Chapter 6Creating Awareness

The fish only knows that it lives in the water, after it is already on the river bank. Without our awareness of another world out there, it would never occur to us to change.

—Unknown

When it’s time to evaluate the effectiveness of change program strategies, people will always say there could have been more communication. The survey results on why change initiatives fail in Chapter 2 demonstrated the point (see Figure 2-2).

But it takes far more than communication to create change in an organization. There are five strategies that create change: awareness, understanding, engagement, leverage, and measurement. To varying degrees, all five should be used in every initiative. The first change strategy we are going to ...

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