Making Change Work: Practical Tools for Overcoming Human Resistance to Change

by Brien Palmer

As organizations strive to remain ahead of the competition, there will inevitably and often come the need for change. All successful organizations regularly use change to improve processes and increase performance. While these times of change can be a great opportunity for an organization, it also can be a time of stress and angst for all involved. Not all organizations are in a position to make these changes effectively and efficiently, and for many their efforts often fall short of the intended goals. Making Change Practical Tools for Overcoming Human Resistance to Change was written to help organizations prepare for and successfully implement change. The price of a failed change effort can be steep, both monetarily and in a loss of credibility. Making Change Work will first provide tools to measure your organization's readiness to change, helping make sure that the efforts will not be doomed to fail from the beginning. The book then provides many tools to apply sequentially and logically in order to gain acceptance of the change throughout the organization. In helping your organization make change successfully, Making Change Work addresses buy-in, acceptance, motivation, anticipation, fear, uncertainty, and all the other messy human considerations that cause change to fail in the real world.

Genres: Business

86 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Mohammed Barakat · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Making Change Work” walks exactly what the title talks. I found the tools explained in this book really practical in putting change to work in any project. Unlike most other books, the book puts a practical methodology, in sequence and with supporting tools, to overcome human resistance to change. The rest is left to the reader on how to use his or her interpersonal skills to make this methodology a way of managing real life projects.

Brien Palmer successfully guides the reader to make change work through following a 7-step methodology supported by tools and examples. Starting with Leading Change to gain management commitment to change, and ending with Anchoring the Change to seamlessly integrate the change with the existing systems the reader can really make any project succeed if the steps are followed rigorously and effectively.

Once you finish reading the book you will not be able to resist the temptation to put what you have read into a flowchart of the steps with the recommended tools and to hang it in your office for use in any project until it is instilled in your, and more importantly in your company’s, culture.

I recommend this book for any change agent and project manager who believe in the natural tendency of human resistance to change. This books is worth more than its price, indeed.