CHANGE MANAGEMENT FACILITATION: A Complete Manual is a translation (i.e. a literal expression) of, the act of using a complete linguistic model of responsibility working in a group in an organization to re-create and communicate this same experience literally, simply and easily. This same communication is represented here more simply by, any one and all of these:-

• the diagram on the home page of this web site.
• an essential set of 8 ‘soft’ elements (see ‘Communication’).[1]
• an essential set of 5 ‘hard’ elements (see ‘The VSM’).
• a radical form of NLP (see 'NLP').[2]

As you read through this web site in truth, you make the model work for you simply by trusting your present experience and being willing to entertain the possibility that you might just be wrong about every thing - literally. And to achieve the end result more easily and simply you can use the manual openly in a group in an organization. 

The development, production and use of the manual is a natural consequence of participation in 1978 in the first phase of a project that began in 1977 with the establishment of ‘The Exegesis Programme’, a 3-day long training course in the nature and use of this same model. And, throughout every training course the complete experience in essence was being represented simply by the diagram. This same project phase was extremely successful and thousands of people from all walks of life had already been through complete training courses by the time the next phase began several years later, i.e. the application of the model (in the form of Communication) to the delivering of training courses for business organizations to assist in improving people's communication ability. So, in 1981 a group of natural power managers founded Company  A (see SECTION A) for the purpose of applying, using and communicating the model to pioneer, grow and develop telebusiness in the UK.

In 1994 in the role of management consultant, I accepted an assignment from the chairman of Company  A, to make and deliver an assessment of their entire business organization and strategy. Almost immediately, I was sensing a strong connection between the company’s use of Communication and my totally intuitive use twelve years earlier of an essential set of 5 structural (or ‘hard’) elements as described above. Throughout a one-year period (1982-1983), I had been totally and continuously responsible for the creating, running and transforming of the organization of which I was a member, and had been practising the act of using a complete linguistic model (of responsibility working) totally intuitively through a continuous process of sensing, trusting and using this same set of elements. The entire project had been extremely successful and everyone involved, as individuals, was often expressing his satisfaction with the services and results that were being delivered throughout the life of the project. 

Seven years later in 1990, I had come across an elaborate description of the nature and use of this same set in the form of a book called Diagnosing The System for Organizations. The book had been written by a man called Stafford Beer and it had first been published in 1985. Beer's book is about the nature and use of a model called The VSM and the model in essence is the set (of elements called subsystems in the book) in the recurring form of a systemic set. Essentially, the underlying structure of this same set simply matches and reflects the underlying structure of the constituents of the nervous system of an individual human being. The published foundation of The VSM is made up of several works and the provenance and development of The VSM are described in four of them, a trilogy of books and an article in a journal (see SECTION A).

In the course of the assignment in 1994-1995, several meetings took place between the founding directors and myself purely for the purpose of exploring more fully the literal nature and use of the connection being sensed between the sets of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ elements. These same meetings were focused on the act of using a literal conjoining of the sets simply to facilitate the process of fundamental change management. So, to facilitate the process of reaching a real understanding of the nature and use of an essential set of ‘hard’ elements, Company A’s top management bought and read copies of Diagnosing the System for Organizations and then were acknowledging, as individuals, the fact that the act of using this same conjoining simply works, is valid, and makes complete sense. Then in January 1995 and as result of all these meetings two key things became clear:-

1. the availability and use of, a clearly, concisely, and well defined description of the literal nature and use of the conjoining - e.g. CHANGE MANAGEMENT FACILITATION: A Complete Manual - is essential to making the act of using it easy to communicate,

2. the development, production and use of this same manual - a written translation of a use of a complete linguistic model of responsibility working that contains both sets of elements with every essential connection between elements made literally explicit - was a real possibility.

The process of developing, producing and using the manual then lasted six years and involved over two hundred people from different walks of life sharing the experience and using both the spoken and written language forms in a continuous process of translation. For me, the first step was simply working through the published foundation of The VSM (the only material about Beer’s work that I had read up till then was Diagnosing the System for Organizations). The need for this had become clear in January 1995 as a result of a meeting (Beer, a founding director of Company A, Bogacki) that had taken place for the purpose of discovering more about the literal nature, source and use of The VSM. And in November 2000, completion of an electronic form of introduction to the manual took place with the production and publication here of the material you are reading right now. So, since copies of the manual are currently available for sale, you can choose right now, if you desire to do so, to use the manual openly in a group in an organization and facilitate the process of fundamental change management.

Footnotes

1. "hard. structural" and "soft. non-structural" in this context.
2. "radical. of or from or going to or being the root, inherent, essential, fundamental, primary, thorough": The Pocket Oxford Dictionary, 5th edn., Oxford University Press, London, 1969. Copyright © Oxford University Press. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.