http://vaughanmerlyn.com/2010/06/15/the-six-month-rule-of-organizational-change-its-all-personal/ Vaughan Merlyn on the Changing Role of the IT Organization Wed, 07 Dec 2011 19:30:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://vaughanmerlyn.com/2010/06/15/the-six-month-rule-of-organizational-change-its-all-personal/#comment-1508 Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:13:06 +0000 http://vaughanmerlyn.com/?p=1397#comment-1508 I thought the six month rule was “any project with a longer life span than six months is too long” (i.e., time boxing works), but I like this alternative interpretation…

]]> http://vaughanmerlyn.com/2010/06/15/the-six-month-rule-of-organizational-change-its-all-personal/#comment-1507 Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:26:33 +0000 http://vaughanmerlyn.com/?p=1397#comment-1507 What a great comment, Matt! Thank you! Please let us know the book you refer to about myelin’s role in developing talents – sounds fascinating, and I love anything we can do, to your point, to tie organizational change management concepts into real, ‘hard’ science.

]]> http://vaughanmerlyn.com/2010/06/15/the-six-month-rule-of-organizational-change-its-all-personal/#comment-1506 Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:10:59 +0000 http://vaughanmerlyn.com/?p=1397#comment-1506 This is certainly an important Rule of Thumb to keep in mind when developing, proposing or implementing an OCM initiative, or any personal change as you illustrated with your very ‘sticky’ example of toothbrushing technique.
The questions you invite people planning or participating in changes to consider are also very useful, because they lead to imagining the new world (with the change in place) and the errors that exist between that world and the present. This process of identifying and correcting errors may be critical to the neurological process of accelerating learning of new behaviors/concepts. I found a lot of valuable information about the relationships between these educational and biological processes in a book about myelin’s likely role in developing talents. If myelin is the substance that ‘wires’ our thought and behavior patterns, and it develops and degrades over time in relation to stimulous of the neuron pathways it insulates, then 6 months is a good estimate of the period required to build up a new pathway and let the previous one retire somewhat.
It think the “soft” side of OCM is very interesting, but if we can tie those concepts to the new theories in what “hard” science processes are underlying these phenomena, it can help guide individuals to understand that their resistance to change is personal, but they are fundamentally ‘not alone’ in this difficulty.

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