Change is more than just a poster on the wall

We interviewed a diverse range of leaders who are driving change in their organisations and one of the overarching messages to emerge is that ‘change is not just a poster on the wall’.

“Changing behaviours is not just producing posters, or training people. You need to think about people’s needs and experience and take them through a journey of change” said one of the change managers.

Last year the leaders of a Melbourne based organisation decided that they needed to reignite their values. They engaged a consultant to understand what those values meant to the staff, what were the behaviours they saw as being aligned with the values and what were the ones they felt were opposite.

Employees across the organisation participated in interviews and co-creation sessions, they worked together to re-define and re-design their values. 

The project was gaining momentum, but as our interviewees mentioned “one of the big challenges of change is getting leaders to understand that change is not only a poster”, and this is exactly what happened, the project sponsor decided that the natural next step for the change was to print posters. The employees already tired of these kinds of posters reacted ironically as they once again were seeing posters that weren’t being reflected in the actions of their leaders.

At Three6 we believe that for any change to stick it needs to be embedded in the organisation’s DNA, in the way you operate, the way you think and make decisions.

A poster in the kitchen is not enough.

So, have you ever seen a poster on your kitchen’s wall waiting for a change to happen?