Driving Organizational Readiness for Change through Strategic Workshops

Change initiatives in organizations often fail because people are neither committed to nor convinced they can implement the change successfully. The change challenge is a practical problem for most leaders. The vast literature on change management offers insights into obstacles to change and how to overcome them, and the emerging literature on readiness for change offers a plethora of instruments for how to assess it, though primarily in health care settings. However, there is limited advice about how to design workshops around new initiatives in organizations to increase readiness for change. To address this problem, we developed a model of the drivers of change readiness, based on survey data from 374 participants in 69 independently facilitated workshops to test hypotheses. The findings show which constructs have the most predictive power. These results have important implications for how to design and facilitate workshops that increase participants’ readiness for change. The study makes several contributions to the theory and practice of creating shared readiness for change.