S4E91: The Art of Complex Change Management with Donnie MacNicol

The Project Chatter Podcast

In this week’s pod we welcomed Donnie MacNicol to talk about the art of complex change management.

Donnie is the founder of Team Animation which works across multiple sectors energising leaders and teams delivering complex change to maximise value and certainty of success through a focus on the human dimension.

Donnie acts as a catalyst to support organisations to improve their collaboration and productivity – aspects that will be critical to tackling the many challenges we face today including climate change and in particular in meeting the NetZero target.

The main topics we discussed on the podcast were as follows:

• Change management is treated differently from Project Management. It should be regarded on an equal footing
• Project and Programme Managers should have a change management responsibility as part of their job description
• IMA can be used to structure conversation based on personality preference. This is similar to the Insights
• When companies do offsite meetings, they often discuss business issues during the morning and focus on people in the afternoon as it is seen as lighter and easier. This should be reversed
• Not enough people use tools such as Insights / IMA to understand the stakeholders when trying to understand complex projects
• When starting on a complex project, try to ingest as much knowledge as possible and seek to diagnose the key problems and root cause of failures.
• Be cynical when reviewing change projects. Who really stands to win or lose from the success of a change being implemented?
• Managers could implement a stakeholder map with a RAG status on who would benefit from the change being implemented
• The main learning point from people in project management has been cultural, getting managers and organisations to truly care about people and personality types. Models such as Insights, DISC and IMA have supported this
• The main reasons for change project failure are nonsense! It does not seek to ask why the reason for failure happened. Root cause, not symptom
• Consultancies are often the main beneficiary from project failure!

Here are links to some of the topics that were discussed:

IMA Model – Personality Types: http://ima-pm.co.uk/

Opiner - Video Research Resource: https://opiner.app/

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Join us next week when we’re joined by Jo Lucas to talk about rewilding organisation and minimal interference approach to change management.

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Dale and Val