Designing your change strategy

Key subject 2 focused on understanding:

• your goal
• your target audiences & stakeholders
• the potential role of communication

Key subject 3 focuses on designing your

• change strategy
• objectives
• messages and means
• evaluation

Frogleaps strategic sustainability change model

Next illustration shows the four phases of Frogleaps strategic sustainability change model. After executing your change strategy, you evaluate the results. The evaluation gives you insights to adapt your strategy and improve. Or to design the strategy for your next sub goal.

goal

understand

design

execute

No hard barriers between Understanding, Designing and Executing phase

There are no hard barriers between the Understanding, Designing and Execution phase:

• Understanding delivers insights in solutions which could work. This is also part of designing: identifying and developing solutions to reach your goal.
• Designing your strategy in co-operation with the people involved, results in even better Understanding.
• Executing your change strategy will give you new insights to improve the designs of your solutions. And because your work in joint effort, executing results also in improved understanding.

Understanding, Designing and Executing phase are intertwined

So when you go to work with Frogleaps sustainability change strategy, you will find that Understanding, Designing and Executing (Communicating) are intertwined.

Repeating cycle through evaluation stimulates learning

Because the change process is also a step by step approach, linking each iteration through evaluation, the people involved will learn and become more effective on the way.

Is your Big Goal doable?

If your Big Goal is doable, you can design a strategy to reach it in One Big Leap. In that case you do not need to break it down into realistic sub goals:

Break down your Big Goal in doable sub goals

In most cases however, you need to identify doable sub goals with a high chances of success:

Avoiding high complexity and high risk for failure

When you focus on ‘One Big Goal’, the problem will be too complex to solve. There will be too many stakeholders. The required behavior change will be too complicated. There will be too many threats to cope with. The result – failure – will damage the relations between the people involved.

Creating success to involve your stakeholders and develop your team

Creating success together results in trust and improved relations: a crucial base for more successes on the road to your Big Goal.

So we advise you to spent much energy in the Designing phase to break down your Big Goal and identify the first ‘guaranteed’ successful step.

The first success gives you great advantage in later stages.

Using Frogleaps strategic change model

To sum it up, using Frogleaps strategic change model will increase your success rate. So make the jump:

• Break down your Big Goal in doable, realistic sub goals
• Don’t sketch solutions behind your desk but go into the field
• Identify a first decisive sub goal with a high chance of success
• Design solutions and communication based on understanding
• Develop and implement solutions as a joint effort with the people involved