The first step is to "make the case for change", which seems to assume that change is some rational and intellectual process. I suppose being a business academic is going to make you think that's how the world works.

The second step is "Create a vision of what will be different" - another B School convention that sets us up for idealising the future and instead of getting grounded in the present. I concede that there seems to be a big market for grand visions, but if you want real change, they're quite likely to set you up for failure.

The third step is "Mobilize commitment to change". Ah the commitment word. Again, the idea is that we make a rational decision, commit to it, and lo it happens. I've been to way too many meetings where commitments are made to have much faith in this. I call them "commitment ceremonies" and I try hard to avoid them.

The fourth step is about creating early successes but I can't help feeling this is another set up to avoid really honest evaluation of changes and complexity in favour of a simplistic pursuit of things going to plan.

And I find this sign off pretty patronising:

Clearly, there's room for improvement in the President's change management approach. Let's hope that he learns from the experience of the first year and — like the best senior executives — gets better at managing change over time.

Hat tip: Dominic Campbell

Matt's paper succeeds in outlining an alternative that is more sophisticated, without making it sound painfully difficult. (It's no surprise that he wasn't able to sell it to his government.)

We act our way into a new way of thinking, we don’t think our way into a new way of acting.

When you’re asking me to change a particular behaviour (even if it’s for my own good, or for the well-being of others, or even the planet) you’re asking me to let go of something familiar and take up something unfamilar. That space between letting go and grabbing on to something new is called liminal space. You’re asking me to enter a space of unknowing, of uncertaintly and of change. Is it any wonder I’m reluctant?

The title of Bob Sutton's latest post makes lots of sense to me:

Most claims of originality are testimony to ignorance and most claims of magic are testimony to hubris.

I found his argument confusing and a bit annoying. He seems to suggest that the mass collaborations made possible by the web will lead to a bland aggregation in which we all lose our personalities. He says

I don’t want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent social-networking site. I want them to develop as fierce individuals, and to earn their living doing exactly that.

(See also Caterina's post on the same topic.)

Hat tip: Open Culture who say

If you think this sounds like Ayn Rand philosophy (see vintage clip) grafted onto tech talk, you’re probably right.

Euan Semple "Changing Innovation" (lift09 France EN) from Lift Conference on Vimeo.

Euan has posted his talk from LIFT last year. Good stuff, including his mini-rant against the costs of pomposity. I wanted to highlight the last chunk, starting around 12 mins.

This is where he argues that management doesn't disappear when organisations use social network tools, but it changes. Here's how he describes his role after the BBC introduced a forum and wiki.

I spent a lot of time and a lot of effort being interested in that space, being interested in what people were doing... and noticing things. Much harder work than managing something in a conventional sense. But by being there, noticing and being engaged, I had influence.

My colleague David Simoes-Brown likes to say that open innovation professionals are on the 'fringe of the fringe' of their organisations. By this he means that innovation teams, if they exist, tend to be fringe departments as they are about disrupting or evolving the status quo, and open innovators are on the fringe of the innovation departments.

If you frame innovation as disruptive then you're inviting some to organise disorganisation. There are lots of knotty problems with that.

If, alternatively, you frame innovation as natural and innate, again there are questions about anyone being put in charge of it.

Keith Sawyer has interesting things to say about skunk works and other models for innovation departments. I think the short version is that they can work if there is a regular throughput of people from diverse areas of the organisation and from outside. They don't work so well if they're mostly permanent staff who are just supposed to innovate.

Naughton uses the examples of lasers, which play a vital role in heaps of current technology - but the people who first experimented with them could not have foreseen that. And presumably could not have got government funding under the proposed regime. Naugthon says

This bodes ill for any scientist or engineer interested in curiosity-driven research.

Facilitators often come under pressure to get meetings to deliver definite outcomes on a fixed timescale. That approach comes with a hidden cost.

(For more of my thoughts on this, see this post on obliquity.)