TABLE OF CONTENTS Now that you have completed your work on Understanding Change, let's review our workbook objectives together.
The first workbook objective was as follows.
You should be better able to identify the forces behind change and how they might affect your organization and team.
We reviewed six major forces behind changes of all kinds: political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors. Political factors arise from the policies pursued by the government of the day, some of which may have an effect on economic factors. In fact, it's not always easy to decide whether a factor is political or economic. Of course, some economic factors have nothing to do with government policies, arising as they do out of events beyond the government's control.
Social factors may be long term such as changes in the composition of the population or fleeting, as in the case of fashion in clothes and food. The same can be said of technology, which drives change along at a relentless pace. New laws and regulations, some of them relating to environmental issues such as pollution and the need to preserve finite resources, also bring about change, as do environmental developments themselves and the public's response to them.
As a leader of change, it is useful for you to be able to identify which of these factors are in operation when a change occurs at work. It is even more valuable to make yourself aware of known developments so that you...
