Becoming a catalyst for change

If you leading anything (a company, your home, a church, or just your 5 year old's soccer team) then you know that leading people to make change is a difficult process. We know our organizations need change. Many times we know what needs to change. We want to see things change. The problem comes when we make a move to begin the change process and really have no understanding of how to make change happen...to make it real...to make it stick. This summer I read Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. I have never read a book that better explained the change process. This is one of those books that every ministry leaders needs to read and then maybe memorize half of it. As ministry leaders we are called to be change agents not institution builders. Here are some of my favorite thoughts from Chip and Dan Heath. Go get the book and get to reading!

• And that’s the first surprise about change: What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
• For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.
• Decision paralysis can be deadly for change—because the most familiar path is always the status quo.
• Big-picture, hands-off leadership isn’t likely to work in a change situation, because the hardest part of change—the paralyzing part—is precisely in the details.
• Until you can ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you’re not ready to lead a switch. To create movement, you’ve got to be specific and be concrete.
• Kotter and Cohen observed that, in almost all successful change efforts, the sequence of change is not ANALYZE-THINK-CHANGE, but rather SEE-FEEL-CHANGE.
• But to create and sustain change, you’ve got to act more like a coach and less like a scorekeeper. You’ve got to embrace a growth mindset and instill it in your team.
• Failing is often the best way to learn, and because of that, early failure is a kind of necessary investment.
• Change isn’t an event; it’s a process.