Voluntary Complexity

I’m always working with my teams to accommodate change. Whether those are small changes or large, considering Peter de Jager’s Seven Questions of Change Management has made me better at introducing those changes smoothly.

On beyond the who, what, and where classic questions, some questions are immediately in need of an answer when changes occur.
In short they are:

1. Why is this change taking place?
2. What’s in it for me?
   
3. What do I do next?
   
4. What stays the same?
   
5. What could go wrong?
   
6. What’s going to be difficult?
   
7. When are we going to get there? (And how will we know we’ve arrived?)

I’m still not as good as I could be but when I go back to troubleshoot problems associated with change, I can often identify which question was left unanswered when I initially proposed a new thing.