Welcome to the Everyday PM Podcast, the podcast where we
discuss project management principles for your everyday
life. My name is Anne Campia.
I'm a certified project manager. I currently work as the Vice
President of Project Management Operations for Trusense
Marketing. I'm also the host of the
everyday PM and I'm excited to welcome our very special guest,
Lata Hamilton, who is joining us from somewhere that is not the
USI know that because we vary in time zones, but we are here to
talk about change management. Now we're going to talk about
engaging hearts and minds in project change using Neuro
Linguistic Programming. But lotta for those who have not
met you yet or have seen you on LinkedIn or online, please take
a brief moment to introduce yourself to our audience.
Thanks so much, Anne. So yes, my name is Lata Hamilton
and I am a change leadership and confidence expert.
Where I am actually located is Sydney, Australia.
So often I'm sort of like ahead, like a like a day ahead, like
living in the future to my host, which I am for you today.
And yeah, it's super sunny here. It's kind of like, I don't know,
we're going into spring, so the weather's really changing and.
It's really beautiful. Yeah, it's really nice.
And I guess for me, like, you know, I really love working in
change management. I love sharing more about change
management. I've worked on many, many, many
different types of changes. I've worked on changes that have
impacted over 100,000 people, operating model changes that
have impacted thousands of roles, digital transformation
that's changing the way that we work, global culture change.
I just recently did like an office refurbishment.
Like so many different types of change.
So the variety really kind of like lights me up.
And I really love helping helping women carve their own
paths for change in their career, leadership and life.
I love that. Thank you.
Thank you so much for that introduction.
And Lotta, I know that you've worked on a lot of
transformations. As you had mentioned, hundreds
of thousands of people have been impacted by the change that
you've been helped, helped shepherd through.
You're also the author of pioneer your career change, as
well as the founder of passion Pioneers.
So change management is just all around you.
And I think the way I described it when I, when you had
introduced yourself to me was you're the change management
powerhouse in my opinion. But I think for those of us that
are listening and, and primary audience of, of this podcast as
project managers, but we also have just career professionals
as well. And so for those that aren't
familiar with change management or change managers, or maybe
they're called transformational leaders or something of that
sort, what's the difference? How would you define a project
manager versus a change manager? Yeah, it's such a great question
and I think it actually really does matter where you are in the
world and it matters, you know, what industry you're in and or
even sort of like what company you're in.
There's different, definitely different terms for different
people, but I, I think to like level set everybody.
And like when I'm talking about organizational change
management, like what is it exactly that I'm talking about?
So I love to define things really simply.
And I say it's moving people from doing things in one way in
an organization to doing things in a new way in an organization.
And we do that sort of three, three key areas.
So through communications training and business readiness.
And business readiness is like, you've probably heard of
communications, you've heard of training.
Business readiness is like, does everybody have everything they
need to do things in the new way and keep doing it that way in
the future so they don't go back like to the old way of doing
things or they don't get stuck not being able to like move
forward. And so we don't just do it for
the fun of it. We actually do it for the return
on investment. We want to realize the business
benefits of the change, which is often what you know the project
manager has come up with or is aware of from say the business
case or from the early scoping of the project, like what is
actually the results that we want to achieve.
So it can be any, like I mentioned a few types of
organizational changes already, but it can be any kind of
organizational change. It could be a new product or
service or a change to a product or service.
It could be a new system, platform, application bringing
in AI like anything techno, technological or digital.
It could be a new operating model or team structure.
It could be a new or changed process.
The move to remote work, the move back to the office,
construction projects, refurbishments like culture
changes, regulatory change, compliance change, like the It's
so vast, like any project really that you can think of.
We can use change management to help people feel informed,
inspired, confident and ready. So that's what change managers
do. Then comes, I mean, obviously,
you know, from a, from a project management perspective, project
managers are usually focused on actually the delivery of the
thing. They want to actually get the
solution up and running into the hands of people.
And they're responsible for scoping that, for planning out
how they're going to do that, resourcing the project and
making that happen. So change managers, we care
about the delivery of the thing, but we also are actually more
about bringing the people on board so that they want the
thing, they know about the thing, they want the thing, they
know how to use the thing and then they want to keep using it
in the future. And also a slightly maybe like a
different shift, which is around sort of like the results because
project managers often their, you know, I guess marker of
success is go live. And I know that that's changing,
but like launch is success to them, whereas we're looking at
like how do we sustain that change into the future?
