The challenge:

Change management practices are still often overly influenced by consulting practices that define a target state and regiment adoption and compliance with established methods.

Such traditional approaches to change no longer work:

• With "Knowledge Work" (1), much is left to the interpretation of every team member, and it will not join into a collective alignment unless people are engaged in the definition,

• Humans have emotions; thinking people adopt change by rationally complying with a standard is misguided. Humans are largely influenced by context and emotions, and it is necessary to stimulate those and understand what context may play against change,

• Organisations and leaders struggle to effectively create intentionality on intangibles. It often results in over-communication that frustrates people,

• Much is known within the organisational and team systems, and out-of-context methods will inevitably face resistance unless they have been set to fit the context,

• And worse, regimenting adaption mutes the people’s input, and using extrinsic motivation for adoption (like paying bonuses) tends to game it too.

Therefore, it is essential to work with the context, collective alignment, and continuous means of stimulation as part of any change initiative and as a way of feedback. This is what the practice supervision groups and Guilds do.

(1) Knowledge Work is work performed by applying workers' knowledge and reflection, generally collaboratively. Service industries and digital are all about knowledge work. A characteristic of knowledge work is relying upon and developing the competencies of all the people doing the work so they can apply relevant judgement and build autonomy. 

Henko's differentiated approach:

Our approach is systemic and human-focused by default.

We offer two key services and can design experiences tailored to your exact needs.

The focused practice supervision groups

The focused practice supervision groups look to reverse the learning approach, working from what people experience in practice. This makes it a practical and pragmatic learning journey that favours adoption.

The groups are generally themed for focus, and we design a range of considerations around those topics. We have established templated journeys for:

• Engineering Leadership,

• LeanTech leadership,

• Kaizen improvements,

• Strategic and systemic leadership,

• Collaboration effectiveness,

• Flow,

• etc.

The groups may run in different formats. Typically, we aim for six sessions over three or six months, accommodating twelve people. It is best to organise those cohorts from diverse people across the business to bring as wide a perspective as possible. The group format has very reasonable costs and leverages peer connections in the business. The groups are a very effective way of developing learning from practice, making them highly effective and pragmatic.

Guilds and in-house meetups

Guilds are essential for developing and maintaining expertise when knowledge and practices evolve quickly. Many organisations, often in engineering domains, have embraced the idea of creating Guilds (or CoEs - Centres of Excellence) to share knowledge.

However, running such Guilds consistently and creatively is often hit-and-miss because it is left to the best endeavours of a coach or engineer who also has a day job to get on with. When delivery pressure hits, the Guild goes mute. 

We offer to manage those Guilds on your behalf to ensure continuity and resilience. We co-design a programme with you and organise the run of events. We coordinate with in-house speakers and can also plan a run of externally sourced speakers amongst our networks.

Additional options:

Optionally, we can also bring personal coaching assistance on public speaking to some in-house speakers, as public speaking and presenting are essential skills to develop in their leadership.

Expected outcomes: 

Our approach complements change efforts with a continuous reflection focused on practice adoption.

As a result, you can expect:

• A better adoption of change in practice,

• Acceleration of change,

• New ideas, emergence and ownership coming from the teams,

• Better relationships and communications between the cross-functional roles,

• Informal networks and collaboration developing across the business,

• Better development of expertise and standardisation where it matters,

• Eventually, sustainability of the change efforts.

Your next steps: 

Those offerings can easily be deployed after a short discussion or designed as part of a bigger programme.

Please contact us to discuss your needs. We can help you quickly test the service by setting up initial groups.