Interventions-AIR

Targeted Interventions

Making the most of your Change Initiatives

An organizational transofrmation is made up of interventions, such as training, applying new processes or restructruing.

We have observed many organizations that run a standard training or workshop without fully considering the possible impacts and clear change goals they intend with the exercise. While general training and knowledge accumulation is of course valuable, we believe that any intervention is an investment in change which should be considered and if necessary, adapted for generating the best chance of achieving its goals.

We refer to these interventions as targeted interventions. Read on for more details.

The nature of Interventions

Analyze, Intervene, Reflect (AIR)

The worst intervention is one where the impact is not considered, where, for example, people are sent on training courses and afterwards have no opportunity to use the skills they have learned, where organizational structures are changed, without consideration of the sociotechnical impact. For them to have maximum impact, interventions should be carefully planned.

Like transformations, intervantions should have a defined lifecycle, beginning with and analysis and evaluation phase, followed by the intervention itself and concluded by a review and reflection of its impact.

We call this Process AIR and the three phases are described below.

Analyze

Before running headlong into a change, we believe that a brief observation, orientation and assessment step (sometimes this may be extremely short) is almost always meaningful and we call this the analysis phase of an intervention – symbolized by a flashlight.

Here, the goal is to understand the territory and the need for change, to examine the desired impact and explore possible intervention alternatives and their feasibility.

We may use mechanisms from Design Thinking or other tools in this phase.

Intervene

In this phase, the intervention is designed, planned and executed. We believe that a change cannot be inflicted upon a person or organization but that the person or organization must own the change.

Accordingly, we define our interventions together with the party that is subject to change. This is often a change manager, internal coach or representatives of the organization where the intervention should take place.

Many interventions are complex sociotechnical challenges where the outcomes are uncertain. Consequently, during many interventions, observation and adjustment is included in the process.

We symbolize interventions with a syringe surrounded by an inspect and adjust arrow cycle

Reflect

The intervention is concluded with a reflection phase in which the overall value of the intervention and its impact is investigated.

While during the inspect and adapt part of the interve step, the focus is on optimizing the specific intervention, during the reflect phase, the focus is more towards the overall impact and the process itself.

Possibilities for improvements and for future interventions are considered and results are recorded.

Patterns of successful interventions are used as a base to design the intervention

Further Considerations

There are very many more things to consider when running an intervention. We have listed just a small subset of these here:

There is often a latency between intervention and impact. 1
Interventions may be used in combination to amplify impact
They can be a combination of cultural and structural changes
Some interventions may be small (such as running an in-house training). Nevertheless, we believe that a short analysis phase still makes sense to consider how the value of the intervention should be maximised.
In a sociotechnical change, interventions do not cause fully predictable results and may generate unexpected consequences in unexpected areas (positive or negative)

1 Particularly cultural changes take time. Losing patience and giving up before the impact is visible has been observed as an anti-pattern.t me. It's easy.