How do we embed it into the future?
So in some in Australia, it's quite split in terms of, you
know, project management is a profession, change management is
a profession and the market in Australia.
So the change management market in Australia is very mature,
probably the most mature in the world actually, which is
surprising because we're really little, we're really small.
Like we have like maybe like almost 30 million people in our
population. Like the US is 10 times as big
as us. But we really punch above our
weight in the change management sort of space.
Whereas in some markets like America, like I've had clients
before who they had the title of change manager, but the work
they were doing was actually project management work.
Regardless of where you are, what your role title is, I think
there's this level of even if you're not necessarily managing
change, having change management skills and understanding.
Like we know that project managers need to work with
stakeholders. We know that they need to
connect their team. We know that they need to bring
people on board of the project and of what they need people to
do, so having change management skills is fabulous for any
project manager or any professional.
I love that. Thank you for that
distinguishment. And not only do you live in the
future, but it sounds like you're, you know everything
about change management in terms of it being its own role and,
and, and recognize and, and fully delineated from a project
management perspective. You are living in the future as
well. Because I do see, at least in
the US, when I'm looking across the various roles that
organizations are looking for, they very much still have those
two roles in some ways intertwined.
Maybe it's intentional, maybe it's not.
I was recently at a change management conference and coming
from a project management background, I love this
conversation Ready. And I'm already diverging from
our script, so I apologize about that.
But coming from APM background, I thought it was fascinating
that that was the first thing that jumped out at me as folks
were saying these two roles really should be distinguished
as their own roles. And So what do you think Lada is
the would be the negative impact for, you know, maybe what we're
seeing a lot more heavily here in the US, which is a
combination of those roles or again, whether it's intentional
or not, those roles seem to be looked at as the same or doing
similar things. Yeah.
And I, I should caveat it, but it's not always like that.
In some industries there is more delineation.
In some countries there is more delineation.
And even in Australia we have what I like to like.
It's a, it's a term I coined a few years ago, which is called
like a slashy, like a slashy role.
And if you know Zoolander, the field like the old sort of cult.
Yeah, where, where Hansels like, you know, I or actually I don't
even think it was Hansel. It was somebody who wanted Fabio
was like I wanna be an actor slash model and not the other
way around. It's true.
And I think it's not always when we're talking about like project
slash change, there's a lot of that around like project slash
change, change slash business analyst, you know, change slash
comms, so many slashy roles. But I think the thing to really
watch out for if you are project manager or if you're a business
leader who's tasked with putting together a project, like
understanding that project management in and of itself is
such a big role. Like it's such a, a key thing to
have to manage a project end to end.
You know, to scope, to quality, to time, to budget, to resources
that you have and capacity that you have available, you know, to
the business case, like having to manage that is such a massive
role. And then change management, like
I just came off a project with a consulting client and they were
project, they were very used to projects, but it was the first
time that they'd really been supported by a really kind of
hands on practical change manager and one of the program
managers. She was like, I always kind of
knew like project management had this kind of like you put
together a plan and then you kind of execute across the plan.
I never knew that change management wouldn't have the
same thing. Imagine you've got a whole
almost like replicating how much work there is to do in project
management. You have to do that for the
people because you want to, you know, identify and map out all
of your stakeholders. And then you want to actually
create an experience and create a journey and keep tapping into
those people and into those networks, and you want to craft
communications and you're going to need to pull together like
training. So what I found is when project
managers are having to do all the change management themselves
as well, it can really run people very ragged.
It can really burn people out. Or they don't focus on the
people at all. They just focus on the delivery.
And it kind of waters down both professions and it puts your
project at risk really. So even if you can't, even if
your budget doesn't allow, maybe for a full time change manager,
like you could always potentially bring in a
consultant to do a bit bits and pieces of it.
Or you could bring in somebody more part time, or you could
have somebody come in just to set you up for success on the
change front. And then use some internal
resources to do the delivery. Like there's ways I think that
you can massage it where it's not all sitting on the shoulders
of the project manager. Absolutely, absolutely.
