP refers to as the self-reference meta-program (as against the opposite, external reference). Note that self-reference tends to make people more resilient, though less open to feedback.

Turner also observes that, while some say leaders are born not made, and some people are naturally more suited to leadership than others, everyone can improve their leadership skills.

3.9.2 Six styles of leadership

Turner wrote a comprehensive series on leadership in the project context based on research as to whether different leadership styles influenced project success, and whether different leadership styles were more appropriate to different types of project.²⁹ There is no right or wrong style, only the wrong context. I think each of these styles has use for some types of project in some situation or other. What is your preferred style?

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Figure 3.17 Six styles of leadership

Source: Compiled from leader articles in The Sunday Times, January–March 2008.

Reflecting on the past, do you think you have flexed your style to situations and been as effective as you could be? What style do you think works best in an agile environment? Looking to the future, can you think of a situation where you might want to flex your style?

Reflecting back, I can see a progression in my career from a pure directive style, through pacesetting to be more facilitating. I now focus on spending more of my time in a coaching style. Of course, that is my own opinion. In a survey by the CMI Institute, most managers said that they used a coaching style, yet replied that their managers used a directive style. Perhaps CMI members are truly different, but perception obviously comes into it. There is in fact no best style of leadership, as it should be contextual. So, how do you plan to become more agile in your leadership style?

3.9.3 Supervising, managing or leading – what got you here might not get you there

I was in the headquarters of a professional body when someone asked the question in relation to an application for chartered status, ‘Can I put my time as a supervisor down under leadership experience?’ ‘Yes’, came the reply. I disagree; though both have a part to play, leading and supervising are poles apart. If someone is not sure what they are doing and does not know how to do it, then we might have to give them detailed instructions if we are short of time in order to meet a deadline. Ideally, we would have sufficient time to bring them up to speed and coach them to an acceptable standard.

When I started my career, I was informed about ‘The Peter Principle’,³⁰ which says that people are promoted to a level at which they become incompetent, and then they do not rise any more. Years later, Marshal Goldsmith, probably the most influential executive coach in the Western hemisphere, penned the bestseller, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.³¹ Basically, you need to stop doing some of the behaviours that served you in the past in order to adopt those which will serve you in the future.

During training courses, we do a kinaesthetic version of this exercise where we get delegates to write words associated with supervising, managing and leading and place them on a continuum on the floor. We then walk along this timeline to where they think others see them, envisioning letting go of some of the behaviours behind them in order to focus on the behaviours in front of them. The effects have proven to be profound. Why do you think it works?

So, should a BA/change manager be a manager or a leader? I think an effective change manager requires awareness of the context in order to flex between managing and leading depending on the activity being undertaken. Does the table in Figure 3.18 reflect your map of the world?

How can you spend more time on leading change?

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Figure 3.18 Change managers need to be both managers and leaders depending on context

3.10 MODELLING EXCELLENCE

Do you know any really good BAs, or ones that do some aspect of the job really well, for example run a workshop? You are in luck, as the primary approach of NLP has been to model effective behaviours. I gave a brief introduction to modelling in Section 2.17, and will now introduce the practical steps of modelling. Please note, however, that effective modelling requires a number of competencies in itself, some of which have been introduced to this point, but it is not usually taught until Master Practitioner level. Of about 50 NLP books on my shelf, half only mention modelling in passing and the rest contain only a cursory outline for modelling of simple strategies. Proper coverage, aside from facilitated practice, needs a book all to itself. The pioneering work for modelling in business was by Robert Dilts,³² based in large part around modelling of leadership skills at Fiat. My own modelling project, on entrepreneurs in the project management sector, took over a year to complete and achieve my desired outcomes. But BAs are clever people, and we are already familiar with modelling, so we will make a start.

3.10.1 From complex behaviour to modelling of simple strategies

Many areas of excellence that we experience are complex composites of many beliefs, values, behaviours and skills. For example, ‘presenting’ could be broken down into a number of components, such as: presenting yourself, engaging your audience, use of language, projecting your voice, dealing with questions, use of tools such as PowerPoint, and so on. The more finite the process is, then the better your chance of achieving the same outcome.

Where you are trying to master a larger topic, some success can be achieved by spending a lot of time with people who are experts and subconsciously mimicking what you see and hear. Some of your preference for approach will depend on your own meta-programs; for example, for process, big picture, and so on. For martial arts, this is equivalent to just mimicking the master, which was the common form of instruction when it originated. For BAs, I certainly recommend spending time with your peers and getting involved in best practice groups. Aside from picking up knowledge, some of the behaviours will ‘rub off’.

Think of a simple skill that you would like to learn; for example, remembering names. I use this as a warm up for my training as usually, at most, only one person in the group might consider themselves good at remembering names, even though all agree that it is important in building rapport. At the end of the exercise, most people remember all the names in the room.

My first experience of explicit modelling was in the early 1990s. In the days before mobile phones, I was not comfortable using the telephone, but had the fortune to witness a colleague in the PMO who appeared confident and achieved good results. I will use this example for illustration in the process below. Please note that, although the process is shown linearly and can be read through in a minute, it usually requires repeat cycles for you to be able to replicate the skill. Yet more time and practice is required to move it from being consciously competent to a subconscious and internalised skill. The true test of whether you have accurately modelled a skill is whether you can transfer it to a third party. Of course, it can all happen much quicker with appropriate facilitation. Remember that it is your job to discover what it is the person is doing to be successful because they will not have conscious awareness of it.

As with any skill that we start to see an improvement on, I was motivated to improve further as I got the hang of it. You can refine the model by testing for bits that can be taken out without affecting the result. Modelling of other ‘callers’ also revealed that it was not necessary to stand, only to be comfortable, avoid looking down and relax the diaphragm in order to project your voice for clarity.

Is the strategy effective in all situations in which you want to use it? The strategy was not effective when calling strangers, and had to be adapted. I gleaned this from a ‘cold caller’ in sales, who told me they imagined they were phoning up someone they already knew.

Models can be improved over time as you discover new resources. Matching of pace and energy, matching of language and preferences, and so on, all built on to this skill over subsequent years. I later realised that my mother disliked using the telephone and would avoid answering it, so I was unpicking my unconscious modelling of her.

If you study NLP and modelling further you will see notation for modelling relating to this, particularly to the eye-accessing cues. It is, however, easy to misread these cues unless you have had practical training in sensory acuity and have ‘calibrated’ for your model; that is, tested how far and fast their eye movements are for a range of questions related to the senses.

In our training courses we include a modelling project to achieve ‘NLP Business Practitioner’ status. Seeing a group of a dozen people presenting back the skills they have learned from those around them is a humbling experience. You can download the guidance notes for this from the supporting website www.NLP4BA.com.

3.11 BE YOUR OWN COACH

Coaching skills were specifically mentioned in the review of competencies for effective BAs in Section 1.4. and form one of the three specialist skills assessed for the ‘Expert BA’ qualification. We can also be a coach to ourselves.

It is expected in sports that you need a coach to achieve your potential, but it is relatively new to business, and usually confined to those in very senior positions. While writing, I am employed as a coach for senior staff across a portfolio of major programs, including their business change managers and lead team in the IT department. But we can all be our own coach with the help of a few techniques and a bit of NLP.

3.11.1 From knowing to being

In Section 1.4 we talked about competencies and becoming competent, and how this was achieved through a combination of knowledge, experience and behaviours. Figure 3.19 is a popular model of this process. I have shown it as a cycle as, hopefully, like top tennis and golf players, we continue on the cycle towards our ultimate goal.

A similar model to this, which I have seen promoted in recent years to assist in sales, suggests a progression from ‘just do it’, to ‘being it’. I think it better represents the journey from understanding, to practising, to feeling fully comfortable in the role (see Figure 3.20).

3.11.2 Compassionate coaching and the inner game

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Figure 3.19 Towards unconscious competency

We sometimes make the mistake of thinking that the, sometimes harsh, inner voice is ‘me’. It is not, though it is a part of us. We have the most effective learning machine ever developed between our ears, and yet when we try something new we tend to over-rationalise it. Our inner voice did not teach us to crawl or walk, and certainly was not around to teach us to speak, so put it aside. Top athletes have learned ‘the inner game’ of practice without judgement.³³ This results in the ultimate experience of what has been referred to as ‘flow’,³⁴ or ‘up time’ in NLP speak.

As described in Section 2.6, the subconscious mind is what drives us. If you want to put an internal voice to good use then let it be ‘your compassionate coach’,³⁵ and be gentle and encouraging to yourself. Know and repeat your goals. The more solid they are and the more you can visualise them and experience them with all your senses, then the stronger will be the compulsion of your subconscious mind to attain them.

