Change Management

More often than not, decisions today are made by teams, based on a broad number of collected ideas and opinions. Collecting these inputs and then reaching a consensus can be made through a broad number of decision-making techniques. In this article we analyze five of the most popular ones: Prediction Markets, Surveys/Polls, the Delphi Method, the Nominal Group Technique, and the venerable Face-to-face Meeting.

There are sentences that stick to your mind, like gum. In my case, one of these is about feedback. It all goes back to the days of my MBA. At the end of a group project that had gone wrong from the start, we decided to organize a round of feedback to understand what had happened. One of my colleagues didn’t hold anything back: she told the rest of us, eyes in eyes, where we had failed and how we should improve. She finalized by saying that “feedback is a gift that I give you, you can decide to accept or reject it”.

Simple actions like switching off the lights or turning down the thermostat can lead to substantial savings: studies suggest that behavioral change alone, without any technology update, can result in 5 to 20% carbon emissions savings. The human mind is however far more complex than any machine, and meaningful behavioral changes in this area have proven difficult.

I really enjoy that moment, when you finish an assignment and you look back at your deliverable - that handful of slides that kept you up and running - and feel that everything you put in there makes perfect sense. It’s like bringing order to chaos. Fighting entropy. But, is that all? Is this handful of slides the final stage? The result of a work well done? We don’t think so. To reach the final stage, you need to bring your slides to life, you need to make sure that all your ideas and conclusions are implemented (or at least implementable), even in challenging conditions (economic downturn, lack of liquidity, etc...). And one of the best ways to do so is by running a pilot: an old recipe for an emerging issue. 82DBNBG9S443