Never has the need for innovation been more important than it is today.

Organisations with a flatter structure tend to be much more innovative. If innovation is strategically important to you, you need to be flat(ter).

The flat organisational model promotes employee involvement through decentralised decision-making. It elevates the level of responsibility of front-line employees and eliminates unnecessary layers of management, resulting in comments and feedback reaching all of the personnel involved in decision-making more quickly.

Albeit the title could infer that this is for people working on 'agile' projects, it is far from that. This book is for anyone that recognises that change is now constant and in everything that we do we must do with increased agility.

In February 21018, I hosted a breakfast seminar called 'Change is Broken'.

atch the 40 minute video of the breakfast seminar.

At the start of 2018, ITSM.tools asked its readers to vote for the IT service management (ITSM) topics that they felt would be the most important for the website to cover in 2018.

I didn’t see any major surprises in the results but was disappointed that there was no mention about increasing our understanding of how we are going to support our people in a world in which change is constant. With “people” topics taking a backseat to the process and technology.

In a hierarchy decisions can take a long time due to the layers through which information has to flow before a decision is made. When organisations need to respond quickly to changing priorities, opportunities, competition, threats etc. the ability to make decisions quickly will be essential for success. Therefore the hierarchy has to be flattened so that there are less decision-making hoops through which to jump.

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In this post I discuss the need to kill the hierarchy.

The only way to enable a ‘faster’ organisation that can respond to constant change is to flatten the structure. It needs to move away from a structure of hierarchical control to a flatter structure that removes the bureaucracy that slows organisations down.

It not about having no structure at all and having no hierarchy – I think there will always be an element of hierarchy.

At my recent breakfast seminar, I was pleased to welcome an eclectic mix of interesting people including Change Leaders, Practitioners and Consultants, Human Resources professionals and Program Managers from many different types of industry backgrounds.

In this post I explore support – the relationship between the Coaches and the Players.

Coaches need to provide unrelenting support for the Players.

Players are operating in times of instability and uncertainty, which is not going to change anytime soon. They need the ability to remain highly effective under intense pressure.

In this post I explore sustainment – the relationship between the Managers and the Coaches.

ustainment consists of three key activities - educate, support, and coach and mentor.

Engagement consists of four activities – educate, communicate, facilitate and alleviate. Change resilience can be achieved through engagement. When excessive amounts of change are taking place, employees can become disengaged.

A HBR article (2010) summed up constant change. It said

 “The companies most likely to be successful in making change work to their advantage are the ones that no longer view change as a discrete event to be managed, but as a constant opportunity to evolve the business."

Bruce Harpham recently wrote an article published in CIO called “8 ways you’re failing at change management “ (Jan 3, 2018).

The article explores the 8 most common ways that change management efforts fail.

Whilst I agree with some of what Harpham has written, I think some of his observations fail to reflect the world in which are currently living.

Are you passionate about bringing meaningful change into your organization? If the answer is yes, then this book is for you.

If you want to add to your change management toolkit with ideas from Agile, Lean Startup, neuroscience, psychology, and organizational development, then this is a must read.

Change is now constant and complex. There is no time to take breath and wait for one change to be embedded before moving on to the next. Changes are hitting us like an automatic rifle. The old scattergun effect of dealing with change is dead.

In this post, I would like to explore the roles we need in the organisation to manage in a VUCA world.

The tables get turned in Karen's Conversations #30 when Breed Barrett chats to Karen about her change in direction and her focus on organisational change. Karen describes how the organisational change management world needs a major shake-up and wake-up if organisations are going to survive.