I think it blew my mind. But at the same time, when I
heard it at this conference that they should be distinguished
roles, it completely made sense. And then what you just said
further emphasized the point. So I wanna get into the
connection between the two roles though, because project managers
essentially are carrying out or at least executing part of that
change, right? So we are involved in the
project change aspect of it. And the heart mind connection is
what I'm super fascinated about in terms of how you do with
change. So you talk about engaging
hearts and minds from the inside out for PMS dealing with
resistant stakeholders, let's say, or team members who you
know, we all encounter people who are just really adverse to
change, whether it's in the professional setting or even in
the personal setting, right? People, some people just don't
like change. So how do you use that technique
to move beyond the traditional change management approaches
that were some of us might be familiar with?
I think in the past, our audience has heard about models
like ADCAR, Prosci. I think it is, forgive me if I
didn't pronounce that correctly, but there's a few that we're
familiar with. But how?
How does this technique differ from those?
Yeah. So I think it kind of we have to
think about where we are in the grand scheme of things.
And project management's been around for, you know, several
decades. Change management's been around
for probably a couple of decades.
So it is that bit of a newer profession, probably a bit newer
than project management because back in the past, like sort of
the traditional view of change management was that you would
have a project, it was running waterfall and then you would be
able to have this really clear cut change that would like
change management approach that would sort of tee up against
that kind of very like defined and timelined step by step,
stage by stage project management approach.
And the problem is, is like that's not the way that projects
often run anymore. Like often they are more
flexible, they are more fluid, they are more agile.
There might be an overarching project timeline, but things are
chopping and changing in between.
And then there's how we actually think about people.
So people in the past as well, you know, like 20 years ago and
30 years ago, there was a lot more opportunity for people to
just be told what to do. I mean, yeah, there might have
been some resistance, but you know, people generally kind of
like stuck with that kind of hierarchical.
Reporting kind. Of things, whereas now people
really want to be empowered in their organization.
They want to feel like they've contributed, that they've been
part of it, that they've been consulted.
There is a real shift in the way that people show up to work and
what they feel entitled to at work.
Like rightly or wrongly, they feel entitled to have a say and
they want to be engaged and they want to be part of it.
And you mentioned, you know, some people don't like, most
people don't like change. Like myself included, like I'm
part of this as well because it's part of our internal hard
wiring of like how our psychology is hard wired.
Like it's not rocket science and I don't go into it in huge
amounts of like detail, but like it said, like at a really high
level, when things are stable, when things are the same, when
things continue on, then we know our place.
We can plan for the future. We can guarantee our livelihood
and our income. And when something changes in an
organization, it really throws up that survival instinct
because people don't know what it's going to mean for them,
don't know what it's going to mean for their role, don't know
what it's going to mean for their future.
And you know, their ability even to put food on the table, even
something as little as like a process change can really fire
up that survival instinct within people.
Then what happens is that once that emotion gets triggered,
people's ears close to all of the logical, rational reasons
why we need to do this change. So they, they often, like we say
in neurolinguistic programming, which is what I'm accredited in,
it's the study of excellence in behaviour, communications and
psychology, or your emotions. And what we say in that is that
when people's emotions increase, their intelligence decreases,
which is not to say that their IQ decreases.
It's that their ability to rationally think and process is
impacted. And if you ever think about, you
know, when you're in the heated and in a heated argument or in a
really like high emotional state, you can't think clearly.
Like you'll literally like, you know, they talk about like
you're seeing red or you kind of almost like you're more focused
on winning that on what's right. If that makes sense.
Those same things are being triggered when change is
announced and probably even more emotive because it is really
linked to, you know, am I going to have a job tomorrow?
And again, even the the simplest thing that you might think
doesn't even affect people's role.
People will project that and they will jump ahead and they
will, they'll be doing that at an unconscious level, whether or
not it's right or not. They'll make that jump for
themselves and jump to that conclusion.
So with neurolinguistic programming, we really want to
tap into people's hearts and minds and we want to craft
change communications and change messaging.
We want to run programs and training.
We want to set people up for success and build capability and
coaching skills in a way that's going to actually really tap
into their hearts and their minds.
It's going to actually have them resonating with this change from
the inside out and feeling like they are empowered, supported,
understanding, and also that they have a future.
And I think that's where it differs.
Like my approach really differs from sort of a lot of the
traditional kind of models of change management out there and
the methodologies of change management because they're very
much focused on the technical side of change.
And like, yes, you need to deliver change.
And I teach my students how to like practically deliver change
in a project. At the same time, you need to be
able to bring in these abilities to engage hearts and minds.
