Contributed by Riley Clark

“The times – they are a-changin’”, Bob Dylan sang in one of his most notable songs ever. And indeed, they are. So, it’s absolutely critical for every person to learn to adapt to these changes.

The idea also applies both to businesses and personal lives. Yet, most people are resistant to change. As businesses are operated by humans, they are often even more reluctant to make any shifts in the time-tested models.

The job of true leaders is to gently implement the idea of the necessity of change into the minds of the employees, other collaborators, or even their own. The next part is about making the transition as smooth as possible. In order to do that, leaders need effective change management tools.

We’ve put together a list of such tools that can be used for both business and personal life alike.

What Is Change Management?

In brief, change management is how exactly you handle change. It’s a systematic approach where you combine knowledge, analysis, tools, and resources to support yourself or other people and help adopt the new way of doing things.

Change management principles can be applied to virtually any sphere of life, and the skills needed to nail it can be unexpected.

Imagine utilizing the analytical approach you used to write a poetry analysis essay! See how to do it in a blog in case you forgot, and let’s move on to other tools that will help you successfully go through changes in any sphere.

ADKAR Model

Being one of the most commonly used tools for handling individual change, ADKAR stands for:

• Awareness;
• Desire;
• Knowledge;
• Ability;
• Reinforcement.

The idea behind it is to guide a person through change step-by-step by asking and answering a series of successive questions. As a result, every individual should go through all the stages like being aware of the necessity of change, being willing to adapt, knowing how to do it, being able to do their job differently, and making the change stick.

As it is an individual tool, it goes without saying that in the case of an organization, every employee involved in the change process should go through all these stages of personal transformation.

Lewin’s Change Model

This is one of the cornerstone models for managing change. It was developed back in the 1940s by Kurt Lewin, a prominent psychologist, and consists of three stages, namely:

• Unfreezing;
• Changing;
• Refreezing.

This model is one of the simplest ones, but it is still widely used both by itself and as a basis for more sophisticated modern schemes.

Basically, it drives a person (an employee) through three consecutive levels which account for understanding the need for a change (unfreezing), implementing the new way of doing things (changing), and setting this new way as the new norm (refreezing).

Gantt Chart

Named after its inventor, Henry L. Gantt, a mechanical engineer, and management consultant, Gantt Chart is one of the oldest methods for handling change. It still proves highly effective as a simple visual form of controlling the processes and their current states of completion.

Just put the tasks and subtasks in the rows and the dates in the columns, and here you go – your chart is ready to use. Moreover, there are also lots of templates available for free on the internet if you don’t want to do all the work from scratch.

This chart is very easy to use for controlling any processes in life that involve timing and deadlines. It will apply to anything, from personal goals to writing a term paper. Thus, knowing how to use Gantt charts is useful for everyone, not just business project managers.

Flowcharts

If you are a visual person, you’ll certainly appreciate flowcharts as being among the most effective change management tools. Flowcharts are also rather old, but, nonetheless, widely used tools invented back in the 1920s, which were initially called Process flow charts back then.

The idea behind this method is to represent every problem-solution process in a form of a diagram with boxes connected by lines. This way, you can break every complex process or problem into stages, control their completion, and see the otherwise not-so-obvious connections.

Of course, it’s better to learn how to draw custom flowcharts by yourself if you really want to command the method. Still, if you’re not willing to dive deep just now, there are also lots of ready templates available for free.

Final Words

Managing change in the right way is crucial for any individual and any organization. But it’s by no means easy to do, especially without knowing the proper tools to help handle the process.

Moreover, such tools can be useful for individuals going through any transformation in their lives – for example, students, who have to adapt very quickly to the changing environment. So, whatever stage of life you are currently in, it is always possible to make use of some of the tools listed above.

Bio: Riley Clark is an experienced author writing on various topics like marketing, personal development, education, and more. In the past few years, Riley’s been working as a freelance author and has written all kinds of content – from things like domyessay review which you can see here at https://nocramming.com/domyessay-review to guides and listicles. The author has relevant experience in marketing and self-development.