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Figure 3.20 Being there

3.11.3 The virtual mentor – imaginary friends for grown ups

Before ‘re-engineering of corporations’,³⁶ there used to be multiple tiers of managers, and people stayed in their jobs for a long time. Nowadays, a couple of years in the same role seems to be a long time, and many people freelance. Hence we have fewer opportunities to ‘learn on the job’ through informal mentoring.³⁷ I would strongly advise you to find mentors for all aspects of your life wherever you can. Sometimes you may really wish that you had one there and then. Well, with a bit of imagination you can. I have a collection of virtual mentors that I use in different kinds of environment. I am using Genghis Khan a lot less than I used to, and relying more on Mahatma Gandhi to do things a bit more elegantly. I think of it as a metaphor to put a bit of distance between me and the situation to allow more creativity (rather like ‘as if’ reframing). For this next exercise, imagine a mentor called ‘John’ – perhaps someone that you have encountered and admired in your career. I think my father would have chosen John Wayne.

3.11.4 Action learning sets and communities of practice

Action learning is essentially where you agree a common development aim as a group and agree to work on it individually and share experiences.³⁸ It also acts as a support group. I have been involved in action learning sets as a senior manager. A related principle is that of communities of practice.³⁹ A number of large organisations are now setting up communities of practice to share resources and support. I set up an online community on LinkedIn to discuss application of NLP to business analysis and project management, which is now as big as most other special interest groups of the professional bodies.⁴⁰ What experiences can you contribute?

3.12 GREAT LEADERS USE STORYTELLING AND METAPHOR TO GET THE MESSAGE OVER

In a creative paper on why and how BAs and PMs should work better together, ‘The Marriage of Professions; Business Analysis and Project Management can live happily ever after…together’,⁴¹ Chuck Milhollan makes the case through the medium of story, including ‘The Monster’ (legacy system), the heroine (BA) and hero (PM) who go on to live, well, happily ever after.

British sociologist Anthony Giddens (Lord Barron),⁴² argued that we derive our sense of self, not from what has happened through our lives, but from our capacity to weave those episodic events into a consistent story. Our story is consistent with, and a constituent of, our personal map of the world.

Use of stories has become ubiquitous across analysis to bridge the gap between what a user wants from a system and the specification for the system. In recent years books have been published on use of storytelling and metaphor as a medium for teaching leadership⁴³ and lessons in project management.⁴⁴ I am currently modelling exponents of storytelling like Steven Carver,⁴⁵ who has gone beyond incorporating stories to delivering whole talks within a single story, including post-graduate lectures as Professor at Cranfield Management School.

Legendary orators made extensive use of stories, including religious leaders. Well, the ones who remember anyway, as storytelling aids memory, and masters of memory make extensive use of stories and imagery.⁴⁶

Why do these stories and metaphors work? As the great orators and religious leaders have found, they provide a low resistance doorway to the unconscious mind. Marketers and brand managers have also discovered and perfected these techniques. The unconscious mind is the world’s greatest pattern recognition system and looks for hidden meaning in all things. Hence I make extensive use of stories.

How will you inspire your audience? A start would be to use the often quoted but usually forgotten rule of stories – to have a start, a middle and an end. Far too often I have had presentations which seemed, at best, to be a stream of consciousness. Start with a simple message and build out.

3.12.1 Be the STAR of your story

One of the most effective ways of conveying information is use of the STAR model below. Recruiters use this technique to establish areas of competency, and I described it as such in Section 1.5 on assessing competency. So, if you want to sound competent, practice the STAR model in Figure 3.22 (the example is from a presentation I gave to a community of practice in Canada).

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Figure 3.22 Storytelling using the STAR model

Situation or Task	Northampton’s city council was struggling to embrace national Modernising Government and eGovernment agendas to a reasonable timescale. The council had 250,000 citizens supported by 250 lines of business.
	I was sent in by a central government agency as interim CIO to facilitate turnaround and develop internal delivery capability.
Action you took	I established cross-party governance, facilitated ICT strategy, pulled together delivery capability and delivered a portfolio of ICT enabled change.
Results you achieved	The council’s KPI for eGovernment improved from 36 per cent to 91 per cent within 12 months, resulting in markedly improved customer satisfaction.

How does that sound to you? Does it influence you to think that I am competent? How long did that take, less than a minute? (Sometimes I would ramble when asked these questions at an interview, so it is a great structure for me.) Think of a message that you want to get over and practice writing/telling it in this STAR format.

3.12.2 Use of ambiguity to gain agreement

If you want to engage people, and also get them to agree with you, be specific about immaterial things, but use ambiguous terminology where people might associate values and beliefs. This, alongside storytelling and metaphor, is one tool which accomplished politicians, and lawyers versed in the art of rhetoric, use to influence people. We might all agree that ‘education is good’, but if you go into specifics like ‘online training is good’, then you run the risk of people disagreeing with you. This is especially true in a group, where they will not agree amongst themselves on specifics and your first task is to get general agreement of direction of travel before considering options.

In the early days of NLP, the founders derived the meta-model for specific questioning by modelling the renowned hypno-therapist Milton Erickson. Erickson used what was described as ‘artfully vague language’ to persuade mentally ill people to become well again. It can also be used to help mentally tired people to see clearly.

An over the top example of its use might be something like:

The decision to move forward can only be a good thing. People are behind this. It means we can increase performance and become more competitive while reducing inefficiency. The problems of the past will be behind us as we create new capabilities which give us a competitive edge. Let’s do it now.

All great empowering words. Don’t you just want one? Would your governing body want one? Have you heard people in your organisation speaking like this? If so, they are probably on the top floors as they know how to sell a story.

By lightly applying the meta-model questions in Section 2.15, we can start to pick it apart.

The decision (nominalisation) to move forward (how?) can only be a good thing (complex equivalent – this means that, really?). Everyone (generalisation – everyone?) is behind this (what?). It means (complex equivalent) we can increase performance (lack of referential index) and become more competitive (than who?) while reducing inefficiency (inefficient at what?). The problems (which?) of the past (when?) will be behind us (who?) as we (who?) create (how?) new capabilities (which?) which give us (who specifically?) a competitive edge (lack of referential index – against who?). Let’s (who?) do it (what?) now (why?).

When the head of performance management from Rolls-Royce went back to work after attending one of my courses a few years ago, her boss, the head of capability, asked if she had been ‘programed’. ‘No’, she replied, ‘I think I have been de-programed.’

3.12.3 Using metaphor … is like painting a picture to help people see what you are talking about

Use of metaphor helps to make change less threatening by associating something new with something they already know and are familiar with. For example, you might warn someone that they risk just repeating what they used to do on the old system with the new system, which does not sound particularly motivating. But if you warn them that they are simply ‘digitising the dinosaur’, they might imagine that they could face extinction unless they change their ways.

When presenting options, you could advise that you can:

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Figure 3.23 Presenting options using metaphor

Factual	Metaphoric
Upgrade current systems	Fix the leaky roof
Increase functionality	Give them a paint job
Implement a new system	Design them a modern new house built for the information age

From the first column, do you think people might be tempted to play safe? In the second column, do you think this approach might tempt people to enter the information age? How can we paint a rosy picture of the future, ideally one so bright that they have to wear shades?

3.13 PRESENTING YOURSELF AND MANAGING YOUR PERSONAL BRAND AND REPUTATION

The term ‘presenting yourself’ implies being ‘present’ in that moment in time. When we looked at flexibility with timelines, we saw that we should be ‘in time’. It also implies having some ‘presence’, an aspect of charisma which can be thought of as ‘self-confidence’. Being ‘present’ helps to build rapport, and appearing confident helps to build trust. Are you fully in the moment and self-confident when meeting people? If not, you can model people who are.

3.13.1 Modelling the structure of charisma

Charisma – ‘The impressive manner of a person’, as the Oxford English Dictionary terms it – can be learned. I remember seeing the CEO of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) speak at their annual conference and remarking to one of my colleagues that he came over as quite charismatic. ‘You should have seen him when we got him’, she replied. Model strategies for behaviours that are considered charismatic and use this simple tip: start any presentation you make by beginning in a lower and slower voice than you would naturally use. You only have to do this for a few seconds. After this you will already have made your impression and you can let your voice move to its natural pitch and pace. Because I ‘eat my own dog food’, as my Canadian colleagues say, I explored ‘NLP for public speaking’ courses. Aside from addressing beliefs, state management and a few other strategies which I might address in another book, my main tips are these, echoed by courses delivered by RADA.⁴⁸

• Pitch – as above in the structure of charisma, drop the pitch of your voice, because a high voice is an indicator of tightening of the vocal chords due to stress. You achieve this by relaxing the diaphragm, which has the secondary benefits of forcing you to breathe deeply and release stress in your body.
• Pace – ‘say half as much and appear twice as smart’. Speaking fast indicates nervousness, as well as making it difficult to establish rapport. Speaking more slowly also gives your audience a chance to process what you are saying.
• Pause – a continuous monologue does not give opportunity to punctuate and emphasise your key messages. A short pause might seem a long time when you are in front of an audience, so allow yourself a count of five. Silence is very effective in communication as well as establishing hierarchy.

Watch and listen to effective speakers and notice their body language, pitch, pace and pause.

