Change Management vs. today’s challenges

Dr Naomi Stanford

Naomi is a consultant, teacher, and author. Her work as a consultant is in organisation design and development in all its manifestations. She is the author of three books: Organisation Design, the Collaborative Approach, The Economist Guide to Organisation Design, and Organisation Culture – Getting it Right (also an Economist publication).
Before leaving the UK to live in the US she worked for large multinational companies and now is working in the government sector. She teaches MBA students and supervises doctoral students. Her blog www.naomistanford.com showcases her interests

Jane Cotton

After a degree in geography at Cambridge, Jane joined the Civil Service graduate entry scheme. She became a transport policy advisor, covering topics from the channel tunnel to Stansted airport to rail privatisation. She first “dabbled” in personnel work in Department of Transport in the mid 1980s, and then gradually specialised in HR. Her roles have included Director of Resources for the Charity Commission and Director of Personnel and Change Management at Department of Environment, Transport and Regions. She moved to become Oxfam’s HR Director at the end of 1999. The HR challenges at Oxfam involve working with staff in over 70 countries, in many different contexts and cultures, and with over 20,000 volunteers in the UK.

Conflicting views and different perspectives on how people seek out and handle change muddy the waters when it comes to making radical or incremental changes to organisations.

• Should we go with the idea that people resist change? Or with the view that people embrace change?
  
  
• Should we focus on changing behaviours believing that existing structures and processes will support new behaviours? Or should we aim to change structures and processes and hope that new behaviours will be an outcome of this?
  
  
• Does the notion that change management is ridiculous prevail in our organisation or do we have people with the job titles of Change Manager?

This session will debate the ins and outs of the differing views, outline how the CIPD Approaches to Change Toolkit was developed in the way it was, and suggest how you can make up your mind (or change it) on how to help your organisation meet today’s challenges.

Naomi Stanford – author of the Toolkit, and Jane Cotton, HR Director, Oxfam UK (one of the case organisations in the Toolkit) will facilitate the session.

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