Managing change by removing frictions

How to overcome the workplace's four common “frictions" so that organizations can innovate and evolve.

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Based on the book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas (Nordgren & Schonthal, 2021), the Center for Faculty Development has developed a self-assessment exercise and corresponding videos to help our community tackle each friction.

To find out more about the book, please refer to the authors' own website for the book. 

What do we mean by "frictions"?

Nordgren and Schonthal (2021, p. 6) define inertia as

"The powerful desire to stick with what we know, despite the limitations."

This video explains how to overcome Inertia as a friction to organizational change and innovation.

Discover your own project's frictions

Identifying the frictions holding a project back can be difficult, especially when we are excited about the potential of our new idea.

  1. To help, we've created this self-assessment survey for you to complete.

  2. Once you have your scores from the survey, you can use this Frictions exercise Excel document to create a visual representation of the frictions that are most salient to your project or innovation.

  3. Watch the relevant videos above to learn more about how you can reduce those frictions to help your project succeed.

 

Reference

Nordgren, L., & Schonthal, D. (2021). The human element: Overcoming the resistance that awaits new ideas. Wiley.

SU community members can access an electronic copy of the book from Lemieux Library.