Welcome to the first post on the Influencing Change blog. 

My name is Kevin Bishop, and for the past 20 years I have been working in change – behaviour change, organisational change, change leadership, change methodologies, change capability, process change, technology change. In fact, if you name any type of change, there is a pretty good chance I have worked directly in/on it.

Through my wide experience of change, in organisations right around the globe, I got really interested in how you systematically and methodically build an organisation’s change capability. Focusing on answering the question “What are all the components that impact on an organisation’s ability to deliver change faster and more successfully, and how do you improve them?“.  Building change capability has become a real focus for me.

My other, closely related, interest is using business  storytelling to influence change. It’s an area that has been an interest of mine for over a decade now, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see more and more people ‘get’ the power of stories to motivate, inspire and educate people to influence change. The focus now seems to have shifted from “Why use stories?” ( a motivation challenge) to “How do I use stories?” (a challenge of ability) as people are hankering for learning how to purposefully and deliberately use stories  to create change.

The whole area of why people do what they do, and what you can do to support them changing that, is an absolute passion of mine. It intrigues me, fascinates me and is such a complex area, I know it will keep my massively curious mind, engaged for the rest of my life. There is no one way, not one thing that answers the multitude of questions around change, no ‘silver bullet’ – and that’s an element of this work that I absolutely love.

The Influencing Change blog, therefore will focus on these three areas – organisational change capability, approaches to influence behaviour change and using stories to influence change.

I have created the Influencing Change blog for two main reasons:

(1) To help others

By sharing my insights, experiences, and knowledge I want to educate, inspire and motivate others to change what they believe about how change happens, and the things they actually do  to influence change. I also hope to make even a small difference to the way organisations manage and lead change to improve engagement, morale and just simply make them better places to be.

(2) To help me

As Roman philosopher Seneca said; “While we teach, we learn.” Turning my thoughts into a blog post helps me to really understand a topic. There is also the other advantage of blogging. Creating the discipline of writing regularly helps build/maintain my ‘writing muscle’. One day I would love to write a book, and this blog is one of the first steps in that process.

So, now you know what I am going to write about and why, sit back, relax and enjoy the Influencing Change blog, and please do share your experiences, thoughts, questions and ideas around the content so we can all continue to learn about this vitally important area.