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Responsiveness 215

RESPONDING TO CHANGE

How do you put the principles outlined on page 211 into practice?
Or, more explicitly, how do you change the hearts and minds of all
the employees in a large company, building on its past successes,
involving and engaging people fully, providing a clear vision and
creating a supportive culture, all undertaken at accelerated speed?
One company, ICL, has put much of this philosophy into
practice with the help of the learning consultancy Celemi. Here is
what happened.

When Keith Todd became Chief Executive of ICL in 1995, he joined a
company that successfully made computers. Over the next few years, it
became clear to him and his team that the future of the business lay in
providing ebusiness services and not manufacturing computers. In early
1998, he began investing heavily in the 500 most senior people, to ensure
that they had engaged, understood, and agreed with the transformation
that was being envisaged.
However, ICL realized that unless all the workforce—22,000
employees—had an opportunity to study the information previously only
available to the top people, learn from it, and decide to change, the
process would be a slow and wasteful one. ICL might lose the very
market advantage it was determined to secure.
Enter Elizabeth Lank, programme director for mobilizing knowledge
at ICL and author of The Power of Learning. Elizabeth engaged Ian Windle,
managing director of Celemi, to work with ICL to develop an imaginative
way of really involving all its employees in the planned changes.The
Conversations for Change initiative was born.
The chosen communication tool was WorkMats™.These are large,
table-sized posters that form the basis for dialog between small groups of
people.A number of design principles were agreed: that the process
should engage people as individuals; that the same basic global
conversation would be had in five different languages; that employees
would want to take actions as a result of what they had learned; and,
finally, that it would be a two-way process, giving management the chance
to listen and adapt their plans.