We've talked about what gets communicated when and we've talked about who needs to own chain communication. Let's look at some ways that communication can be very engaging. Let's look at the how piece now, a model that has been around for a long time is very useful here when we determine what level of communication are we looking for. And this is an old adult learning model that came out of social science research way back in the early 60s. And the model is people need to be aware of something, they need to understand something they need to get committed to it, and they need to act. Now this model has been utilized and reinterpreted as a change management model to varying degrees of success.

That's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about is the original model as it relates to adult learning, and interpreting this through the lens of learning. new thing that relates to a change in an organization, one of the things that's important to realize is that for any major change in an organization, not everybody needs to be an action a lot of people may need simply just to be aware that the change is going on and we can communicate accordingly. There will be some other people that need to be aware and they also need to understand a little bit more in depth information. But there will be some folks who need to get over the hard hurdle, which is the commitment. And once we get committed to this, then action will be reasonably straightforward, best way to determine who needs to get to what level of communication is through conversations between the project teams and the supervisors.

The project teams are the experts on the change and the supervisors are experts on the local work area. So project teams need to learn more about the impact the project has its own local work area. supervisors are experts in the local work area and they need more in Information about how this particular project is going to impact their particular group. Once we get that figured out, we can communicate through a variety of different mediums. We can use technology based technology supported social media, text, messages, emails, whatever it might be. These are classic tools that are used in broadcast information.

It's broad, far reaching, and it can be quick. And both of those things give the illusion that it's effective. And it's barely scratching the surface. But nonetheless, it's used. web based information can be very helpful because what you can get here is a very in depth pile of information, lots of detail around any specific topic you want. So that's why project teams love building their own project website.

The downside is that people have got to be motivated to go to the website and search around enough to get information that they need. Not everybody is that motivated in fact, putting an HTML link to a project website into an email that people may or may not read is actually asking people to work hard for information that they may not want in the first place. What on earth makes you think they're going to follow the link and go to the website, some will many won't. paper based information, in spite of the myth of the paperless office can still be very helpful. Typically, people like to be able to print something out when it is really a big deal. So they want a repository or proof that this thing came out.

More importantly, paper based information is important when somebody has to learn something, any change that has got a complicated series of steps that people have to learn, paper based information is very helpful. And then we have face to face dialogue, people showing up talk, don't think for a moment that everybody's got to talk to everybody about all of this stuff. That's not the case at all. Some of the most efficient Face to face dialogue is the face to face dialogue between the project teams and the local area leaders. Those are the supervisors. That's critical.

Because what we want to be able to do is ensure that the supervisors, they're already having ongoing daily face to face conversation with their people, we need to ensure that they have information about the change. The other place that face to face dialogue is helpful for people who are really resistant and really stuck. Not wanting to deal with the change. So there's some ways of thinking about varying the medium and they're all have their benefit. They all have their value. We can think about utilizing these various mediums across this lens of awareness, understanding, commitment and action.

So if you want to build awareness, send some emails, do video presentations, social media, put a Facebook page together, whatever it might be. But that's all you're going to do is build awareness and only with enough repetition If you want to build some understanding, maybe we need a little bit more detail, maybe some web content, maybe we need an all hands meeting, maybe we need some conference calls. Maybe we need some training sessions. But in order to get over the hurdle of commitment, we may need face to face conversation. And it's the face to face conversation between the supervisor and their local work area. So this may be department meetings, team meetings, shift meetings, whatever it is, maybe it's one on one conversations.

And it's the commitment that is required between the project teams and the local work area leaders that needs to be face to face in order to get the supervisors and the managers committed to this change and making it happen in their local work area, because they are the boss of the local work area. And that's where change needs to flourish. And in order for it to act, we need to move this thing from talk to action. employees need to see their managers and supervisors acting accordingly they need to see the product teams, they need to see the executives and need to see all levels of leadership aligned and behaving in a way that the employees are being told to behave now, ongoing updates, recognition, reward, team problem solving insurance success stories, lots of things. When we think about this dialogue, this conversation that needs to happen between some key people, the most important dialogue that needs to happen is to get all levels of leadership engaged in a face to face conversation, the expectations of the senior leaders need to be made clear up front and at the end, here's what I expect you to do.

Here's the critical importance of this change. Here's what you need to do to lead this in your part of the organization. And I'm going to check up a week from now and let's make sure we're getting some traction on this. In these conversations of getting all of the leaders together or even the conversations of project team leads with local area work manager, supervisors, whatever it is the leaders at the local work area, any have these conversations need to be that they need to be conversations, not presentations. If information needs to be shared, if you've got 30 minutes for one of these sessions and the project teams are coming together to pull together a bunch of supervisors, the presentation should last no more than 10 minutes max. And the other 20 minutes should be conversation questions and answers.

And the question and answer rather than from the audience to the boss at the front, the question and answers need to come from everyone, both questions and answers. Of course, the project teams have got to be represented in these conversations, and support with consistent communication tools. And we're going to talk about some of these in just a minute. What we're trying to do here is to set the supervisors up for success. What we're trying to do is ensure that they have the answers to the questions that they get from their employees, when they get the question not after the fact sometimes Organizations aren't comfortable with bringing all levels of leaders together. And sometimes there's a lot of debate and rancor and argument.

Those meetings aren't helpful. So you may need to use a skilled facilitator. And my guess is there's lots of facilitators that can be helpful with turbulent meeting design, if you will. So there's some ideas around how we can communicate. So are we using a variety of mediums? What can you do to broaden the variety of mediums that you will use in your organization?

To communicate change more effectively? Find your action plan and make a note to yourself. What are you going to do to increase the effectiveness of your communication by using a variety of methods? The how question, so make a note. What are you going to do?