WIIFM? Answer this question and you get to the heart of change: the right message, the right time, the right place, for the right motivation.
A project is an intentional effort to deliver a product or service that creates an opportunity – intended or otherwise. Projects have multiple stakeholders with multiple needs for, or against, project realization.
Typical project steps include initial scope design, organization impact assessment, stakeholder identification, communications planning, risk, and a second iteration of scope, delving into user community goals serves project and stakeholders more accurately.
With the on-going game focused on more of less, our organizations are expected to not only run lean(er), but to lean further into the winds of constant change and constant constraints.
Change is no longer an event to manage and move on, organizations must realize change is the only constant. This operating climate highlights change management as a competitive advantage to those that figure it out, pivot, and to maintain an engaged workforce.
The stakeholders and the voice they have remains a stronger voice for change than any amount of company flyers, magnets, and town halls. Adopt a community persona strategy to improve organization, change management capability.
We design constantly. Our emails, training courses, project plans, policies, programs, surveys, business cases, strategies, facilitations, we are in a constant state of craft, create, model, test, build, and repair.
Whatever the intent, to take a concept from intention to adoption relies less on what you design and more on how you design.
A community persona perspective measures functional communication design success and reaction to how you design is the feedback loop of how people accept your design.
SharePoint intranet site design that leaves out understanding user need offers little more than propaganda for what you hope sells.
Hope for a community to buy-in is not much of a strategy.
Conversely, community commitment happens when people return to seek value, exchange value, and contribute value with, and for, each other.
Can you build that? Yes, particularly when you start with a community persona strategy to identify end-user motivations and the transparency to contribute to their need.
Communication is a bridge, on one side is our thought, the other side our audience. The gulf between the two littered with wasted efforts and missed intentions.
What you intend to convey and the view of how your audience reads and reacts reveals the gulf between getting it done versus getting it accomplished. Goal-oriented Design improves the way we think about communication and the channels, the vehicles, and the modes you to create community impact.
Diversity is the spice of life, your work can have greater impact with Goal-oriented Design added to your profession and your work … or continue to build that bridge to nowhere.
When I presented at the Shifting Role of OD in Business Conference in St. Louis, I showed a visual timeline of sources and influences that led me from organization development into social media.
This image takes you to an expanded view of these influences with direct source links to each.
In business we constantly design. By design I include that we design meetings, we design strategy, we design communication, we design training, and we design projects and programs.
Some design efforts, such as strategy, business process re-engineering, or talent engagement initiatives, may result in new processes, new standards, or new tasks, but the design goal remains: adoption and utility.
Why do people matter? Because people are the only way organizations, and communities, achieve or sustain anything. To understand people you need to understand what answers they look for.
Clear links from content to the place where action occurs is crucial. To move from selling to solving means a move from your motivation to get it done to another’s motivation to solve a challenge. Persona strategies create marketing goals more effective than traditional advertising.
The technical skills, frameworks, and tools that HR and organization development rely on to understand, communicate, and motivate interventions for people and organizations needs a reboot. A relaunch. A restart. This starts with a peek outside their profession: enter marketing, with a social media twist.
The persona effort, based on the usability and goal-oriented design, is a superior framework to plan, launch, guide, monitor, and manage organization interventions and change management initiatives than many organization development frameworks.