3.13.2 Achieving congruence in word and deed

One of the NLP presuppositions is, ‘The meaning of the communication is the response that you get’, that is, you are responsible for ensuring that meaning has been understood as intended. Studies have shown that the words we use account for less than 10 per cent of the message that we deliver.⁴⁹ The tone alone counts for far more, while body language accounts for over half of the message as received. Saying, ‘I’m not angry’ through gritted teeth is not congruent behaviour. Some tips for aligning words, voice and body language are given in Figure 3.24.

It is not that you have to do these things all the time, just when you need to deliver important messages or when you need to convince people of your authority. The more you practise, however, the more natural it will feel and the less you will have to think about it.

3.13.3 Self-confidence and feeling good about yourself

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Figure 3.24 Congruence in words, voice and body language

One of the traits of ‘the human condition’ is that we lack confidence in some situations. As seen in the belief cycle, the behaviour is self-fulfilling, but no one wants to follow a leader who lacks confidence in themselves. So how do you appear confident even if you don’t feel it inside? NLP can help by using change techniques based on the way we code beliefs. Revisit ‘Beliefs’ and ‘Belief change’ in Sections 2.7 and 3.2.4.

The way we view or frame a situation also affects the way we feel, which in turn will affect the way we behave. Look at the table in Figure 3.25. Keep yourself in the outcome frame to make the most of your internal resources and look confident.

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Figure 3.25 Feelings associated with blame and outcome frames

Blame frame	Outcome frame
Stagnant	Moving forward
Limiting	Choice/opportunities/possibilities feels
Frustrating	Freeing
Negative	Positive
Disempowering	Empowering
Pessimistic	Optimistic

The ‘circle of excellence’ technique in Section 3.29.2 is often used to ‘anchor’ confident states.

3.13.4 Developing your personal brand and reputation

Companies and celebrities place great emphasis on developing, exuding and promoting their personal brand. This same concept should be applied to career professionals seeking to differentiate themselves in a competitive global job market. Building your brand boosts your professional credibility, propels your chances for a job interview or promotion, positions you as an aspiring leader and, ultimately, fosters an increase in earning potential.

So, what makes for a good personal brand? A captivating personal brand is:

• A representation of your character and identity.
• Authentic and unique to you.
• Well understood by your target audience.
• Consistently portrayed in person, online and in writing.

If I were to ask you ‘What is your unique promise of value’, do you have an answer?

After successfully delivering a number of courses to one large organisation, the head of delivery asked us to take his team to ‘the next level’. We agreed development requirements, designed and piloted the second level course.

As the delivery director had a degree in marketing, he was keen for us to address ‘personal brand’ in the content. What is personal brand? Like established corporate brands, it is a shortcut to our identity and capabilities, and whether we consciously take control of our brand or not, we all have one in the minds of our stakeholders. What would you like yours to be?

Like all good brands, our statements and ‘elevator pitch’ need to be congruent with our behaviours and how we present ourselves. Indeed, with development of social media, there are a number of guides out now on how to develop and maintain your online presence and branding too.⁵⁰

How do you develop your brand? I was surprised at how easily NLP can be applied to this emerging concept. Of course, congruence, establishing rapport and trust, and ethical behaviour are core to NLP from the outset. Understanding yourself and how others see you is the next step, that is, self-awareness. As for corporate brands, this must be linked to your personal values. You may think that they are generic, but we have not yet had two people stating the same values within a group doing nominally the same job in the same organisation. Then, using some of the communication techniques in this book, refine your words and test them with one of your clients or colleagues until they confirm that your statement is congruent with how they see you. The words you use in your brand statement will become consistent as you start to feel comfortable with them.

Try the exercise below.

3.14 CREATIVITY AND PROBLEM SOLVING – USING WALT DISNEY’S STRATEGY

‘Creative problem analysis and resolution’ is one of the three core skills assessed for the ‘Expert BA’ qualification. There is a lot written about creativity and problem solving, including by de Bono.⁵¹ the ‘inventor’ of brainstorming and mind maps. Along with fellow scientists and engineers, I remember going on a week-long graduate training program on creativity as part of my preparation for the world of work. So what does NLP have to add to the mix? Of course, NLP did not invent anything, it just modelled people who were really good at stuff. One person who was really good at being creative was Walt Disney and his ‘imagineers’.⁵²

3.14.1 Modelling Disney’s strategy for creativity

Aside from creation of characters and stories with global and cross-generational appeal, Walt Disney was also responsible for a number of important technical and organisational innovations in the fields of animation and film-making in general. I remember visiting his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT)⁵³ in Florida 20 years ago and being educated through entertainment as I travelled around on his pioneering magnetic monorail.

It is clear that one of the major elements of Disney’s unique genius was his ability to explore something from a number of different perceptual positions. From the analysis of Dilts and DeLozier,⁵⁴ it would seem that Disney the ‘dreamer’ functioned primarily through a strategy of constructed visual images. Disney then made his fantasies ‘real’ by associating into the feelings of the imaginary characters and acting them out to give them life. The spoiler comes from taking a second look at these creations from the point of view of a critical audience. The strategy can be used in any situation where creativity is required. Balancing the fundamental perceptual positions of the dreamer, the realist and the spoiler (or critic) in the service of a common vision is no doubt a fundamental strategy of all genius and had many common elements to self-analysis by Einstein.

3.15 CO-CREATE THE BUSINESS

I started this book relating my experiences around BPR. Back in those days we were all about ‘re-engineering the corporation’,⁵⁵ ‘down-sizing’ and ‘right-sizing’. Internal and external consultants were sent away to do MBAs, learn consultancy skills and BPR. Indeed, I sent my own staff away to become qualified.⁵⁶ While working with local government, however, I had a revelation. Local government is made up of more than 200 lines of business, with many thousands of business processes – far too many for a single person to remain expert. But it did not require someone with a huge brain and an MBA to design processes which cut out waste. With a little facilitation, those involved in the end-to-end process, when put in the same room so that they could reproduce and comprehend the ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ which processes often become through repeated evolution and change, were quite capable of optimising their own processes. Perhaps more importantly, they would own the process and any perceived resistance to change would evaporate.

Of course, the concept of self-managing teams is not new. We used to advocate them when total quality management and Peter Drucker’s The Toyota Way,⁵⁷ was fashionable. Here the facilitator only manages the co-creation process, ensuring input from all team members, ideally only contributing questions to lead the team towards the goal. I have found questions like those below useful for drawing out contribution:

• Who is our customer?
• What do they want from us?
• What are we trying to achieve?
• How will we know when we have succeeded?
• What would that enable us to do?
• What do we need to do?
• Does the customer value that?
• What can we stop doing?
• Are we finished, is there anything else we need to do?

Note that I avoid using ‘why?’ questions, as these can lead to justification and entrenchment rather than facilitate change (see Figure 3.26). You can read more about question types in Section 3.16.

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Figure 3.26 The 3Es – efficacy, effectiveness and (only then) efficiency

In terms of tools to help you to do that, while yellow stickies work; personally I use mind-mapping software, which enables co-construction in real time (see Figure 3.27). The one I use readily exports to process flowsheet software such as Visio as well as the rest of the Microsoft suite,⁵⁸ including MS Project.

So, I urge you, if you want to see effective and efficient processes which work and are happily adopted and supported by those responsible for doing them, then put aside any ego and dedicate yourself to becoming an excellent facilitator and coach in order to support them in finding their own solution. The quicker you can make yourself redundant from the process then the more value you will add. But do not worry, I know from personal experience that there is always a next job for those with that skill set.

3.16 REQUIREMENTS – BETTER ANSWERS THROUGH BETTER QUESTIONS

Understanding requirements is obviously a fundamental part of the role of any BA, but the role is much more than listing stated needs. As BABOK^® v2 says, ‘The BA is responsible for eliciting the actual needs of the stakeholders, not simply their expressed desires.’

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Figure 3.27 Mind-mapping software is an effective tool for facilitation and co-construction

Remember, a key part of our interaction is to build rapport and trust, and we should spend just as much effort thinking about the way we will encourage the customer to feel, as they might not remember what was actually said. Some say that we decide emotionally then rationalise logically after the event. What do you feel?

3.16.1 World-views and perspectives – a different kind of elephant in the room?

We all have different perspectives, and from different perspectives we form different views and imagine different paths to get there. But, sometimes, we let our ego get in the way and imagine that our map is the only true map or even the only map. As you know, unfortunately some people are prepared to make huge sacrifices to prove their view. But when we appreciate variety we can create a beautiful functioning thing that everyone has part of. Harvest the views and perspectives of your stakeholders to enrich you vision and shun none. If their view is radically different then see it as a challenge to understand why, rather than dismissing it as wrong simply because it does not fit with your view or that of the majority.

Figure 3.28 Different perspectives are needed to progress from true to truth

3.16.2 Balancing open and closed questions

While delivering workshops in a large engineering company, I was surprised when I was asked on several occasions what the difference is between open and closed questions. So, for completeness, a refresher on that topic is provided now in Figure 3.29, to draw out how an NLP perspective can be applied to them.