And I sort of share a lot of really deep neuro linguistic
programming coaching techniques where you can then engage hearts
and minds to really reframe the change for people.
I love that you said so many good Nuggets and, and, and you
started with something that had never crossed my mind, which is
the voice of the people in terms of how it used to be versus how
it is today. And all of that intertwined with
their even passion or their excitement for change or
whatever, for lack of a better word.
And being involved in the change and how even just kind of
flipping the script on how that has transformed itself through
the years is really a big change in itself for how probably
Someone Like You, a change leader, would approach change
today versus maybe 5-10 years ago when you said it was easier
just to tell somebody we're changing it.
Good luck, right? But now you really have to be
conscious of like what people are thinking, how they're
feeling about it, what's the impact to their role.
Those are all the things that, you know, we started this this
conversation by distinguishing between APM and a change
manager. I don't know that APM would even
be in that frame of mind to be thinking about that.
So even more so from convincing me that absolutely these roles
should be delineated because you have to have somebody like you
in there thinking about the people and, and how they're
feeling about the change. So that was fantastic.
Now, when it comes to the application of the technique
here, do you have something a little practical that our
listeners could take and apply to something that might be
happening at their organization? Yeah, absolutely.
Like I mentioned, I drawn a lot of sort of NLP tools and
coaching techniques and I sort of have brought those across
into the change management space.
So like they're kind of business ready tools.
And one of the ones that I love the most, like I'm sure a lot of
your listeners will have heard of this already, but you know,
like when you are thinking about change, it's like coming up with
the say the like the what's in it for me or sometimes we'll
call it like the wiffum. So what's in it for me?
But my question to you and would be like who comes up with the
what's in it for me? Gosh, like who responds to that?
Yeah. Like on a project, if you were
coming up with the what's in it for me on the change, like who
would usually come up with that do you think?
I don't know. I mean, I, I would think one of
the typical answers you hear is leadership or the executives or
somebody who's setting the vision for the organization, but
I'm going to guess that's wrong. Am I wrong a lot of?
Bingo. You're not wrong.
You're absolutely right. Like you know, it might be the
change manager, the project manager, it could be executive,
sometimes even the board. I've worked on projects where
the board actually mandated it changed the leaders.
And if you think about it, if somebody else is coming up with
the what's in it for me, then it's not really what's in it for
me. It's actually what's in it for
you. It's trying to convince somebody
what's in it for you. So it's not with them.
It's actually more wiffy. And it is a bit wiffy, right?
Like it smells a bit like BF because people are like, hang on
a second. You're just telling me all these
like, and often it's like the logical, rational reasons why we
need the change. Like we need to create this
burning platform for change, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah. But the problem is it's being
crafted from people who are looking at it from a business
case perspective or looking at it from a productivity
perspective or a performance perspective.
And that's not what engages people's hearts and minds.
Like a really good example of this sort of early on in my
change management career, I'd already learnt neurolinguistic
programming and coaching and I was struggling with this project
manager who was rolling out this financial reporting system and
she was like an accounting finance background.
So I was saying to her, I'm like trying to figure out how we're
going to brand and message this change.
And I said to her, I'm like, oh, you know what, what is the
benefit of this change? And she's like financial
reporting. And I'm like, OK, I'm for you.
I know that switches you on. Like you could see her like,
she's like, yes, like. This is great.
And like, nobody else is going to care about that.
Like maybe your colleagues will, but nobody else in the
organization is going to care about that.
So if we LED messaging that change with like financial
reporting, we would lose people because they would either not
care or even worse, they would think it's only about the money.
And like they, you know what I mean.
So instead I did this one really simple, very powerful NLP tool
with her, which is called Chunking Up and an idea.
The principal premise behind chunking up is that when things
are high level, when things are more broad brush and high level
that they, that more people are going to get into agreement with
it. And that when things are more
detailed and lower level and more specific, that's where
you're going to get disagreement.
That's where you're going to get opposition, resistance, personal
preferences which create, you know, opposition.
So like a really good example is like, I live in the heart of
Sydney. I live in a 2 bedroom apartment.
I've got a beautiful garden terrace, I have a pool, spa,
sauna, 24/7 concierge and a library in my apartment
building. And I love it.
But for other people, like it's super specific, right?
