Change management is disciplined and organized

From "The irrational side of change management" in the McKinsey Quarterly:

... It also hasn’t helped that most academics and practitioners now agree on the building blocks for influencing employee attitudes and management behavior. McKinsey’s Emily Lawson and Colin Price provided a holistic perspective in “The psychology of change management,”¹ which suggests that four basic conditions are necessary before employees will change their behavior: a) a compelling story, because employees must see the point of the change and agree with it; b) role modeling, because they must also see the CEO and colleagues they admire behaving in the new way; c) reinforcing mechanisms, because systems, processes, and incentives must be in line with the new behavior; and d) capability building, because employees must have the skills required to make the desired changes.

I think we can accept as a given that neither Mayor Fenty nor Michelle Rhee, Chancellor of the DC Public Schools, attempted to bring about change through the employment of this model and the four conditions.

Note that there is a reason I am keyed into this. I tried the more top-down, expert approach to change for many years (despite my familiarity with the organizational development field, and even having worked for a brief moment with Ronald Lippitt, one of the founders of the field) mostly to fail.

And I finally came to appreciate patience, how it can take even good ideas many years to be realized. E.g., it took the Center for Science in the Public Interest six years after I left the organization to come around and implement my proposal for a Canadian edition. That edition now has over 100,000 subscribers and generates a couple million dollars in annual gross revenue for the organization.

But at the time, I couldn't fathom why "they couldn't see it." I once said to my boss "it's not like I am brilliant, isn't this obvious?" (Although that was about how to reorganize and refocus the publishing program.) That didn't go down well.

It was in Brookland, working as a Main Street commercial district revitalization manager for an organization that became increasingly distant and disconnected from the neighborhood it was set up to serve, that I learned once and for all that the expert approach really doesn't go anywhere when you lack community engagement, support, and commitment.

And I was in my late 40s. Regardless of the belief in the young genius (see the New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, "Annals of Culture: Late Bloomers: Why do we equate genius with precocity?") there is a recognition that wisdom come with age and experience amongst those always committed to learning and reflection.

Interestingly enough, through Ronald Lippitt I was exposed to NTL (originally called the National Training Laboratory), an academic and practice institute focused on training people in the field of organizational development. (Already I had learned about their journal, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science as well as the organization, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, which came out of the same group of people, and had read the textbook Social Psychology of Organizations.)

It's based in DC, at American University.

The city is full of people who work successfully on bringing about planned change.

It's just they mostly do it elsewhere.

(And what interests me the most is academically-informed practice.)