It is easier to ask closed questions rather than open questions because we can readily perform a quantitative analysis of the results. But quantity does not always relate to quality, and in the field of performance management we say, ‘Just because something is easy to measure does not mean that we should measure it, and just because something is difficult to measure does not mean we should not try.’ Or more succinctly, ‘Rubbish in, rubbish out.’

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Figure 3.29 Properties of open and closed questions

Closed questions	Open questions
Framed to illicit a short binary answer to provide specific information	Encourages the second party to express their opinion
Projects our map of the world	Elicits their map of their world
Enables us to make decisions quickly	Provides us with the opportunity to listen to indicators of their preferred language patterns sensory preference, metaprograms, values and preferences
Transactional	Builds rapport
Encourages the second party to use unconscious ‘fast thinking’	Encourages the second party to unconscious ‘fast thinking’ consciously think about what they want using ‘slow thinking’
Isn’t this easy?	Why do you think that I end most sections with questions for you to reflect on?
Provides a universally understood answer	Open to interpretation
Easy to capture in questionnaires and spreadsheets and perform numeric analysis	Requires skill to elicit and interpret
Provides quantity	Provides quality
Useful in getting people to do what you want	Useful for finding out what people might actually want
Use after we have established the scope and frame of the topic through use of open questions	Use to build rapport and understand the client’s map of the world
Readily automated	Encourages us to interact with our customers

3.16.3 World-views, meta-programs and sample size

In Section 2.5 we introduced the concepts of world-views and filters, and the role of behavioural meta-programs in determining preferences. If you were to characterise your sample user population, which you are gathering requirements from, what proportion are:

• detail oriented rather than big picture?
• reflecting on the past rather than focusing on the future?
• process oriented rather than outcome focused?
• looking for variances rather than seeing commonality?

Have you ever asked for something and been surprised when it didn’t turn out the way you expected? Has someone asked you for something and been disappointed with what they ended up with? What are your preferences? How might these be biasing your proposed solution? How will you compensate? In the future, how are you going to change your behaviours to accurately capture people’s stated requirements?

3.16.4 Ask how not why

When I worked for one of the large consultancy firms, we were drilled with the ‘5Ys’ technique. I felt like I was interrogating people in client organisations by asking a succession of five ‘why’ questions before we moved on. An example might have run along the lines of the example given in Figure 3.31.

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Figure 3.31 The ‘5 whys’ men

5 whys	Possible responses
1. Why isn’t the product available?	The project got behind
2. Why did the project get behind?	Because the contractor didn’t deliver
3. Why didn’t the contractor deliver?	Because he didn’t have enough resource
4. Why didn’t he have enough resource?	They are on higher priority work
5. Why are they on higher priority work?	Because that was behind schedule

Being on the receiving end of this interrogation, how do you think you might feel? (There I go again, slipping into use of framing and priming to lead you to say what I expect you to.) In my experience, it led to people becoming defensive, even when given assurances such as, ‘Hello, we are from Y consultancy preparing a report for internal audit on your project and are here to help you.’

In contrast, explore the types of responses you might give to ‘how’ questions in Exercise 3.18.

3.17 REQUIREMENTS – THE AGILE ROAD TO ‘MOSCOW’

Adolf Hitler, like Napoleon before him, after stunning ‘quick wins’, finally bit off more than he could chew when he tried to go for a ‘big bang’ and implement his Russian campaign in one phase. Synchronicity, then, that agile methods make extensive use of with the term ‘MoSCoW’ to capture the principle of prioritising requirements in terms of (my interpretations):

• Musts – we must have these requirements as a minimum to function effectively.
• Shoulds – these requirements have obvious value, so we should do them if we have sufficient resources, but the system functions without them.
• Woulds – these would add value, and would be worth developing if we have time before the deadline.
• Coulds – I could do them if I have time, somewhere down the line. (But probably will just put them on this ‘car park’ instead, and maybe fold them into a future release.)

In traditional agile ‘sprints’, delivery is ‘time-boxed’, that is, after establishing a reasonable duration to check progress, say a week to a month, the team works down from the highest priority requirements until they run out of time. Delivery of functionality over time establishes the team’s ‘velocity’ for planning future sprints. A series of further sprints are scheduled, each going through their own development and test cycles, until the agreed release date.

Think about release of your next smartphone; the provider will not be pinned down on functionality until close to the release date, usually set by the marketing team, because they are not sure how much they will fit in, but it must have the Musts. Other software functionality from the desired requirements list can be added after you have purchased the phone. Customer feedback and research and development (R&D) then pave the way for a re-visitation of customer requirements, including those anti-gravity and teleportation features for the release of iPhone 99.

But it is not my job here to teach you the benefits and formalities of agile, which should be self-evident. Aside from the exercises below, which will help you to separate needs from wants and overcome some of the barriers to getting buy-in to an agile approach, I want to draw out a more general application of agile thinking.

As we have said from the start, agile is about approach and mindset. When I look at any task, including writing this book, I visualise it in terms of a standard consultant’s 2×2 matrix, as illustrated in Figure 3.33.

I want to exclude anything that I can from the top left box of Musts and establish the minimum that I can get away with while still fulfilling the customer needs.

For those familiar with bidding for contracts, a successful approach is to submit the minimum specification compliant with the request for tender, sometimes even knowing that it would not be fit for purpose. After all, if you do not win the work then you are not going to be able to add any value to the client anyway. A more expensive ‘value proposition’ can then be added alongside the compliant bid. Alternatively, a value proposition might be submitted after securing the contract.

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Figure 3.33 Boxing in MoSCoW

What is the minimum I must do to achieve the desired outcome in the shortest time with the least resource?	What work would I do if I still have resource and time before the final deadline?
What questions do I need to ask to get to the core of the opportunity or problem?
What additional work is there which has clear value to the client which I should do if I have resource?	What work could I do if I had available resource and inclination, bearing in mind the opportunity cost of staying on this task?

This approach gives me a number of immediate benefits:

1. I am de-risked in that I have a working solution in as short a time as practical.
2. I only need to ring-fence my resources for a short period but more importantly,
3. It focuses my attention on questioning what the customer really needs.

3.17.1 ‘Old wine in new bottles’ – haven’t we tasted this before?

Of course, much like NLP, a lot of this can be thought of as ‘old wine in new bottles’. Things that make sense and are practical will re-surface time and again in the colours of the new fashion (or ‘flavour of the month’, ‘à la mode’, ‘smells familiar’, or ‘reboot/upgrade/v2.0’, depending on your sensory preference).

Value management⁶⁰ has been around for a long time in engineering circles, though not so visible in recent years. I remember the textbook exercise of assigning value to the functionality of a bus stop, and in combination with assessed cost/effort, working out how to ‘get the most bang for our buck’ (see Figure 3.34). Of course, it is the client’s perception of value which we have to get an understanding of; we need to get into their world. That raised curb at the bus stop might be of little value to me, but my brother is in a wheelchair, and I might not need that timetable on display while I have my phone app, but what about my grandfather who does not have a car or smartphone? How will you find out how your client values things differently to you, as they surely will?

Note the parallels with Section 3.18.10 on benefits management in the delivery of change programs where value is added incrementally with each tranche. Added advantages are that our cash and business exposure is greatly reduced. It is politically much more acceptable to walk away from the project at any time without having to face the psychological burden of sunk cost as in a traditional ‘waterfall’ approach from requirements to test.

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Figure 3.34 Value and cost

And let us not forget the Pareto Principle,⁶¹ usually referred to as the 80/20 rule, which states that you can usually get 80 per cent of the value of an activity from only 20 per cent of the effort. This was taken a stage further by The Lazy Project Manager,⁶² who asked ‘Can’t we just get 80% of the 80% with 20% of the 20%?’ Yes, in principle, you can get two-thirds of the value (64 per cent) from less than 5 per cent of the effort.

3.17.2 Needs from wants using the meta-model

Having travelled on that long road to MoSCoW several times, it is a challenge to help users on the journey to understand what good enough might look, sound, feel and function like. Forget perfection; the best is the enemy of the good. Good enough is, well, good enough.

A fundamental of NLP is the meta-model (see Section 2.15), which helps us to develop precise language by minimising distortions, generalisations, deletions and equivalences. As I said in the introduction of Part 2, and you saw from the history of development of NLP in Section 2.2, little in NLP is new, being a synthesis and modelling of strategies which have been found to work. The meta-model is one of those few developments which was developed at the core of NLP, being reverse engineered from Erickson artfully vague hypnotic language.⁶³ It is perhaps the most effective structure for exploring other people’s maps of the world and clarifying what the words and phrases they use actually mean to them, rather than what they mean to us. Meta-model questions will help you to uncover all the types of distortions that fall out of our mouths all of the time (all of the time leads to distortion). Hence, our words provide a print-out of our internal map of the world to those who invest enough time to listen and understand them.

