Changes in Thinking about Change for HR Professionals

Speaker(s): Nick Barclay is a Client Director in Executive Education at Warwick Business School. His background has been in Management and Leadership Development for almost 30 years, taking a few years out for a sabbatical period as a senior leader in education. He has run two MBA’s at different Business Schools and delivered a range of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. His role in Executive Education is the design and delivery of interventions for external clients as diverse as Network Rail, the Fire and Rescue Service for England, Wales and Northern Ireland, Care UK and Signet. Nick, as an alumni of York and Warwick universities, sees his main interests residing in the fields of organizational learning, leadership and change

Event details: To quote an eminent professor of strategy from Harvard Business School; “Change is changing.” Historically a considerable amount of literature has been devoted to identifying approaches to change management, with the implicit assumption that change is something special that comes along from time to time, creates some upheaval and requires managing/resolving into submission. This does not really chime with our current experience. Many of my clients have no sooner completed one transformation than they are on to the next. So perhaps a more helpful way of responding to change is to acknowledge that it is ongoing, often non-linear, and is now a permanent feature of our organizational lives. Seen through that lens change capability becomes more important than change management.

This session will examine some of the recent ideas emerging from both academics and practitioners on the notion of change capability; i.e. the organizational capacity to effectively acknowledge and absorb change as a fixed feature in the landscape rather than as aberration which creates some upheaval from time to time. We will examine some instruments that can you can take back and apply in the workplace and the session will culminate in an upbeat “good news” example of change that provides a wealth of learning for HR practitioners.

For more information:

• Email Eleanor Lloyd Jones, Regional Branch Co-ordinator  

Contact phone number 07525 101337