Meet Kris Kringle, change management specialist

This year one of my colleagues (thank you Rachel) suggested a very clever tweak to the office Kris Kringle;   we were to buy a gift for our designated recipient as if they were 10 years old so that the gift would then be donated to a children's charity. We not only had fun imagining our colleagues as children (not a stretch for some), but chose our gifts knowing they were going to someone who would really value them.

This version of Kris Kringle reminded me of the change management principles outlined in Chip and Dan Heath's Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard, and here's why;

Script the Critical Moves by outlining specific behaviours
Our Kris Kringle instructions were very clear - "buy a gift under $20 for your colleague as if they were 10 years old" - much more effective than as abstract "buy something for a children's charity".   In change management, people need to know what they specifically need to do.  Paint the scene for them.

Find the Feeling to engage the heart
To get us into the Kris Kringle spirit, we brought in photos of ourselves as children. Aside from lots of laughter, this helped to inspire our choices of gift because we remembered what is was like being a child.  For change management, finding the feeling means capturing the heart as well as the mind, tapping into an emotional reason to be part of the process. 

Point to the Destination
We knew when we were buying our gifts for our colleagues that the ultimate recipient would be a real-life child, so we were able to make the purchase decision knowing our audience.  In change management, it's not good enough to focus on the detail of the change - it needs to be always in the context of where you need to end up.

Shrink the Change
If the task for me and my colleagues had been to solve the problem of disadvantaged children in our community, we would have been overwhelmed.  Instead the Mother Teresa principle came into play (ie  If I look at one, I will act) - in other words, we were simply asked to buy a gift on behalf of a colleague from which one disadvantaged child would benefit.  Not scary at all. In change management, chunking the change into small, manageable parts will ensure progress can be made.

All up, I must say that this was the best Kris Kringle experience I have ever had.  Did we think we were going through a change management exercise? No way. And this is the biggest lesson - processes we go through that feel like "Change " are actually ineffective change management experiences.  Done right, we should barely feel a thing.  It is possible, it takes work, but tools like Switch can make change absolutely worthwhile and extremely rewarding.