The table in Figure 3.35 shows the 12 types of meta-model violations with typical responses which could be asked to explore the elements that are obvious and redundant in the client’s map of the world.

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Figure 3.35 Using the meta-model in negotiation

I recommend that you play with the meta-model questions with friendly colleagues and move on to listening for the patterns before trying them out in real work situations, as they can come over as abrasive if used without finesse.

3.17.3 Getting requirements signed off

Finally, when we believe we have adequately captured requirements, we sometimes still have a problem getting the client to sign-off on them. Why might that be? Let us consider for a moment life in the client’s shoes. To take second position, if you will. What do they have to lose by signing off requirements, and how might they think that their position is better if they don’t?

Reasons may include:

• They do not want to be held accountable (and we might not want to either).
• They do not want to be charged for any changes down the line (and we do not either).
• They do not want to be seen to be the cause of delays further down the line (and neither do we).
• They do not understand the requirements document (and we probably have a limited understanding of their business, otherwise we might not need to behave so contractually about requirements).
• They don’t understand the language in the document – for example, ‘use cases’.
• The language preference in the document is that of the analyst, translated from their sensory-based language (or lack of it in the case of a high proportion of BAs being naturally AD).
• They are not actually sure what they want (as am I, when I am looking for something that I am not familiar with, such as when I recently bought my first telescope and ended up with a great specification which I found difficult to use; it remains in the garage to this day).

In one organisation, users’ reluctance to give up wants in order to get their needs sooner appeared to have been due to the fact that, in the past, they never got their next release. As we have discussed elsewhere, trust underpins everything, and it takes a long time and lot of effort to build. It can, however, easily be lost. How long does it take to recover a lost reputation?

Why do you think users sometimes resist signing off? How might you overcome those barriers in advance by thinking about it now?

Should we even be trying to get a ‘sign-off’ of these technical specifications by the end user? What I am looking for is ownership rather than accountability or blame. I want the client to help me if we hit problems, rather than us wasting time working out from the requirements whose fault it might have been.

To test whether I have captured what will satisfy them, and expressed it in their language, I usually use the phrase, while holding out my hand, ‘If I had this in my hand, would you take it now?’ This is a phrase we often use in behavioural change and personal coaching. If the person does not make a movement towards the hand you offered, then they are still not sure and you need to cycle around phrases such as, ‘Imagine what might we need to add or change for you to really want it’ or ‘Now it has that feature, how much do you want it?’ Always look for the body language rather than the words. Now you have commitment rather than a reluctant signature.

If you still feel that you need a formal sign-off, I use the phrase, ‘Now, in order to give you what you need, I need to get this closed-out with an email so that we can move forward and deliver it to you by your required date.’ Remember though, their map of the world and language patterns are different from yours, so keep your eyes and ears open for the subtlety of what they are saying, not what you think they mean.

3.18 DELIVERING TRANSFORMATIONAL CHANGE

The BCS survey discussed in part 1.2.3 lists ‘business transformation’ and ‘organisational change’ as two of the top three current management issues. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that the whole of the BA skill set in the SFIA framework is aligned to the ‘business change’ category.

Year after year, more change initiatives fail than succeed, particularly in not realising the promised benefits from the resources invested. As a member of the UK government’s accredited ‘Gateway’ reviewers for high risk projects, I see more than my fair share of them. But failure is avoidable. As quoted previously, what is now widely known as ‘Cobb’s Paradox’⁶⁴ points out:

We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure; so why do they still fail?

So, enough of failure; in NLP we model what works rather than what does not, so let us focus on making all of our projects succeed.

3.18.1 Do you want incremental improvement or transformational change?

Often when I am called in to review or support programs of change I find that they are still using linear project management methods with the emphasis on incremental milestones from the current situation. However, to achieve true transformation we must start with the end in mind, as walking forward in a direction with which we are familiar is unlikely to take us to new places. The table in Figure 3.36 shows the difference in application and emphasis for the two approaches.

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Figure 3.36 Do you want incremental change or transformation?

Incremental change	Transformational change
Suitable for stable business environments	Required when business environment changes
Focus on efficiency	Focus on efficacy – doing the right things, and effectiveness – achieving results
Need to understand processes	Need to understand customers
Competitive advantage is cost or time	Competitive advantage is in creating new services and value
Efficiencies of a few per cent can be realised	Transformation should target at least 30 percent improvement to outweigh barriers
Only refinements to processes are required	Changes to mindset and to behaviours are required
Forward looking	Imagine a point in the future where you are successful and look backwards to understand how to achieve that
Operators best placed to identify efficiencies	Operators can be blinkered by ‘as is’ situation so best facilitated by external change team
Improvements can be captured and measured easily	Benefits require formal methods to realise and track

In the following sections I will focus on transformational change, but incremental change should still be carried out after transformation to realise further improvements in performance and operational excellence.

3.18.2 Be customer centric

After central government modernisation and technology-enabled transformation initiatives, which basically migrated processes from being paper-based to being web-enabled, another transformation was initiated which still has a long way to run. Of course the driver was to reduce the number of civil servants by migrating customers to the lowest cost channel, that is, self-service via the web. While high-volume services in central and local government mimicked operating models and processes in the financial services sector, the words around valuing ‘the customer’ rang hollow in both, especially after a couple of instances of wasting hours hanging on the telephone waiting for ‘customer services’. In the private sector, such a commodity market differentiated on cost rather than service destroys brand loyalty and customers migrate to the lowest cost provider. Margins are lost and quality is on a downward spiral of cost cutting.

Bizarrely, in spite of the old adage in retail that ‘the customer is always right’, it can appear from down in the operational engine room that customers are a pain. Life would be a lot easier if we did not have them, or at least if they would stop bothering us and stick to the process as we designed it. In financial services and utilities these are usually designed to maximise cross-selling rather than delight us, the customer. These attitudes and behaviours prompted fellow NLP practitioner, Shelle Rose Charvet, to write her excellent follow-up book The Customer is Bothering Me.⁶⁵

So, strangely, real customer-focused service is revolutionary. Instead of us, as the professionals/experts, telling people what is best for them, we should give them the choice. To get around our own biases, we have to develop the ability to ask questions without imposing our own filters. You can practice structures for eliciting what the customer might actually want in Section 3.16 on ‘better answers through better questions’.

One expert in selling and buying, and associate NLP practitioner, Michael Beale, summed up current thinking around creating a sustainable business as:⁶⁷

1. Maximise the proportion of ‘good sales’ from bad, that is, focus on products and services that the customer is happy to pay for rather than charging them for things that they do not want or use your market position to bully or penalise them. (Think of examples such as phone roaming charges, lock-in periods for gym membership, obfuscating tariffs from utilities, and so on, as great ways to tarnish your brand.)
2. In your requests for customer feedback you only really have to ask one question: ‘Would you recommend us to friends and colleagues?’
   And I will add a final follow-up question.
3. What is one thing that I could do more or less of to improve the value and quality of our services to you?

Would you happily and unreservedly recommend your service providers to friends and colleagues?

How do you think that your customers might respond to those questions? You can practise using the exercise on second positioning your customer in Section 3.17.3 to help you find out.

3.18.3 For transformational change think programs not projects

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Figure 3.37 Behaviours of effective program and project managers

Effective behaviours for a project manager	Effective behaviours for a program manager
Focused on delivery of assets to time and cost	Focused on operational outcomes and realisation of benefit
Drives out risk and uncertainty (‘Away from’ risk)	Comfortable with risk and uncertainty in order to maximise opportunity (‘Towards’ opportunity)
Manages internal stakeholders and suppliers	Navigates through external stakeholders
Supervisory or directive leadership style	Coaching style of leadership
Suited to detail	Likely to be ‘big picture’
Resilient and may be dissociated from feelings	High degree of empathy to tune into feelings of stakeholders
Comfortable telling	A natural listener
Driven by schedule	Directed by business case
Might be introverted	Might be extroverted
Task focused	People focused
Asks ‘why’ questions	Asks ‘how’ questions
Explains project view	Elicits other people’s perspectives and world-view

To be honest, for many years I was a sceptic of the adoption of program terminology and had many discussions on the topic with my colleagues in the best practice group for program management.⁶⁸ I was not alone in reluctance to adopt the developing world-view around programs. The APM only restructured its body of knowledge to address the different perspectives of programs and projects (and also portfolios) in its sixth edition in 2012 under the chairmanship of the late Mike Nichols of the Nichols Group,⁶⁹ with whom I was honoured to sit on the steering group.⁷⁰ US-based PMI has also supplemented its ‘Project Management Professional’ qualification with a similar one for program management.⁷¹ Today, roles and terminology have been clarified and codified to the point where they are coherent and practical.⁷² To cement my conversion, I now deliver master classes in program management for my former employer BNFL, now Sellafield Ltd, and re-purpose some of that slide-ware in this section.

