Learning

At the conclusion of the outcome review, you still have a responsibility to help the client and the client's organization understand what they have learned from the change experience:

• For the change that culminates in the presentation of a strategy report to the board, it is about closing the presentation with a summary of what the new knowledge will offer to the company.

• In the case of a new IT system, it is a report that details the learning that has emerged from the hand-over process and what action the client can take to better prepare themselves for future upgrades.

• With a culture change programme, it is a review workshop with the internal change facilitators to help them to reflect on what changes have happened in the culture and how they need to modify their style to support the transformation.

Whatever the process, this can often be the added value that the client had not thought about. The result is that if undertaken effectively it can leave your client with a positive view and can potentially lead to the generation of future contracts, either with this client or from ongoing recommendations.

One way to give feedback to your client on learning is through the matrix shown in Fig. 12.2. Here, learning is broken into four categories:

• Behavioural/Content: this is quite simply the fact that people do things better - customers are handled with more sincerity, data is clearer, transactions are quicker.

• Behavioural/Process: in this case the improvement is focused on the way that people manage the process - reduced time to market, improved senior management visibility of the process measures, or just getting to meetings on time.

• Cognitive/Content: this might be people thinking through how they will respond to customer complaints before actually taking the telephone call, programmers who have a better understanding of the software, or engineers who understand the technical configurations of the telephone system.

• Cognitive/Process this is related to the way that people plan or think about how they will manage an action. This might be deciding to use a project management system to roll out a new product launch, deciding to involve all the stakeholders before a procedural change, or just trying to agree the agenda with people before starting a meeting.