Overcoming Barriers for your Change Initiatives

“My goal is to help you clear out and clean up the path to change so everyone will follow as quickly as possible, which means you can reach your end state with your change sooner than later.” This Powernoodle Solution Was developed with Powernoodle Expert: Liz Guthridge 2 Liz works with leaders to influence employees to get on board with change. She helps leaders gain clarity around change so they can share their vision, explain their goals and clearly articulate their “ask” of team members, peers and other employees who often don’t work for them.

About Powernoodle With Powernoodle, your group will move through a structured process for sharing ideas, filtering and evaluating them to create a prioritized action plan. Powernoodle provides distinct advantages to your team:  Speed  Convenience  Confidentiality  Candor  Efficiency. 3

The Powernoodle Approach – Simple yet Powerful With Powernoodle you can easily involve a large, diverse group of people who can quickly identify real, perceived or potential barriers quickly. Furthermore, you can offer them:  A safe setting to contribute ideas  A convenient way to participate  An opportunity to be involved in the change initiative in a meaningful way. 4

Are you concerned that people may stop, delay or resist your change initiative if they come across a barrier on the path to change? If you’re not worried, you should be. Even if we have the best of plans, the road to good intentions is paved with hell. Any obstacle, from the miniscule to the mighty, can inadvertently stop people in their tracks. And that can derail your change initiative. About Overcoming Barriers for Your Change Initiative 5

Team members —or a group of individuals pulled together as a rapid response team—can use Powernoodle to identify real, perceived or potential roadblocks to your change initiative. This Powernoodle is designed to help your team brainstorm effective and practical ways for your situation and organization to reduce or eliminate these obstacles and barriers so you can achieve your change on time and on budget. Keeping your Change Initiative on Track 6

Your first step is to clarify the overall objective of the change initiative for which you want to take action. This objective becomes the basis for the Powernoodle session… “How do we…” “What are all the ways…” “What actions can we take that will…” Preparing Your Powernoodle 7

The Powernoodle Organizer’s job  The Organizer creates the session, invites Participants, and leads the group through the Powernoodle steps: Brainstorm, Categorize, Combine, Vote, Rate, Prioritize, and Action Plan.  Depending on the session’s purpose, the Organizer is able to customize the Powernoodle as needed.  Every Powernoodle creates a Powernoodle Report, a complete record of the decision-making trail in a downloadable spreadsheet. 8

An In-House Team Leader? Advantages:  Holds valuable content knowledge  Understands your organization and how it operates Disadvantages  Might be too busy organizing the sessions to participate fully  May not recognize biases An Outside Facilitator? Advantages:  Brings objectivity  Adds specialized facilitation knowledge - can keep the group on track and on time  Allows all participants to focus on the discussion Disadvantages  Will need some background preparation 9 Select your Organizer

To get started, the Powernoodle Organizer: 1.Creates the Powernoodle Session. 2.Creates a Powernoodle Removing Barriers for Change Question What are all the things that are getting in the way of this change? 3.Invites all participants via into the Powernoodle Session. Launching your Powernoodle Session 10 Looking for more detailed directions? Watch the Organizer Training Series videos Looking for more detailed directions? Watch the Organizer Training Series videos

The Organizer’s Session Room 11 Explain the purpose of the session. This will also appear on the Agenda and the Invitation to Participants. Your group can work on one or several related questions in a session. List of invited Participants.

Brainstorm: Consider each and contribute ideas. Comment on other participants’ ideas. Categorise: Assign each idea to one of the following categories:  Organizational structure  Decision-making  Work processes  Communication, including “saying” and “doing” gaps  Knowledge and Skills  Timing  Culture  Other Overcoming Barriers to Change Action Process 12

Rate: Consider the importance of each idea with 1=strongly disagree, and 10 = strongly agree. Prioritise: Time, energy and money are the scarce resources in any organization. Prioritize your scarce resources using the following standard: “Knowing what I know today, this is how I would allocate our resources to achieve our objective.” Comment on your top priorities, focusing on availability of resources, ease of execution and positive impact on the change initiative. Action Plan: Assign ownership and next steps for accountability to each priority. Overcoming Barriers to Change Action Process 13

Rating gives a nuanced view of the impact of each barrier. 14 Intuitive slider rating is customised by Organizer.

Assign scarce resources (time, energy, money) to the ideas that will have the most impact. 15 Decide where to invest your time, energy and money. You filter the ideas that are not priorities before building the Action Plan. However all ideas will be documented in the Priority tab in the downloaded Report.

The Organizer generates the Powernoodle Report. The Report shows how the group evaluated the ideas to reach their decisions.  The Report is created automatically after your session ends.  It is available in spreadsheet format for you and your participants.  It captures every discussion thread for future reference and action. The Report becomes the foundation of your Action Plan to overcome barriers so you can accelerate your change. Overcoming Barriers to Change Next Steps 16

Next steps are now in the Powernoodle Report. 17 Every Participant can download the Powernoodle Report within moments. This creates transparency, maintaining momentum and buy-in. It also saves time. Each step in the session is documented.

For detailed examples and directions, you can:  Watch the Powernoodle Organizer Training Series videos.  Log in and visit the Help section.  Contact us at  Join the Powernoodle user groups online. Powernoodle help and support 18

19 Liz Guthridge Website: Blog: Twitter: Join Liz in the Powernoodle Group on LinkedIn.com

Powernoodle Template Overcoming Barriers for Your Change Initiative by Liz Guthridge and Powernoodle Inc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at