But for other people, they might, that might be their idea
of a nightmare. Like they might be like, I want
to be in a house in the suburbs so that there's, you know, room
for my kids and my pets. Or they might be like, I could
don't even want to live in the city.
I want to live in the countryside and see the mountain
air. Do you know what I mean?
Like everybody has personal preferences of the individual
house to live in. But when we chunk up and we kind
of go, you know, like, what's the purpose of a house?
What's the purpose of of living in a house?
We can chunk up by asking this question for what purpose or
what's the highest intention of that?
That's how we get higher level chunked.
And then we could chunk up and go, OK, like we've got a house.
What's the purpose of a house? It's or like, what's the next
stage of a house? Oh, OK.
It's to be in, you know, a community.
What's the purpose of that? Because that's part of, you
know, being in a country. What's the purpose of the
country being part of the world? What's the purpose of the world?
Well, we're in. We're all part of the fabric of
the universe. Yeah.
And when you chunk up to the universe, like we can all agree
that the universe is a pretty great place to live, right?
So then you're able to kind of get to this point where
everybody's able to be in agreement.
So that's the principle. Then going back to this
particular case with this particular project manager, so
I'm asking her, so I just did this with her, one-on-one, just
with her. And I just said to her, like,
what's the purpose of financial reporting?
And then she answered, what's the purpose of that?
What's the purpose of that? And I just kept asking, and I
wasn't asking the question why? Because why actually creates
listing in the mind? We want to ask for what purpose?
What's the highest intention? Because we want to chunk up.
And we ended up getting to the point it was a local government
organization that I was working for.
And we ended up getting to the point that that doing this would
actually create more information and data to be able to make
better decisions. And the reason that we want to
make better decisions is for our community and everybody, whether
they're office based staff, whether they're outdoor based
staff, like no matter where they worked in the organization, the
community was a really big reason as to why people chose to
work at that organization. And it really switched people on
and gave them a real kind of like sense of why they showed up
to work each day. So we ended up naming that
program Make It Count. And the tagline was empowering,
better decision making for our community.
Nice. And then and then we kind of
called it like, you know, every asset, every person, every
dollar, every decision. So rather than just focusing on
the finance, we went broad brush.
We tapped it into people's hearts and minds as to what
would actually switch them on, and we kind of paved that way
for them. Such a great example.
It completely translates. And so for folks who are
thinking about this in terms of how do they push out their own
change, I think that is truly applicable to the kind of the
narrow funnel that a change could be perceived as from maybe
one person that you've spoken to versus the many.
So, so far we've learned, I'm just going to call this out
slushy with them and chunking up.
These are all and these are great because you know what,
following this conversation, I will remember all of those terms
and remember what you're you were saying.
So this is all really good practical application.
Thank you, Lada. So let's talk a little bit about
change management in terms of the after, because PMS are
typically not used to that. As we had talked about in the
beginning, when we close a project, we're on to the next
project, right? So we start close and maybe
there's some documentation we got to do lessons learned, put
that in the catalog, pick that up for the next project.
Change management from what I understand is different.
It almost feels like your works only starts after the changes
executed and implemented and trained on to figure out if it's
actually going to to stick to be sustained.
So tell me more about how that works out for you in terms of
how do you measure that? You know, have you ever been in
a a situation where you're within the change itself and
you're seeing maybe the general audience is losing their hearts
and minds about the change? You know, how do you pick that
momentum back up as well? So such a such a good question,
such a big. Question, sorry, it's very
broad. And you've definitely like hit
the nail on the head, I think in terms of when the project ends,
like that is really when the change work begins, or I should
even say when go live happens, which is usually like in, in a
lot of project managers minds, like that's the mouse when
they're trying to hit is go live launch.
And like I've seen projects where like a project manager
will literally like finish on that project 2, two weeks later.