So, what promoted my change of mind? Basically, I saw that, in general, projects were still focused on delivery of assets rather than realisation of benefits, and even today, benefits as stated in the business case are not achieved in the majority of IT projects. Whether I agree with it or not, the PM role remains largely technical and supervisory rather than one of leadership, consigning the BA to a role of requirements gathering and testing. Program management, however, promotes the BA to undertake change management and benefits realisation, often with the title ‘business change manager’.

One of the exercises we conduct in workshops is to imagine the behaviours of ideal program managers and PMs to help crystallise the differences in roles. Some of the responses are captured in the table in Figure 3.37. Most of the behavioural aspects can be readily matched to the NLP meta-programs.

Irrespective of what it is currently called, do you think that you are working on a project or a program? More importantly, is the approach suitable for realisation of the benefits articulated in the business case?

3.18.4 The role of the executive in sponsoring change

When I first became involved with the APM best practice group for governance in 2004,⁷³ I realised from the UK National Audit Office’s list of reasons for project failure – gleaned from several thousand independent gateway reviews⁷⁴ – that failure was usually outside the direct control of either the BA or the PM. Those causes of failure, however, should be under the influence of the sponsor, otherwise you have the wrong sponsor appointed. A standard model for program governance showing the leading role of the sponsor, sometimes referred to as the senior responsible owner (SRO), is shown in Figure 3.38.

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Figure 3.38 How the sponsor supports delivery

In 2005, when we published the first guidance on project governance,⁷⁵ even the word ‘governance’ had not yet made an appearance in APM’s BoK, PMI’s BoK or any of the OGC (now Axelos) publications such as PRINCE2 (the IIBA had not yet been founded). The role of sponsor was even less well defined, and so our guidance on the role of the sponsor in delivering change,⁷⁶ published by the APM, was readily adopted by the OGC, now the Cabinet Office, and distributed to senior sponsors. Recognising the gap that had been filled in this age of governance and oversight, a launch event was hosted at the Institute of Directors’ London headquarters⁷⁷ and introduced by the then chairman of the IoD, Sir Neville Bain.

Personally, I did my best to avoid sponsors right through the 1990s as I did not understand their role any more than they did. But now I say to you, ‘sweat’ your sponsor; that is, give them tasks and make them work to support delivery. Not only should they be considered as part of the team, think of them as team president. They should be working behind the scenes to make your life easier. Under formal methods, they are actually the ones who ‘own’ the business case, that is, present it for funding approval, and who ‘own’ the benefits, as benefits are usually only realised after the resources have moved on to the next project. Of course, they will probably get you to write it for them.

To me, sponsorship is all about leadership, which is the ability to get people to want to follow you, and they should practice the language of leadership. While you should use very concrete, specific and detailed language to elicit requirements, a leader needs to paint a picture in people’s minds of where they want to take them. For this we use what NLP refers to as ‘artfully vague language’.⁷⁸

Artfully vague language is the approach of choice for politicians and those seeking to build a following and achieve consensus. Basically, you make generic ‘motherhood and apple pie’ statements that everyone thinks they understand, interprets in their own map of the world, and few have reason to disagree with. Any devil is in the detail. In training I use videos of great orators and politicians to illustrate common language patterns established millennia ago by Aristotle as part of the art of rhetoric,⁷⁹ and more recently mastered by US President Obama. It is the polar opposite of the meta-model introduced in Section 2.15 to uncover specific meaning. Basically, use:

• Global and inclusive terms – We (everyone, really?).
• Nominalisations (verbs used as nouns) – took ‘the decision’ (which?).
• Words and phrases with generic or global meaning (though not common meaning) – to achieve improvements (value, customer satisfaction?).
• Lack of specificity – and things (which?) will be better (how?).
• Lack of referential index –in the future (when?).

It is also the language of hypnotists,⁸⁰ and allows people to tune out and feel that they are part of something global. You can deal with specifics with individuals, according to their maps of the world, further down the line, but it removes many roadblocks if people feel that they want to be part of the change, even if they have suspended disbelief for the time being.

3.18.5 Imagining end state and creating the future together

As you would expect, use of the NLP technique of future pacing can be applied directly to development and description of the future state resulting from transformation. We have used this technique successfully for not only new systems, but also organisational strategy and very large support frameworks. Use Exercise 3.19 to create a robust ‘end state’ which is agreed to by your stakeholders.

3.18.6 People take action when standing on a burning deck

Basic management theory from the time of Henry Ford says that some people are more motivated by fear and others by greed; the proverbial ‘carrot or stick’. NLP says that people have a behavioural bias ‘away from’ problems or ‘towards’ opportunity, and we captured this meta-program in your self-assessment in Exercise 3.2. But why take a chance guessing what motivates someone when you can ‘buy one, get one free’? Accomplished NLP practitioners, like accomplished politicians, attempt to cover both ends of binary pairs for meta-programs using inclusive statements. As well as removing the need to make assumptions about the target audience, it also reduces inadvertent projection of our own biases. The technique can be used to add shade to the usual black and white presentation of ‘as is’ and ‘to be’.

It is often said that transformation, especially of large organisations, rarely exists in the absence of a so-called ‘burning deck’. You might recognise other kinaesthetic based metaphors around ‘doing’ when encouraging people to take action, like ‘holding their feet to the fire’. Pick up on them to encourage feelings of discomfort with the current state.

We often hear of politicians putting a ‘spin’ on things, and even employing a ‘spin doctor’. The sales technique of SPIN selling⁸² was actually taught to me during my NLP practitioner course by NLP trainer Paul Matthews, now managing director (MD) of People Alchemy and former European head of sales for a large software vendor.⁸³ The steps are shown in Figure 3.39:

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Figure 3.39 The steps in SPIN selling

Notice that this method of selling is not about talking someone into action, but in asking questions that allow them to talk themselves into it. The approach is parallel to that used successfully in coaching interventions. How can this technique help you to create the impression of a platform which, if not actually burning yet, might be about to burst into flames?

3.18.7 Getting stakeholders on board

‘Communicating ideas and getting buy-in’ was a specific skill gap in the BCS survey reviewed in Section 1.2.3. The success of your project is often more about perception than reality, so best to start to influence perception in key stakeholders from the outset. Your initial stakeholder map should be a living document which evolves as your map expands through each new contact. Personally, I use a mind map to capture the evolving picture. When you get down to mapping all of your stakeholders, I expect there to be too many to meet up with on a one-on-one basis. The table in Figure 3.40 is an established tool to help prioritise who to talk to, basically anyone who can accelerate your project or derail it. For the rest of those affected by your project, roadshows and online information usually suffice.

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Figure 3.40 Stakeholder power versus interest grid

Who can help you overcome barriers? Who can stop your project? Who has the most influence? What is their map of the world and how might your project benefit them? How are you going to engage them?

Be sure to maintain a stakeholder engagement plan to monitor and record stakeholder activities and the evolving stakeholder landscape as a mechanism to share progress. Fields for a stakeholder engagement plan might include:

• Category (from power versus influence grid).
• Stakeholder position.
• Name.
• Who in the team owns the relationship?
• How will engagement be managed, that is, through existing committee structure, Friday morning coffee, over golf?
• What events are scheduled?
• What engagement has occurred to date?
• What do you think their current position, needs and wants are?

Personally, I also grade the relationship from green – strong supporter – through to red – active blocker. No colour means I have not found out yet, while amber means they are still making up their minds. Over time, how does your stakeholder landscape change? How could you make further improvements?

Once you have constructed your initial stakeholder grid then you may want to think about an analysis of your stakeholder social network. As you already know, network relationships are all the buzz with social media. Who are the key ‘connectors’ influencing perception of your outcome?

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Figure 3.41 Example of a network diagram

Which projects that you were involved in do you think have been presented as successful, and which were considered failures? Do you think that opinion, if not the result, could have been influenced by more robust stakeholder engagement?

Personally, I do not attempt to directly influence those whom I consider to have already made up their minds. I do, however, employ advocacy; that is, influencing people who have influence on those people. Who do you know, or who could you get to know, who could help you to influence, or at least neutralise, any remaining potential blockers? Remember that you do not need to do this directly, and your sponsor may be better placed to manage the politics. Being responsible for change, however, you are responsible for deploying appropriate tools to manage the stakeholder process. (This often leads to confusion over the term ‘stakeholder management’, with many preferring ‘stakeholder engagement’; ‘stakeholder management’ is management of processes, which encompass stakeholder engagement, but engagement needs to be prefaced with analysis and summarised through tracking for broader stakeholder management.)

Tools and techniques for one-on-one engagement are illustrated in Section 3.20.

3.18.8 Managing expectations

Do you like unpleasant surprises? Neither will your sponsor or other stakeholders. It becomes rather boring to see highlight reports in the sequence: green-green-green-red! Red from nowhere on a highlight report is also red on the face of your sponsor when they have to explain to their customer that they did not have proper oversight in place. Expect a debilitating program of external assurance as a consequence. Trust takes a long time to develop but a moment to lose forever. The golden rule is:

No Surprises!

