Do Your Change Comms Suck? Try This.

"The greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished."?– George Bernard Shaw

I was at a conference years ago, and a pair of speakers on stage talked about how hard it was to get people to pay attention to the change. The change was a rollout of a new system, and their change comms plan wasn't working.

They tried newsletters with fancy graphics, click-bait subject lines, SharePoint sites, manager memos and just about everything else they could think of.

The problem was, this wasn't "change comms"; this was broadcasting, and nobody cared until the change smacked them all in the head.

What eventually worked? They went to where the people were working, wore bright, purple-coloured shirts, and started dialogue with the people affected by the change.

Change Comms has always been tricky. It's one of those catch-22s. We know no one reads them, but we still have to do it because stakeholders expect it.

Lately, I've seen change teams using "coffee chats" instead of traditional change comms. Some do it right; many do it completely wrong.

If you want to supercharge your "change comms strategy", use Lean Coffee instead. Here are six simple tips you can use to make your Lean Coffee amazing!

1) Using a theme: All sessions have a theme. Themes sets a boundary about what we'll focus on for the session. You can expect people to ask questions outside that boundary, but don't tell people they're not allowed to ask that question.

2) Don't Pre-Seed Topics: We've all been to those scripted town hall sessions and we know the questions being asked are pre-seeded. Don't do that. If no one has questions, you all get an hour of your time back!

3) Make it anonymous: If you're in person, have people put their sticky notes in a bucket, so people don't see who asked what. Our Lean Coffee tool allows you to make people, and their votes anonymous.

4) Better Dot Voting: Make the dot-voting anonymous. You can also collect votes on sticky notes: Number the topics and ask people to write the number of the topic on a sticky. Collect the notes and tabulate the votes!

5) Setting Constraints: If you think there is a safety, or influence problem, don't let people vote for their own topics!

6) Scaling Lean Coffee: If you're running a lean coffee session with lots of people, break them into groups and have them run a small filtering session. Have each group present their top 1, 2 or 3 topics (depending on the number of groups), and then do your dot-voting.

Mix and match these techniques based on your context. Remember, the key is to enable meaningful dialogue so the attendees, not your agenda, should shape your topics!