Interesting, creative change management exercises for a finance team

Make it experiential

Hi Sharron –

I have seen this done extremely effectively using an experiential exercise. I’ve very roughly sketched out how the day might be structured below. If you’d like more details please feel free to contact me directly.

First of all create a process/task that will be familiar to finance people, for example producing sales invoices from dummy delivery records. Divide the whole group up into teams and run the exercise 3 times.

First time make it fun and relaxed. Second time around impose a redesigned process so that everybody is under pressure and ensure that far more invoices are produced. Final time ask the team to re-organise themselves to make the process as efficient as possible.

Between the first and second time discuss what people enjoyed about the exercise, highlight different personality types and attitudes to change.

After the second run through ask for reaction (which will be negative) and then draw out the essential features of successful change. Introduce the transition curve.

At the end ask everybody to draw their own S shaped transition curve and break into pairs to discuss and coach each other.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with the workshop!

Fran.

2 Responses

suebeatt says:

January 31, 2011 at 1:22 pm

Change session

Hi Sharron

I’ve got a change management session that I can let you have. Contact me off-line and I’ll send it to you

Sue
howatfa says:

February 1, 2011 at 6:24 pm

Make it experiential

Hi Sharron –

I have seen this done extremely effectively using an experiential exercise. I’ve very roughly sketched out how the day might be structured below. If you’d like more details please feel free to contact me directly.

First of all create a process/task that will be familiar to finance people, for example producing sales invoices from dummy delivery records. Divide the whole group up into teams and run the exercise 3 times.

First time make it fun and relaxed. Second time around impose a redesigned process so that everybody is under pressure and ensure that far more invoices are produced. Final time ask the team to re-organise themselves to make the process as efficient as possible.

Between the first and second time discuss what people enjoyed about the exercise, highlight different personality types and attitudes to change.

After the second run through ask for reaction (which will be negative) and then draw out the essential features of successful change. Introduce the transition curve.

At the end ask everybody to draw their own S shaped transition curve and break into pairs to discuss and coach each other.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with the workshop!

Fran.