Do you think that the public consider the iconic Sydney Opera House a success, despite it being an order of magnitude over budget and a decade late? How does Richard Branson hold on to the deposits of paying customers for his Virgin Galactic flights into space, despite a history of delays and even the demonstrator blowing up? In a world where perception is the only reality, it is down to active stakeholder engagement and managing customer expectations.

Of course, marketing, sales or the account manager might have already set expectations too high in order to close the sale and secure their bonus. I know many in the business analysis function try to get involved as early as practical to inject a dose of realism; keep at it, as a sale that does not make money is not even good for the client or the salesman in the long run.

Senior management are conversant with the phrase:

Under-promise and over-deliver

but often we get the opposite. Professor Bent Flyberg at Oxford Said Business School’s centre for complex projects makes a living describing people’s natural ‘optimism bias’, resulting in delivery that runs late and over-cost.⁸⁴ Compounding the fact that most organisations systemically under-estimate resources, however, humans are loss averse.⁸⁵ Psychologists such as Daniel Kannerman demonstrated that we are happier getting less but more than we were promised, rather than getting more but less than we were promised. Assume that you have an ‘intelligent client’ and do not oversell, or you will come to regret it.

Most of us involved with corporate buying are familiar with ‘the hype cycle’ (see Figure 3.42),⁸⁶ and I find it makes a useful tool to keep things light and recalibrate expectations at project initiation with the client. Keep the illustration visible to remind us all that current difficulties are only a phase in what will be a successful journey.

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Figure 3.42 The Gartner Hype Cycle

If you were in a position of oversight for a major change initiative, what would you like to know, and how would you like that information communicated to you?

3.18.9 Overcoming resistance to change

As Machiavelli pointed out,⁸⁷ transformation upsets the status quo and so will inevitably be resisted by established stakeholders. Whether conscious and deliberate or not, this is human nature. Hence, transformation programs will often default to incremental change, which is not disruptive and hence not threatening. Unfortunately, it does not result in transformation of performance either. But we can still ‘cherry-pick the low hanging fruit’, as getting some early successes under our belt will help enormously in managing dissenters. But what does it mean, and how do you do it?

Personally, I use the grid in Figure 3.43 and organise a workshop of stakeholders to help to populate the squares with examples of services / features / benefits. Different perceptions of value and resistance quickly emerge, which helps to inform the client of the difficult choices you have to make, but hopefully you will gain at least some consensus. It also creates some buy-in to the early implementation plan, and you could go further to encourage them to become evangelists for the project.

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Figure 3.43 Value versus resistance

During master classes on change management, after first establishing an overwhelming vision for what we are trying to achieve, I tease with the phrase, ‘It all seems so easy, doesn’t it. So what is stopping us?’ After a long pause, I get the delegates to list on a flip chart everything that they think is preventing them from moving forward quickly enough. Of course, it is all specific to each change initiative, each industry, each organisation … No, generally it is not. Barriers to change are fundamentally part of human nature and fairly generic, as are methods of dealing with them. But first we must assess their magnitude, and decide whether we have enough push from the problem, pull from the opportunity and management support and resource to overcome them.

Some people, especially analysts, like to make tables of barriers and levers, score them and weight them and decide on the likely outcome. Personally, I like to visualise them in a force-field diagram as shown in Figure 3.44.

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Figure 3.44 Lewin force-field diagram illustrating barriers and levers for change

What do you think barriers to your outcomes are?

Of course, sometimes there appears to be just one awkward individual who takes malevolent delight in ruining your day. But I am of the belief that no one comes to work to mess up. Perhaps I am misguided, but usually I find that the individual just has a different map of the world. My own reframe is to see this as an opportunity to practise my skills of eliciting this strange creature’s world-view, and then finding their levers for change. But if we do not have time or energy for that, then try the simple but effective Exercise 3.20.

3.18.10 Focus on delivery of benefits

As you might expect, the SFIA framework includes ‘the quantification of potential business benefits’ as part of the BA role, and benefits realisation mapping was added to the second edition of BCS’s book Business Analysis. A formalised benefits management process helps to work backwards to focus on activities which are essential to delivery of outcomes and realisation of business benefits.

Some people struggle with constructing benefits maps, confusing activities, capabilities, outcomes and benefits, but they are quite easy to construct by asking questions of the right format. In Section 3.16 we discussed getting better answers through better questions. Figure 3.45 illustrates how the sometimes confused terms outputs, outcomes and benefits are related:

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Figure 3.45 Benefits in the context of a healthcare program

Now, starting with the example of the benefits being measured in Figure 3.45, do you necessarily have to create that asset, that is, build a new hospital? In fact, these targets were largely met by alternative activities. What alternative ways can you think of for reducing wait times in this example?

I have seen benefits-mapping exercises to back-fit this approach to large programs which reveal tens of millions of pounds of unnecessary scope, and at the same time illustrate that the scope was missing which would have been necessary to realise the benefits from the assets being created. The impact of the latter would, of course, have led to significant delays when discovered later, affecting not only time and cost, but also functionality, risk and stakeholder confidence.

Can you relate all your activities to operational outcomes, and how you will base-line and measure the benefits?

3.18.11 ‘Let’s not blow everything up in a big bang’ – agile thinking and use of tranches

If we imagine ourselves on a boat, it would be straightforward to plot a course from the front to the back, bow to stern. Unless the boat was very big, or we could not see the other end because of large obstacles, or it was very foggy, especially if we were in rough seas. In these cases, we would be advised to plot our course to the next point where we could stop and rest, then revisit our course with better visibility. Though we might appear to be zig-zagging to someone on solid ground, we would in fact be maintaining forward direction by the most practical route. And so it is with programs of change where we have an overall direction but cannot see clearly quite how to get to our destination at the time we set off.

That is why we use tranches in programs, to provide resting places where we can harvest benefits of progress from creating new capabilities while re-assessing future direction in a changing environment. In this respect, a program approach is similar to an agile approach. With an agile approach, strictly speaking, we should be able to envision the whole development before we decide to break it down into time-based ‘sprints’. With a program approach, tranches are based on achieving capabilities rather than a duration or phase of working. Thus, a program approach embodies the traditional change management cycle illustrated in Figure 3.46.

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Figure 3.46 Unfreezing and freezing meta-states

Because tranches are based on delivery of distinct capabilities, they give us natural ‘walk-away’ decision points where we can harvest the benefits of investment to date, rather than committing ourselves to an all or nothing investment cycle. For large investments, it is easy to fall in to the ‘sunk cost fallacy’, which might otherwise keep the team working long after hope of achieving the business case has, in reality, already been lost.

Calling things by their proper names – tranches, stages, phases or sprints

In NLP we aim to be very precise with our language. As we demonstrate in workshop exercises, the same common words are understood to mean quite different things in different people’s heads, despite being in the same function of the same organisation with similar cultural and educational backgrounds. So, let us be clear with terminology regarding work break-down, as words are often used interchangeably, causing needless confusion.

A programmatised approach to business change is similar in many respects to agile methodology, especially in the agile mindset, for example:

• Focus on early realisation of benefits.
• De-risk implementation by avoiding a ‘big bang’.
• Focus on stakeholders.
• Adaptable approach to changes in environment.
• Plan from a helicopter view around building blocks.
• Adopt a facilitative style and involve the team and stakeholders in co-construction.
• Engage business users directly inside the delivery team.

The main difference should be that, by using agile in developing system architecture, we should have a good picture of what it is we are building before we set off, but choose to deliver in ‘sprints’ in order to realise benefits incrementally. This brings forward the benefits curve and reduces the peaks of the risk profile. While agile sprints should deliver progressive functionality, the main driver for their length is duration, which should not be more than a few weeks, whereas tranches in change management, based on delivery of new capabilities rather than time, are more likely to be months and years.

Stages are sub-divisions of the life-cycle and a very convenient point to reconsider the merits of the business case and reformulate team membership for change in focus. Stage and gate originated in new product development⁸⁸ and is extensively used in pharmaceutical development, where most projects are expected to be terminated early. The method is also extensively used where development periods are long, including the automotive and aerospace industries. So, use of stages and gates is a portfolio process for opportunity and risk management rather than one supporting benefits realisation. The stage and gate process is used by many central government departments to review status before allocating the next round of funding in very large, high risk projects. While stages and gates are extensively used in projects, only a ‘Gate Zero’ is used in programs as an assurance mechanism to ensure that organisation, processes and documentation is in place to support successful delivery.

Many people used the terms tranches and phases interchangeably, but phases are only convenient points in planning, such as handover from one contractor to another, or financial periods. An example would be in construction where first phase electrical fit-out would put wiring in, followed by plastering, that is, a handover to another resource skill set, followed by second phase electrical fit-out. None of which necessarily indicates any realisable benefit to the customer.

When you are using tranches correctly, you will always have the option of closing out the project and mobilising your resources to other initiatives, as benefits of work to the last tranche should have already been realised.

