Introduced the four core competencies that are involved in this integrated approach to leading change. We have strategy, change, transition, and communication. And the ideal here would be that there's equal emphasis, equal efforts, equal clarity on all of the big three, which is strategy, change and transition. And everybody understands that, which is what communication does. Let's look at some semantics in terms of defining what we mean by each of these core competencies. strategy has been around forever as long as organizations have been around.

And one simple definition is simply the continuous ongoing decisions that need to be made in order to determine the nature and direction of an organization focused on the future. It's the big picture. It's answering the essential questions of Who are we as an organization and where are we going Along with some others, and we'll dig into this in more depth in a bit. But that strategy, change is different. In fact, change is the act of making something different strategies. The big picture change is the action change is the details.

Not all changes are created equally. We can have cyclical change, and I would back there are recollection or memory of cyclical change in your organization right now where people would hear about a current change, and they would be reminded of a change that sounds vaguely familiar, that we tried a while ago and didn't go very well. So we ended up abandoning that change and coming back to where we work, or cyclical change, or things like regionalize No, we need to centralize No, we really need to regionalize No, no, no, we really need to centralize, and this debate goes on over decades. So those are cyclical changes, and eventually people Just hunker down, they see these things coming, especially to people that have been around for a long time. And they wait them out. So cyclical change, that's one type of change, structural changes something different.

Now, this is something a little bit more fundamental. Maybe it's a new org chart. So the old org chart used to look like this, and the new one is going to look like this. Or maybe it's a software system that was that. And now it's going to be this particular software, or it used to be this product line. And now it's going to be that product line.

Structural change is relatively straightforward, in that when you're in the old world, you can see the new thing. And you can figure out a plan to get from where you are to where you're supposed to be. And when you get to where you're supposed to be. Things will feel familiar. You may have different reporting relationships and different rules or procedures or different products or whatever it might be, but the essence of the beast still is same. transformational change is very different and transformational changes.

Something that most organizations, not all but most organizations these days are struggling with. transformational change is big, massive, huge change. And it takes place over a long timeframe. Usually transformational changes are a result of many, many, many structural changes and in some cases, cyclical changes happening simultaneously over a decade or more transformational change early in the journey is this natural image in front of us suggests that Caterpillar really doesn't know what's going on, and doesn't have a view of what it's going to be like as a butterfly. It tends to get perhaps worse before it gets better. I'm not sure whether caterpillars have conscious or not, but the cocoon seems like sort of a dark and lonely place.

But coming out of that, we have a butterfly. So that's a an example from nature that would suggest something very profound is happening. In organizations, the scope of these things in the timeframe is so significant that often at the early stages of transformational change, very few people know what that new thing is supposed to be like. And it takes an extraordinary amount of trust and really strong leadership to lead an organization through transformational change. So three different types of change. That's not the end of the competencies.

The third competency is transition. Now change and transition are often used as synonyms as if they mean the same thing. Well, they don't change is the act of making something different transition is how we adapt internally to that change. And it is the internal reorientation that we go through anytime something outside of us changes. Now that transition has three groups. gradual phases.

And you'll see the thick green line here represents the transition phases. And it's superimposed on top of the change line, or world, the New World. Usually, well before the time that change actually takes place. We are already starting consciously or unconsciously to separate away from the way things used to be. Usually by the time the change itself shows up, implementation happens, we have to some degree separated away from the old ways, but we're certainly not ready, willing, able and excited to integrate into the new thing. We're confused and a little overwhelmed.

And that's that time in between. The third phase of transition is integration where we are fully committed and completely integrated with this new change, and everything's working real well. Now, I would love to tell you that all transitions unfold Just that smoothly, and all we have to do is to figure out how to tighten up the dip, if you will, so we can get people through it more smoothly. That's simply not the case, here would be some examples. So this is a transition line that would reflect the change happened, but the transition never did happen. And a number of mergers happen this way.

And they try out this one particular one. I'm thinking of here with this example for two hospitals that were essentially mandated to merge together. And you can imagine that that didn't go particularly well. And it was truly a house divided for the better part of a year and a half, almost two years, right from the top of the organization to the bottom was a huge week and they almost warring factions. So that's a transition that simply didn't take place. The change took place, but nobody let go of the old identities and it was a real problem.

Here's another example. And this is plays out with all kinds of changes, whether it's a reorganization circling the drain, often big IT projects end up looking like this. And what this is, is that the organization gets lost in between, or will spend months in some cases, years between systems. We haven't fully let go the old way of doing things. We're certainly not on all cylinders firing with the new thing. We're confused and overwhelmed and the frustration is increasing to the point where some people want to go back and they are sabotaging new things so they can go back.

Some people want to go forward and some people are simply saying that's it, I quit. This is two great words. A lot of what are referred to as Black Swan projects with major it implementations look like this. Now there's a third iteration on transition, and this would be a delayed transition. This happens in some situations and the one that I'm thinking of here was luck. large global oil and gas company was standardizing and streamlining all of its maintenance systems.

So they were spending millions and millions and millions of dollars every year around the world maintaining pumps and compressors, and they were fighting, they were spending way too much money. So they decided to globalize, a standardized process for maintenance. And one particular area manager didn't want anything to do with a made in headquarters, global maintenance initiative. So he simply kept it literally on the shelf. and months and months and months went by and he finally got a call to headquarters. And it was a very short conversation.

And it really came down to we've been watching you or the last region, do you want to work with us going forward or not? Is it time for you to retire? And he decided he didn't want to retire? And he came back and in fairly short order, started to implement the new global maintenance which meant that he had to let go of how they were doing maintenance in the old world. So, more on that story later. The challenge really when it comes to transition, is because transition takes longer.

So this internal reorientation takes much longer than it does for the actual change to take place. And we've all been through transitions. So we know that the transition flow is much, much longer than the change. And just as a reminder, if that doesn't make sense to you think about the last time you move from one house to another house. The actual move itself probably took a day or two the most unless you were moving from one country to another and even then you can do that within a week or so. But the transition can take months in some cases it will take years.

So transition does take longer, and because of that Because organizations don't tend to put a lot of effort into helping people through transition, we often find a number of variations of transition processes still unfolding, from past changes, all the while, more and more and more changes keep coming on. So here, this is a classic example of an organization that feels and people feel like they're changed out. But it's not the changes that are doing to manage the transition. We'll explore how to lead people through transition in a bit. Before it's competency, of course, is communication. And this while it's something that we all know an enormous amount about, is simply the exchange of information.

That's its most simple definition. When we think about communication between two or three people. It's one thing when you think about four or five people, that's something different. When you think about communication around day to day stuff. That's something different when you think about communication as it relates to change that Something different again. And when you think about communication as it relates to change, with hundreds, in some cases, thousands or 10s of thousands people, communication is truly a challenge.

Those are the four core competencies. And here's a way to understand them in a little bit different kind of a framework, strategy change, transition and communication across the top and then a number of different dimensions, outcome activity, time, source, focus, and the essence. So, when we look at the top and the bottom one, just the outcome of strategy should be clear intentions. And the outcome for change should be actions, fulfilling whatever that intention from the strategy is. The outcome of transition is the experience unfolds and is resolved, so that the change is successful and therefore the intention of the strategy is fulfilled, communication. The outcome here we're looking for is people are engaged, there's a go right down to the very bottom.

The essence of strategy really is the big picture changes about the details transitions about the journey, and communication is about knowing what's going on. So those are the four core competencies.