Let me share a couple really helpful communication tools. bar none. The best one is one that we've been alluding to up until this point. In fact, I have helped you to create a couple already. These are one page talking notes. These one page talking notes are taking complicated information written in point form, and making complex information understandable.

Now, your communication people, if you have any in your organization can be really helpful. That's their skill around taking complex information and making it simple. Never underestimate how simple it needs to be to be clear and engaging to people. To the degree we can use graphics and images to help tell a story that's very effective. These talking notes are created with input from the senior leaders and the project teams, the ultimate owners of the change and the people with the most detailed up to date. current information.

These talking notes are used to get everyone on the same page through conversation and discussion as required, not simply read or sent to employees as an attachment to an email. These one page talking notes need to have dates on them because the situation continually unfolds. And we need to make sure that we're current with our information, then everyone would have the most current up to date, particular talking note on whatever subject it is that we're sharing. And the things we're sharing on these talking notes are the essential strategic change and transition related facts. We're sharing facts here and it's strategy change and transition. These talking notes are a foundation for dialogue between all the leaders in the project teams as well as the supervisors and the employees.

Let me share some examples that have been created in the past. We already shared earlier the one pager of the strategy message. Now here's an interesting one pager that was created in an organization. This was launching a fairly major quality project. And in this information shared in front of you here, they have changed related information, strategy information, as well as transition information. The change information is the first box on top how it works and it describes a little bit about what this new system is not a lot of detail but enough to provide an overview.

In the middle section, it was why is change happening now? Why are we doing this and they put a report card out and it was a great idea because their customer evaluations and feedbacks from the customers where you deliver this stuff on time, but when we get it 45% of the time It doesn't work properly. So our quality is really a problem. And also, they were sending the bottom third of this image was a very clear message that from now on, we are going to use one single set of procedures. No longer are different shifts and different factories going to use their own procedures. That stops right now.

So it was a message that was very clear, and it had change and strategy and transition related information. Here's another example. And this was an update. They were integrating management systems across the organization. This had been going on for quite a while. In fact, it had been underway for probably a year I think almost and it had just started to come alive.

They've done phase one is a pilot project and now they're saying transforming what's next. So this particular year, it was way back in fiscal year eight. They're trying to make transformation come alive across the organization. Now, this wasn't a railroad company, but they somehow liked the image of a railway. So they're finished laying the tracks. And now they're going to start to run the train.

And they're going to lay in mobilize the remaining tracks to catch all of the stuff throughout the rest of the organization. So it provided an interesting update. Here's another launch information. Now, this was an operational excellence initiative. And it was an organization that had tried to improve their operational excellence for years. And this was a very compelling meeting when this was launched.

The person who was heading up this initiative, talked about the journey the organization had been on taking the path on the left hand side of this image, there were skeletons out in the desert. They had done any number of initiatives over the last 10 or 15 years to try Fix operation excellence and it just had not gone well. Well, this time they were going to fix it and they were launching right then corrective action. Once they got to corrective action, then they were going to and they already had had some green belts and one black belt brought into the organization, they were going to institutionalize the Lean Six Sigma approach. self assessments were coming later in the year risk management. And by the first of next year, they were going to have ISO registration, meeting international standards.

They were going to get this once and for all, this was the road to improvement. These tools, it takes some time to put these together, but once you get them together, they become the foundation for dialogue. This is for big changes the opportunity to get all levels of leadership together as we shared earlier, to engage in a conversation. presentations are kept to a minimum, maximizing discussion, project teams and change teams are represented. We need to avoid the typical question and answer format. Both questions and answers can come from everyone.

This needs to be a conversation, this dialogue between all of the leaders and then the supervisors and the employees. The supervisors already know how to talk to all their employees, they're doing it all the time. organizations need to learn how to get all of the leaders together and talk as opposed to just present. These one pagers can provide very simple, consistent tools to share information. Sometimes, especially early in the journey of bringing leadership groups together to talk about major changes. When organizations don't do this, often they may need some help.

