the beginning
I was working in ICI in the 1980’s and landed a role to bring about significant change to the way my team worked. I had no clue, but I went on some courses in project-based change and set about the task. Since then, all my roles have been change related – many of them described as projects or programmes, or (in my last corporate job before returning to a portfolio career), Director of the Change Portfolio. But the projects mindset often misses some things – it presumes that change agents know what to do and the people who are expected to change (let’s call them change recipients) resist change illogically and illegitimately. My doctoral studies researched change from the perspective of change recipients and their line managers and found some interesting things for the how we design investments in organisational change.