How to Lead a Change Revolution
This story began life as a presentation I did over fifteen years ago. It has gone through a few iterations over the years and multiple retellings in classes, conferences, and meetings. It reflects my thinking and experience across a variety of contexts. When it first started, it was about my working introducing technology into the higher education classroom, but even then, it was founded in my work in building coalitions for change on both international and local levels. It draws on my research studying social and organizational change. It concorporates my experience in business and marketing. I think it is a delightful mix of business and social issues.
A change revolution can be something that you launch within your organization or in your community. While we can also talk about change as an individual growth process, the focus here is on changes that span more than one person. Changing oneself is hard enough but introducing change when it requires other people is exponentially harder.
My work on this started in 2000, when I was appointed as Director of Instructional Technology at the Baker College system. My mission was to convince classroom faculty to adopt technology to enhance their teaching. The challenge was how to motivate faculty to voluntarily take on the extra work of using technology. This work followed on projects I had led earlier in my career…