I as a change manager, because change managers are often linked
and funded out of the project, we end up having to do the same
thing where we're actually being pulled off projects after only
two weeks. And so a really and, and
obviously we don't just want to know about what what's happening
with go live. We want to actually make sure
that we've seen that change embedded and sustained into the
future, that people keep doing it and most importantly that we
really realize those business benefits because the business
case, which is why the project even got signed off in the 1st
place. It's like if you have nobody
continuing to actually report against the business case
objectives and from a change perspective and the way that I
teach it is that we don't just look at just like the, you know,
like the financials and the like kind of like the technical
aspects. I open it up and make it more
broader. We want to actually track that
over time. And because I have like a
marketing background for me, everything that we do should
have a customer experience component to it where it's
either going to like increase sales, decrease costs or or do
you know what I mean? Like make, make sales, save
money or bring or, or bring some sort of customer experience
element. You can't figure that out at Go
live like it's not enough time hasn't hasn't actually been
experienced for long enough to see whether there has been that
long term benefit. So, and in one case I actually
saw a project which is literally the people on the project had
been reassigned to new projects and sort of started working on
them even before the change. Went on Oh my before it
launched. Wow.
What we do in change management, we really focus on handover and
embedding and we try to build that in actually from the very
beginning that there's going to be this tail on this project and
then towards the end of the project and after go live, like
I always kind of say to my students, like we always want to
keep our ear to the ground and notice the results.
This is another sort of thing that comes up in neuro
linguistic programming when you're working with somebody
like one-on-one or you want to notice the shifts and the
changes that are happening. Has it worked?
Has it not worked? Yes, no.
Kind of very binary. So we want to notice the
results. And maybe it is that we actually
need to do a bit more training. Like after go live, it's clear
that people are still struck struggling, they're still stuck.
They need to do more training. Maybe it's instead that like
the, the change has created new needs.
So a good example is like from a business readiness perspective,
going back to that change, we're rolling out these like sort of
like tablets to these outdoor workers or iPads to these
outdoor workers. And like one of the things from
a business readiness perspective is that if you've got weed
killer on your hands or water on your hands or dirt or soil on
your hands and you go to try to use a touch screen, like what
happens? Don't want to do that actually.
I, I mean, I would try to avoid it at all costs, but yes, it
would. Yeah, it does not work.
If you have like a wet finger off and you won't find your
finger or as part of go live, like we were like, let's pop a
set of like wet wipes into each truck for each of these after
workers. But then thinking about it,
thinking about how you're going to embed that, once that pack
runs out, it's like they're not going to do it anymore and they
won't be able to use their tablets.
So it's like, OK, we needed to give that job to somebody to
replenish those on a regular basis so that they could keep
using those tablets in the future.
So there's this hand over and end bed place where we want to
go. What's all the things that
happened in the project and how can we farm those out to
business as usual teams? Because we know that the
project's going to disband. We know the project manager's
going to leave, go work on another project, change
manager's going to leave, go work on another project.
So it's like, how do we put the reporting?
How do we farm out the reporting and the benefits realization to
business as usual teams? Who's going to own that moving
forward? But also all the things that the
project did? Because, you know, projects are
short, sharp pieces of work and they're often very well
resourced and supported. But as soon as they disband,
where does all of that support go?
Like it disappears into the ether.
And that's such a big reason why change so often fails.
It was great at Go live, but it never embedded into the future.
There might be new roles that need to get created.
There might be new rhythms and ways of working that needs to be
created in order to support people being able to do this
change in the future. So that is kind of the like what
I would say it's a, it's a crying shame that so often
change managers are hired into projects and finish very shortly
after go live. But a good change manager,
regardless of how much longer they're on the project for, will
at least create that handover and embed plan and see any of
the things that might have popped up and cropped up as soon
as people started actually experiencing the thing, whatever
it is that you're delivering. And they will actually build
that plan in and hand over appropriately.
That's great. Let's add handover and embed to
to the list of phrases or or concepts that we've learned
today. Now without me being facetious
about, I've given you about 50 questions and I maybe have gone
through three of them from what I wanted to ask you today a lot
of. So I think just to round out
this conversation, I have one more question around future
trends because as I think you mentioned upfront too, you're
aware that at least in the PM space, the concept of project
closure now involves value realization, benefits
realization and and that sort of thing.
So the PM profession as well is, is evolving to start to
understand post project, how do we measure if it was successful?
Now knowing that and knowing what the trends may be for
change management, how do those come together in your mind?
Do you see anything that is going to shift or evolve to
where project management and change management might see a
different future because of that?
Or is it, are we kind of continuing down the same path of
the roles, being very distinguished but being able to
work together? Yeah.
So I think that regardless, project management and change
management are partners no matter what.
Oh yeah, absolutely. They.