If the Change is a contentious change. And there's some people who are significantly against it. We still need to get people together to talk. So it may be helpful to have a skilled facilitator, come in and design a meeting where we can get some good conversation out and make sure that people can learn how to disagree with each other and still commit. What's critically important here around dialogue is to make certain that the expectations of the senior leaders are clear upfront of these sessions and again at the end. So that's another tool to consider around improving communication.

Let me offer One Last Tool. Communication is a complicated thing. planning to make it better shouldn't be complicated. We should be able to come up with a communication planning methodology that is relatively straightforward Indeed, here's one that does exactly that. When we think about communication planning, there's three factors we've got to consider. Who are all the players.

At any point in time, what are the details they need to know? What information do they have? What issues do they have? What concerns do they have? And based on that, how are you going to get those people the information they need? Who needs to send that information, supporting tools, timing, etc.

So that's the framework for building a communication plan. If your organization has communication professionals, they will have a very comprehensive approach to communication planning. And and that's great. If it is helpful, that's great. But I'd like to make sure that supervisors and managers and project teams can build their own communication plans. So this is a simple way of doing that.

What I'd like you to do is find worksheet number 10. And I'm going to ask you to draw up a very quick, short form communication plan. Now again, you can do this with a group if you like, you can do this on your own, we're going to just lay out a quick communication plan here. Let's start by again focusing on AP, recent past or current major change. And I'd like you to glance again back to your systems map. And I'd like you to list all those stakeholders.

And if you like, you can use the same stakeholder groups that you used for that assessment around awareness, understanding, commitment, and action, push, pause, and create your stakeholder group list. Now that you've got your list done, what I'd like you to do just for expedience sake, we're not going to take the time to build a complete plan. I just want to give you the idea of what's required here. I'd like you simply to choose one of the groups from the stakeholder list and I'd like To go over to the next column, and I'd like you to create a list of from that particular group's perspective. What issues questions concerns Do they have right now about this particular change? If you're sitting where they're sitting, if you were in a meeting that they had last week, and they were talking about this change, what was the topic of conversation?

So push, pause now and create a list from that particular just the one stakeholder group, what is on their mind when it comes to that particular change? Push, pause, create your list. Okay. So they will have any number of questions and issues and concerns and I'm sure you've come up with two or three or four. Now, what I'd like you to do is simply group all of those questions and issues and concerns together and go over to the last column. How are you going to get those people the information they need in order to resolve and deal with those issues and questions and concerns that they have, what resources will they require?

If you're not the best source of that information? Who else can you bring in to send the information and clarify these issues? When do you need to do that? push pause and come up with two or three ideas around how you're going to improve communication for that particular group based on their issues. Okay, my hope is you've got a couple ideas. In this case, person decided to meet with sales leaders to confirm that what they thought was going on was true.

They recognize then that they weren't the best one to talk to the salespeople they needed to get a VP involved in also the project leader, and rather than have another meeting, they wanted to get to the sales meeting next week. discuss the situation they want to time on the sales meeting agenda. That's always a better approach than having another meeting. And then of course, you need to follow up. So this framework for developing a communication plan is not complicated. Who, what, how, what we've done here, from this list of all of the stakeholder groups, we've only chosen one.

And we've then listed their questions and issues and concerns. The challenge here is that if we go ahead and do all of this, then never again, will we have to communicate with sales. Of course, that's not true. That's simply their list of questions and issues and concerns this week. So we'll have to do this, again, another two or three weeks or whenever we're getting a sense that sales doesn't have enough of the information. They're not as committed, they're not acting in the way they need to.

The other challenge here is we've just picked sales. Would finance have the same issues and questions and concerns with customer service with the Customers? Well of course not. So this is where it does get a little bit complicated because you'll need to do this, the what and the how for each of those stakeholder groups, but I have faith you will do that. If you find this particular tool helpful.