Joy at Work Thinking
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
Open any change management status report, and you will likely find the same thing: a chart of training completion rates, a table of survey scores, maybe an arrow pointing up or down next to last month's numbers. The presenter will walk through the data, perhaps ...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
The organizational chart is a map. Often an incomplete map, but a useful one nonetheless. It clarifies reporting lines, defines accountability, and gives a framework for decision ownership. But it only tells you who reports to whom. It does not tell you who list...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
There is a persistent and dangerous fiction in business: that numbers speak for themselves. They do not. Numbers sit there, inert, until a person with context and judgment converts them into meaning. A spreadsheet full of survey scores does not tell you whether ...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
For months, it has seemed clear that we have been heading for something significant with AI, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). Some say a revolution. Some say a bubble. Likely some of both.
Perhaps the “something significant” remains unclear, but somet...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
You’ve formed a great hypothesis and selected just the right change metrics. Now you begin to Collect the Data, right? Not quite yet. When you Collect the Data is as important as what you collect. In the first of our four phases of Data-Driven Change Management,...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
The survey lands in the employees’ email boxes, and you can almost hear the rise of groans across the office. Another survey, another extraction of brain power with too rarely something in return. Managers often think of surveys as an easy way to get clean dat...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
We live in a world awash in data. Most of us walk around with devices that are radiating and receiving signals from cell towers, satellites, Bluetooth, near field readers, and more. Organizations have inputs from clients and suppliers and operations. There is no...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
There is an insidious problem that pervades many attempts to analyze business progress. Somewhat counterintuitively, this problem grows as the availability of data increases. The impact is dramatic. Analysis stalls and initiatives can fail because the insight is...
Written by Ed Cook
Exploring the question, “Are you a great Change Leader?” is an insightful exercise. The personae that tend to emerge, in response to the question, break in one of two directions: Lawyer or Scientist.
The Lawyer will begin with a recitation of the available evidence underlyi...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
You've just walked out of a meeting where leadership announced a major change. Your team will be looking to you for direction, but inside, you're struggling. You weren't consulted. You don't agree with the decision. You might even think it's a terrible idea.
An...
Written by Ed Cook and Roxanne Brown
A common refrain in many conferences or conversations about Change Management is “people don’t like change.” On the surface, this is understandable. Change Management Professionals and Change Leaders will encounter people who actively push back on a Change or qu...
Written by Ed Cook
Humans walk about the Earth trying to make sense of it. Karl Weick introduced the concept of "sensemaking" to organizational studies in his 1969 book The Social Psychology of Organizing. His work described how humans understand the world in the face of uncertainty and labeled hum...
