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Change and Honesty

Yesterday we decided to start an internal change management course for our collaegues at VLC! During three evenings we will cover a number of items like “what is change management?”, “What is a change process”, “change from an organizational perspective” and “change from an individual perspective”. After the summer we will kick off with the course!

After work I went to Amsterdam for a great diner with friends. During this dinner we discussed a paradox that is still roaming around inside my head. This paradox is about quality versus cost. Supermarkets perceive that customers want to buy cheap products. But more and more people are valuing quality much higher and are willing to pay a premium for better fresh products. The manufacturers of fresh products want to make an honest product that is high quality but large retailers are forcing them to deliver sub-par products at a cheap price. A few weeks ago a Dutch show “Keuringsdienst van Waarde” made two episodes covering malpractices in wine. These malpractices were concerning importing most (crushed grape pulp) and adding water here and selling it as wine. This is illegal since the wine consists of only grapejuice. This means adding water to most makes a drink but you cannot call it wine. The biggest reason to do so is cost, transport is much cheaper and you do not have to pay taxes because the grape most does not contain alcohol. Retailers want to sell people wine at extremely low prices, but do we want to be fooled? Do we really want cheap wine? No! We want honest products at a fair price where the whole supplychain can make a living.

Watch the second episode (Dutch) of the “Keuringsdienst van Waarde”:

Thanks to David Reece for the photo on Flickr

 

 

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Workshopping and changing

Today I started my day with a workshop that took the entire morning. This was the third workshop we did in a row. One thing I changed during this workshop was to have regular break to stretch our legs, get a cup of coffee and, most important, to clear our minds. Before the break I checked if I understood everything correct and summed up our findings. This worked really well. We achieved our goal for this workshop and thereby our goal for the series. Now we have to start our process to deliver the results.

One of the first theories we used was “the colors of change” by Leon de Caluwé, part-time professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. We tried to assess different parts of the organization and different people. If you have the right assessment we should be able to define effective change interventions. It was fun to do and nice to see everybody was already familiar with this theory.

Here is a nice video about the colors of change

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Preparation is key!

As we learned yesterday from Bert van Marwijk preparation is key in performing. Today I met with my contact at a new customer. We talked about the organization, the project and the VLC assignment. We shared some documents for me to study. My contact attended EIM2011 and we talked about the application of some take-aways from yesterday, especially from Toon Abcouwer! When I arrived at the VLC Utrecht office I was in luck that my colleague at the assignment was at the office. We discussed our work and discussed some to-do’s. I started reading some documents for preparation the rest of the day. In between reading I started on actual preparation for a workshop that is planned for next week.

At the end of the day I had a meeting discussing the VLC Advisory Change Management effort. We discussed some theory and methodologies. We talked about the way we can spread the knowledge on this topic within VLC. This inspired me to look at the preparation for my engagement I worked on earlier today: learning starts at the beginning of a project!

For me a big extra is that it is the first time in my working life that I can go to a customer by bike!

PS1: my MacBook Pro battery lasted all day long 🙂

PS2: why do Dell printer find it so hard to print documents from Apple’s 🙁