Kind of like there's always going to be value in partnering
and a change manager. Understanding and respecting
what a project manager is doing and what, what's top of mind for
them is really important. As is a project manager
understanding and supporting what a change manager is doing
and kind of and how involved you want to be in each side.
Like personally, I kind of stay out of the project management
side because like, unless there's no project, I've worked
on projects where there is only a change manager and there is no
project manager, and I've had to sort of jump in to do a bit of
the project management to showcase the fact that we need a
project manager. Sorry, irony of that, yes.
And so like, I'm always advocating, like I think every
project, no matter what, should have a project manager and a
change manager. Absolutely.
I think one of the big trends that we're seeing, it's already
started like it's like if you ever talk to anybody in
organizations, like you hear the words change, fatigue, change,
overwhelm, like, oh, you know, like this project barely rolled
out and the next project is already started.
And I think that we have to really.
And another concept for your. Little list.
Yeah, let's do it Little. Glossary that you're keeping,
You know, we really have to think of like sort of like the
end to end changes and the fact that change isn't going away.
And I kind of like to sort of talk about it kind of almost
like the ripple effects of change.
And I don't know if you've ever heard that phrase where like a
rising tide lifts all boats, but in the past we sort of had like
project peaks and then down and then another project peak and
then down. And those waves are almost like
not, there's no separation of them anymore.
Like change is coming so thick and so fast.
Projects are having to implement and deliver so quickly.
With increasing technology, the advent of AI, more automation
happening. Like we're only going to see
that accelerate. So projects won't have the
luxury of, you know, like sometimes like the six months or
the one to two years to figure themselves out and deliver and
change won't have that either. So what I like to sort of the
phrase that I like to use is building the undercurrent of
change acceptance. So building the undercurrent of
change acceptance. So instead of thinking of those
peaks and troughs, which is why I don't really use a lot of the
change management models anymore, I use sort of my own
model that I or this own kind of framework, which kind of alludes
to the fact that change never ends.
Every change you've done in the past feeds into the change that
is kind of coming in the future. Every change you do in the
future can embed changes from the past.
You don't actually need to start and stop them.
So an undercurrent of change acceptance is getting your
organization, getting your people, getting your community,
your clients, whoever it is that you're serving.
They're starting to build their comfort level with change, their
understanding of change, their acceptance levels of change,
because it's not going away, it's only getting faster.
And they will struggle if they expect to ride peaks and troughs
they actually need to, like a rising tide, lifts or boats.
We need to raise the level of change acceptance across
everybody, everywhere. Otherwise people will drown
people. Will just.
And I think it's everybody's responsibility.
Absolutely absolutely look lotta I I wish I we had many, many
more hours to have you as part of this episode.
I will be completely honest. I hope I didn't sound too
nervous in this conversation, but when folks like yourself,
leaders and in in their space approach this small podcast to
say, hey, I want to come talk about XY and Z, sometimes I do
get nervous because it's just incredible the information that
you shared with our audience today.
And I'm truly honored that you made some space for us.
You've shared a lot about change management, but certainly not
enough. So if folks want to continue the
conversation with you, where can they find you online?
Yeah, I definitely think that if you are interested in sort of
like learning more about change management or making the career
change change, come follow me on LinkedIn for Sadas.
I post all this stuff about change management there.
If you're thinking of sort of like making any kind of career
change, you can find my book Pioneer or Career Change on
Amazon or all audiobook platforms.
And then if you really do want to bring sort of change
management, practical application of change management
skills, tools, techniques. That engage hearts and minds.
If you want to bring that into your project management toolkit
or into your leadership toolkit, I would just so highly recommend
my program Leading Successful Change because that is what it
is all about. And you like I've had students
literally walk out of that program or even just one, one
session or one module or one lesson of it and be like, I've
put that into practice the next day And hearing that just lights
me up because I'm like, people are going out there and they're
practically doing change. They're not just learning about
the theory of change and going out there and doing it and
helping people to understand, accept, embrace and come on
board with change, which is my big passion.
I, I can't emphasize enough how honored we are to have the
information that you shared super practical, not just for
project managers, but career professionals in general.
So you folks can also talk to me, but you know, more so talk
to Lada. I'm also on LinkedIn at
Ancampia. But more importantly, subscribe
to this podcast, the Everyday PM Podcast, and leave us a comment
about what you thought about our conversation today.
So that will do it for Lada and I for this installment of the
Everyday PM Podcast. Until next time, take care.