For organisational change practitioners
Exploring value to shape better organisational change
Organisational change practitioners work on the shape and substance of change. They design, plan, and coordinate changes to structures, services, systems, processes, and ways of operating. This group includes roles such as project managers, service designers, enterprise architects, business analysts, product managers, and others whose work influences how organisations evolve.
These practitioners often work alongside change managers, leaders, and teams. Their focus is usually on defining and delivering change initiatives, rather than supporting individuals through the experience of changing.
If this is you, read on!
Why you should care about value
Organisational changes are rarely pursued for their own sake. They are driven by an intention to create value (not to be confused with values), such as efficiency, capability, growth, or reputation.
The challenge is that this intent is not always clearly articulated. Strategy documents may name outcomes without explaining what they mean in practice, or for whom they matter. As a result, organisational change practitioners are often asked to design and deliver solutions without a shared understanding of the value they are meant to create.
Being literate in value helps make this work more coherent. It supports clearer thinking about what an organisation is trying to achieve, how success might be recognised, and where trade-offs are being made. It also helps practitioners connect high-level intent to practical design and delivery decisions.
Value literacy becomes especially important when organisational changes are customer-facing or service-led. Understanding value helps ensure that changes meet real needs, rather than just satisfying internal measures.
As a professional practitioner, knowing and articulating your value proposition helps you make better choices about where to focus your effort, how to engage with clients, and what a fair and sustainable exchange looks like for your work.
How you can use the value(x) approach
The value(x) approach gives you language and tools to work more deliberately with value across different contexts of organisational changes.
- Extend your professional practice to include value-based conversations, without confusion with values, with our handy VALUE framework.
- Use the Business Value Elements deck of cards for its vocabulary of value elements as a way to surface what kind of value the organisation is truly trying to achieve. This helps you uncover and better articulate the real strategic intent of change initiatives — especially when it’s unclear or assumed.
- Use the Business methods (with Business Value Element cards) to apply the sense defined about what value a business wants to claim, contribute, or create through its strategies.
- Use Marketplace value perspectives to better understand what is desirable for customers, clients, or communities when changes affect service delivery.
- Draw on Workscape value perspectives when organisational changes are employee-centric, to better anticipate impacts on how people experience work.
- Consider your potential and actions in influencing organisational conversations about Employee Value Proposition.
- Read the article ‘Speaking the Language of Value in Organizational Change‘ to deepen an understanding on how a change management practitioner might have value-based conversations in change programs.
- Use the Workscape Value Proposition Statement method to clarify the value you can provide as a professional practitioner. This helps you to more easily communicate and negotiate your contribution, and the expectations and boundaries of your practice.
Bonus: Combining the Business, Marketplace and Workscape perspectives helps you design changes that arecoherent across all parts of the organisation — strategy, structure, and lived experience.
Ready, set, go!
Arrange a Customer Value Exploration session – COMING