Data Gathering

We’ve discussed “sound and current data.”  Now we need to get a handle on gathering that sound and current data.

The “first and always intervention” is closely related to the discipline of sound and current data. Our assumptions and interpretations about what’s going on and what’s needed are generally sufficient when things are normal and we wish them to continue that way. However, when planning and implementing a change process, sound and current data are needed to make decisions about change strategies and tactics that will lead to desired results.

Gathering sound and current data starts with the initial client meeting. Clients are usually forthcoming about their view of the problem and the solution they wish us to carry out. This initial data-gathering process gives us crucial sound and current data about the client who must lead the project and, accordingly, is a significant intervention. The data gathered during this interview can significantly shift the client’s perspective and provide the added value needed to positively influence the client toward a more systemic perspective.  I find myself frequently asking the client questions like, “How do you know that?” and “How might you find out?” The client and I both learn through effective data gathering!

Data gathering during the initial interview is an important intervention for both the client and the practitioner.  However, it is only focused on the client’s point of view, which is more likely than not to be the result of assumptions and interpretations of his or her system. Accordingly, the prudent change agent insists on a more systemic data-gathering process during which the practitioner interviews the key stakeholders who need to be involved in the proposed project. These interviews serve several purposes:

 a.    to develop a more systemic set of sound and current data that often may be quite different than that of the client’s.

 b.    to galvanize organizational energy in preparation for “something happening.”

 c.     to provide some initial empowerment coaching for those from whom data is gathered.

 d.    to strengthen the quality of the relationship between the practitioners and the stakeholders who were interviewed.

To begin these interviews, ask the following core questions

a.   What’s working in the targeted system?

b.   What needs improvement within the system?

c.   What has been done to attempt improvement?

d.   What barriers occurred during such attempts?

e.   What were the reactions to the change goals and reason for it?

The information being sought by asking these particular questions is to identify the general themes and patterns extant about the state of the system and its readiness for a particular change goal. This data will help the practitioner develop the strategic and tactical plan for the change project and identify needs of the system, which could act as resistance to the change, so they can be considered, planned for and engaged.

Data gathering is not something that should be done only one or two times during a planned change process. It is continual as sound and current data is needed to ascertain the impact of other interventions and to know what’s changed since data was last collected and reviewed. Sound and current data is very fluid as systems are in constant flux, not just from our intended changes but also changes that are simply a part of human life.  Thinking that things are now the way you left them is to fall prey to the inaccuracy that too often comes with such assumptions. Keep in mind, as well, that data gathering itself has an impact—raising expectations and/or triggering thought that might not have occurred otherwise—and thus, it is one of our critical interventions.

Learn to Make a Difference in the World of People, Teams, and Organizations

The Seven Critical Interventions of Planned Change

Most organizational development literature has some version of the stages or steps of planned change. They go something like: contracting, data gathering, intervention, evaluation, and disengagement. I have problems with this framework. Each stage is an intervention in itself, yet intervention properly comes after data gathering. In addition, evaluation includes data gathering along with some analysis. Further, in real life, the sequence suggested in most literature does not account for various stages overlapping. For example, data gathering often leads to re-contracting – as might any other intervention. This makes the framework both confusing and unwieldy.

I have designed an alternative approach I am calling “Critical Interventions.” This approach acknowledges that all of the stages are interventions. It does not suggest any particular ordering, although the order in which they are offered may have some value.

From the perspective of applied behavioral science, an intervention is an action within a human system that is intended to move that system toward some specific change goal. In organization development terms, our interventions are designed to move the support for a specified goal toward critical mass http://tinyurl.com/supportsystems through engendering collaboration dynamics such as mutual understanding and the willingness to learn from differences.  http://tinyurl.com/learningfromdifferences 

Seven Critical Interventions

• Data Gathering

• Creating Possibility

• Contracting for Collaboration

• Event Planning and Implementation

• Feedback as a Learning Process

• Clear Consequences

• Disengagement

Stayed tuned next week for our explication of “Data Gathering” and what makes it the very first of the “Seven Critical Interventions!”

Learn to Make a Difference in the World of People, Teams, and Organizations  http://bit.ly/zFCNfv

A Meta-Model of Planned Change

So far this blog series has focused on the eight disciplines of planned change that are the vertical axis of the Meta-Model of Planned Change.

The Meta-Model of Planned Change is a generalized map of the skills and perspectives needed to manage change in human systems. Much of it is based on the classic perspective of organizational development as developed by the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science. That perspective holds that the tasks of an organization—from planning to production—are accomplished with the highest level of productivity through processes that are highlighted by a high quality of relationship among those responsible for those tasks. With that in mind, the Meta-Model of Planned Change is offered. It is a model that believes in the empower-ability of human systems and the people that live and work within them. Accordingly, the Meta-Model calls for collaborative strategies and tactics aimed at open communication, and consensual decision-making.

A model is a descriptive system of information, theories, inferences, and implications used to represent and support understanding of some phenomenon. Meta-, in the sense used here, is a context or framework. A meta-model could, then, be understood as a framework or context of a model—albeit, a model of a model. A meta-model of change management, then, is a framework from which any number of more specific models of how to manage change in human systems can be understood and developed.

Our model is a three dimensional matrix with the vertical axis describing eight disciplines which this blog series has already covered. When each discipline is consistently adhered to—as is the wont of “disciplines”—the success of any particular change management effort will be greatly enhanced. The horizontal axis describes the seven “critical interventions” of any change management project within which each of the disciplines must be applied. The third dimension offers six levels of human systems—personal, interpersonal, group, intergroup, organization and community—to which the first two dimensions can be applied.

Starting with our next blog will be an exploration of each of the seven critical inventions listed along the bottom of the cube above as “The Stages of Planned Change.” The reason for that inconsistency will be made manifest at the beginning of the series to come.

Learn to Make a Difference in the World of People, Teams, and Organizations   http://bit.ly/zFCNfv