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This timeless post from Andy Sheppard identifies the strengths and weaknesses of the six most common approaches leaders adopt when instituting change. 

A leader has many options when determining what can be improved in their organisation (or organisational unit). The options for determining how to mobilise their organisation to successfully deliver the improvements are more limited. This question of how to change is also often an afterthought: leaders can find themselves well down one of these paths without considering the relative strengths and weaknesses of alternative approaches. Yet without considering how to deliver improvements, even the best of ideas may remain as just ideas: ideas that can leave the majority of an organisation bruised, bewildered but otherwise little-changed. The hope of this article is therefore to broaden awareness of practical options, so that different delivery methods can be evaluated as to how well they promise to meet an organisation’s needs. I believe that any change programme should only be chosen after evaluating the potential impact of different combinations of what and how. Although aspects of different approaches can be blended, I would suggest that improvement initiatives commonly follow one of these six patterns:

The six approaches are:

• The squeeze
• The action list
• The change events
• The vision deployment
• The narrow and deep redesign
• The skills deployment

Read the full article, Six Patterns for Leading Change: Which Ones Do You Recognise?, on LinkedIn.