3.18.12 Selecting options for implementation

Consider Figure 3.47. A ‘perfect’ solution, but with a lot of resistance, or which is difficult to embed, does not result in any more benefit than a simple solution, such as a spreadsheet which is widely adopted. A simpler solution also minimises disruption by the program. Hence, I council you from experience: look for options which are likely to result in sufficient benefits with lower risk and disruption. Having constructed your benefits map, look at it again from right to left. If what you want to achieve is on the right, do you really need all the stuff on the left to achieve it?

Consider Figure 3.45, showing the relationship between building a new hospital and the measured benefits which we are expecting to result. If we start on the right with the goal of reducing waiting time for hip operations, do we really need to build a new hospital, which will take years to complete, irrespective of the cost? In master classes on this topic, delegates have no problem coming up with a long list of alternative ways to achieve the benefits more quickly and cheaply. (Many of these were in fact used by the health service when it considered the same approach.) Unfortunately, sometimes ‘the tail wags the dog’, and we become the slave of a system implementation.

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Figure 3.47 Options – the best is the enemy of the good when it comes to implementation

Hopefully, your sponsor understands the boundaries of work-scope and relevant responsibilities, but is it worth checking that what you are delivering makes sense on their map of the world?

3.18.13 Methods, tools and behavioural competencies

The UK government’s transformation agenda popularised structured delivery methods such as PRINCE2. In parallel, a comprehensive methodology for business process reengineering and change management in public services, SPRINT, was developed by a lead authority in collaboration with a university’s organisational development function.⁸⁹ The resulting SPRINT methodology is in my opinion equal to the best out there and is actively supported by a community of practice and annual conference. (I should say here that I am biased, as Peak Performance is a SPRINT accredited organisation.) As described in Section 1.3 on qualifications, since then, IIBA was formed (in Canada), qualifications by BCS have become more popular and PMI piloted a BA qualification in 2014.

Why was it felt, so late in the day, that these capabilities needed to be developed? Because it was realised that progress on the five-year funded program was not where it should have been.

Funding enabled a lot of people in local and central government to be trained in the PRINCE2 method. Unfortunately, conferring the title of ‘PRINCE2 Practitioner’ was mistaken as a qualification in project management itself, whereas, as the lead author and accompanying manual says, it is (only), a method to support project management. When Andy Murray of Outperform, now part of global consultancy RSM, was commissioned to update PRINCE2, he reported that the overwhelming feedback was that behavioural competencies need to be added. They do indeed need to be added to create capability, but do not belong in the method document itself. Rather they should be developed through a professional cadre or academy using similar group coaching methods to those we deploy within large corporates.

Maturing your change management capability – mindset and toolset

Organisations are maturing from heroic endeavours of change and program management to codifying methods and processes that improve chances of success. Indeed, PWC’s survey for the PMI ‘State of the profession’ highlighted a stark difference between high performing organisations, with a better than 80 per cent success rate, and low performing organisations, with a large correlation to maturity.⁹⁰ Hence the opportunity arises to assess the likelihood of success of programs and projects across an organisation by assessing maturity.

Maturity models were reviewed in a guide by the APM,⁹¹ and include the CMMI model and PMI’s OPM model. More recently, the IPMA have introduced the Delta model, which is perhaps the best in addressing the maturity of behaviours likely to lead to success.⁹² As an accredited maturity assessor, I still consider assessment of behavioural maturity to be lagging significantly.

Another approach to assessing maturity of delivery is the Portfolio, Program and Project Management Maturity Model (P3M3).⁹³ As a trained and accredited assessor, I find in particular that the program management dimension provides reasonable assurance for change management, covering blueprint, benefits, processes, stakeholder management and roles. Some organisations, including the State of Queensland in Australia,⁹⁴ have mandated use of maturity assessment using P3M3 for their departments, and many large organisations in the UK have not only assessed maturity but also have improvement programs in place.

3.19 MINIMISING ORGANISATIONAL DISTRESS DURING TRANSFORMATION

We will deal with managing stress and building resilience in ourselves, alongside broader aspects of the emotional intelligence quadrant of managing ourselves, in Section 3.29. Here we look at ways of minimising stress in an organisation during transformation. Addressing organisational needs forms part of the fourth quadrant of the emotional intelligence framework under social influence. I find this particularly important, not just for ethical reasons, but because an organisation under excessive stress is likely to freeze and resort to passive aggressive behaviour rather than make life easy for us as managers of change.

Stress seriously affects people’s health and wellbeing and it is the number one cause of lost working time through sickness in the UK, with one in four working adults suffering from a stress-related health problem in their lifetime. Organisational restructuring is perhaps the biggest source of stress in the workplace. Hence, as agents of change, we should optimise our approach to reduce the effect we have on the health of others.

3.19.1 Causes of stress in the organisation

I run an ongoing stress survey,⁹⁵ and results to date are:

• Causes – 55 per cent reported being hopelessly under-resourced.
• Symptoms – only 30 per cent did not feel overwhelmed, and 46 per cent were very anxious about work.
• Business impact – only 30 per cent would stay if they had another job offer.
• Wellbeing – only 27 per cent had confidence in their leadership.
• Support – only 30 per cent had any training in managing stress or building resilience.

Do you think stress helps an organisation to move from good to great?⁹⁶

I supplemented a review of literature with input from more than 20 workshops around England speaking about the causes and impact of stress. Common causes of stress given at the workshops are shown in Figure 3.48. Consider how could you modify your approach and behaviours to reduce your impact against each of these.

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Figure 3.48 Causes of stress in the organisation

Cause	Mitigation
Uncertainty
Change
Lack of trust
Lack of control
Lack of leadership
Being micro-managed
Unrealistic targets and deadlines
Lack of recognition
Lack of support and coaching
Not enough rest
Inter-personal conflict
Uncertainty

3.19.2 How the organisation performs better without stress

As in shown Figure 3.49, when under stress we exhibit classic responses of ‘freeze, flight or fight’.

In Figure 3.50, consider how each of these might manifest itself in your organisation.

Stressed people under-perform and make poor decisions at best. Conversely, in the absence of stress, individuals are more likely to collaborate, motivate and create. Which team culture would you prefer if you were in charge? What can you do about it?

3.19.3 Minimising the impact of stress from change management initiatives

Having been responsible for bid and transformation through large PPPs, I have seen change management done badly, and witnessed the effects on the workforce in general as well as on the wellbeing and careers of individuals. In PPPs we have an extreme, but mergers and acquisitions are similar. Put yourself in their shoes: your employer is changing from a ‘cosy local government job for life’ to working for a profit-centred private sector company with aggressive performance management. You may be re-located. Your job description will change. Your boss will change. The systems and processes you use will change. Efficiency targets mean there are likely to be fewer of you. Your outputs will be measured and your performance will be managed. Your output and performance is expected to go up markedly immediately after transition! In their shoes, how do you feel?

Figure 3.49 Stress pyramid

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Figure 3.50 Manifestations of stress in your organisation

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Stress response

Manifestations in your organisation

Flight
Fight
Freeze

I saw one of these transitions drag out for three years waiting for supporting technology platforms and new facilities to come online. Performance declined rather than increased due to the long-term impact of stress, which in turn led to more pressure. When it came to my turn to manage a similar portfolio of technology and facilities through transition, with the benefit of hindsight I realised that performance would be better if we did things quicker and tried our best to keep stakeholders involved through the process. This was underpinned by:

• Setting up joint governance involving leadership from all stakeholder groups with communications top of the agenda.
• Getting agreement at the governance level that the implementation would be as clean and swift as practical, shortening analysis of the stagnant ‘as is’ stage and adopting ‘vanilla’ implementations of key systems such as enterprise resource management and customer relationship management systems with minimal customisation and configuration.
• Only adopting common off the shelf technology (COTS) where we had reference transformations. Avoiding ‘bleeding edge’ technology, no matter how good the sales pitch.
• Working hand in glove with corporate communications to tell people what was going to happen, what was happening and celebrate what we had achieved. Planning media campaigns to work across all channels, appealing to different representational systems and meta-programs, especially away from problems and towards solutions.
• Having a dedicated ring-fenced budget to manage the change and supporting training. Note that this is normally excluded from capital expenditure (CapEx) proposals.
• Employing a dedicated change management professional to augment the program in addition to the business analysis and BPR resource.
• Having a dedicated HR change management professional to promptly deal with queries regarding working conditions. You might already have an HR business partner who would love to be involved and bring additional resources to bear.
• Avoiding ‘big bang’ change-overs by piloting all roll-out of systems through lead groups with close support.
• Involving local subject matter experts in the specification and design, especially ‘black hats’ to look for what might go wrong.
• Majoring on active stakeholder management with ongoing engagement of all groups including workforce representatives.
• Training up a group of ‘change champions’ within the workforce to act as local ambassadors and points of contact.
• Holding regular ‘town hall’ meetings where anyone had a voice to ask any questions.
• Celebrating success at every opportunity.

Award for ‘Major PPP of the year’ was in no small part due to the way we managed the transition. Having made life-long friends with some of those affected was the real measure of success. What approach will you use to minimise road-kill on the road to change?