Objectives

Upon completion of this seminar including both the residential and distance learning components participants will be able to:

1. Analyze and describe their personal responses to change
2. Analyze and describe organizational responses to change
3. List and discuss 5-8 common errors in leading and managing change efforts
4. List and discuss the steps in the eight-stage process of creating major change
5. Describe and discuss the processes of initiating, sustaining and redesigning and rethinking organizational changes
6. Describe and apply methods of assessing and measuring change efforts
7. Describe and develop a change management system for their organizations

Seminar Overview

"Look ahead twenty or thirty years. Does anyone expect the next twenty years to be less tumultuous than the last twenty years? Given the changes expected in technology, biology, medicine, social values, demography, the environment, and international relations, what kind of world might humanity face: No one can say for sure, but one thing is reasonably certain: Continuing challenges will tax our collective abilities to deal with them. Failure to rethink our enterprises will leave us little relief from our current predicaments: rising turbulence causing rising stress; increasing disconnection and internal competitiveness; people working harder, rather than learning how to work smarter; and increasingly intractable problems beyond the reach of any individual or organization. If you are an organizational leader, someone at any level concerned deeply about these challenges, then you face a daunting task. In effect, you are engaged in a great venture of exploration, risk, discovery, and change, without any comprehensive maps for guidance." (1)

Peter Senge did not write these words specifically about the field of public health. But who among the many dedicated public health employees in the US cannot identify with and immediately understand the feelings that are associated with these words. Public health employees are being asked to be ever more productive with declining resources. In many cases those employees are confronted with not only a decline in community support but often must face increasingly hostile citizens and interest groups who may stand in opposition to public health efforts and taxes that support those efforts. Changes have come in the forms of decreasing budgets, reductions in staff, consolidation of health and social service programs, demographics, and even purpose and mission.

Responses of public health organizations to this multitude of changes have demonstrated remarkable dedication and creativity on the part of many public health employees and their leaders and managers. Many organizational leaders and employees have seen these changes coming, have analyzed the probable impact on their organizations and communities, and have most often made the best possible adjustments on behalf of the communities they serve. But increasingly these same employees are reporting a need for a less reactive response and a more deliberate prospective approach to managing this complex system of changes confronting public health.

This seminar is designed to present two parallel and compatible "theories" of change management that can assist public health agencies in developing and maintaining a system of change management that can be both prospective and/or reactive as necessary. Those theories are the work of John Kotter described in his book, Leading Change, and Peter Senge, in his work, The Dance of Change. The seminar will also provide a series of templates or guidelines that can serve as tools to assist leaders and managers in guiding these change processes in their organizations.

The seminar is designed as a four part learning experience. The first part is seminar preparation or the pre-work that participants are asked to do prior to to attending the residential seminar. The second part is the residential seminar during which participants will be introduced to the two models of change management and begin to practice the application of the ideas included in those models. The third part occurs when participants return to work and begin the actual application of the models and guidelines toward the development of a change management system within their organizations. The third part will include a Web based component and will provide an opportunity for ongoing discussions between seminar participants and seminar faculty. The intent of these web-based discussions is to support and emphasize the learning process associated with participants' application of theories, models and guidelines. The fourth and final part is the evaluation that will include two components. One component will be an outcome assessment of the extent to which a change management system has been developed and implemented in the participants' organization. The second component will be a 1/2 day residential meeting to evaluate the extent to which this seminar contributed to the implementation of that system. The desired outcome of the evaluation is to modify and improve on the overall design of this seminar to improve its effectiveness.

Bibliography

Kotter, John P., Leading Change, Boston: HBS Press, 1996
Kotter, John P., "What Leaders Really Do", Harvard Business Review, May-June 1990, pp. 103-111
Quinn, Robert E., et al, Becoming a Master Manger, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996
Schein, Edgar, "How Can Organizations Learn Faster? The Challenge of Entering the Green Room", SMR Forum, Sloan Management Review, Winter 1993, pp. 85-92
Senge, Peter, et al, The Dance of Change, New York: Currency Doubleday, 1999