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© 2005, Arnoud Huibers and Coert Visser The solution-focused approach has brought forward a simple technique which can help to make meetings about organizational change stimulating and effective. Organizational change Organizations, departments, and people in organizations work are practically permanently going through large and small changes. Those changes can encompass structural aspects like a change in the business process, merging departments, implementing systems, or changes in the management structure. They can also be about cultural changes like improving customer satisfaction, improving co-operation, raising productivity, and so forth. Talking about progress In large-scale change projects, it is very important to keep communicating about the goals of and the progress in the change process. Our observation is that meetings about organizational change often focus on two topics: 1) what goes wrong? and 2) What will we do about that? When people focus attention on these two questi...

© 2004, Coert Visser “While we pursue the unattainable, we make impossible the realizable.” - Robert Ardrey One of the most important reasons why individuals and organizations fail to change effectively is that they formulate change goals ineffectively. Well-formulated goals are an important key to realizing successful change. Effective change goals are achievable, ineffective change goals are not. Unachievable and achievable change goals There are three ways in which the formulation of change goals can stand in the way of effective change. In the first place, change goals are often formulated negatively: they are formulated in terms of what one does not want instead of what one does want. In the second place, goals are formulatied in terms that are so abstract or vague that it is impossible to determine whether and when the goal is achieved and whether progress in the direction of the goal is made. In the third place, goal and means are often confused: people often focus their attent...