Last quarter we were working with a large health organisation. They were preparing for some major changes and they had engaged a change management trainer to run sessions for staff and managers. The exec team contacted us as they’d just finished the pilot program and were concerned that the change management training wasn’t up to date. So we had a quick scan of the materials and they were so old they could have been written by Adam or Eve.
So the health organisation was in a bit of a bind as they’d signed the contract to run X amount of sessions. The workbooks were awful. They’d been photocopied so many times that many pages were unreadable. All the fonts were different as bits and pieces had been inserted over the years. If there were 2 pages that were paginated in sequence then we couldn’t find them. So we were brought in as the consultants to help update the materials with newer peer reviewed change models etc.
Sounds straightforward. The trainer had a hissy fit. He maintained that his materials were up to date and state of the art. So we highlighted missing pages, archaic models, defunct examples from the 70’s and 80”s (nothing from the 90’s to 2018).
But we were getting nowhere. And then I pulled out this line. “Tony, it’s a bit ironic that your message is that organisations must be constantly changing and adapting, yet you haven’t changed your training materials in over 25 years”.
His response trumped mine. “You are correct, everything in the world needs to constantly change and the only exception to this universal rule is my workbooks. They never change”.
So there you go. Tony got paid out not to train. And we learned that Tony’s workbooks never ever change.
Now if change is on your radar we’ve got lots of different versions.
Just go to our website preftrain.com.au and type “change” into the search bar