Fearless change - Bringing your people with you on the journey

20 Mar 2023 01:37 PM

Fearless Change – APM People SIG and Enabling Change SIG

On Wednesday 8 March the APM facilitated a conference orchestrated by Steve Walters of the APM People SIG bringing together over 80 participants to help the people side of projects get to a better space and support the APM vision of “creating a world where projects never fail”.

The event schedule ran as follows:

As can be seen, it was a thoroughly well thought out and planned event and aimed to help teams discuss and get to the crux of the most challenging issues we all face on projects/change: People.

During the final session key speakers were asked to summarise their key takeaways from the conference, and they were:

• “90% of focus is on tools and techniques within the project/change space and there is a shift of focus in progress, but more is needed” – Stephen Carver
• “Focus on a logical state of our brain” – Tammy Watchorn
• “Meet-point-dance” – Marion Thomas
• “The Power of Listening” – Trish Thurley and Christine Castle
• “Understand where people are – keep measuring” – Ian Pickard
• “Thinking vs Feeling Brain” – Carole Osterweil
• “Have 2 way conversation - Mutual Respect” – Glenn Smith

Each area of focus delivered by the speakers brought energy from participants to participate in pushing understanding further. The one strain that ran through each session was the focus on “Fearless”. This ranged from the ability of people to disregard the status quo, to looking at how we don’t get burdened down by emotions to keep the clarity when focusing on reaching shared solutions.

The topic of Fearless change uncovered a lot of different themes and brought together an audience on a journey to create better results going forward through shared understanding of what contributes to the most energised, proactive and coordinated people efforts.

The individual talks and workshops and their outcomes will be explored in further blogs.

Oliver Randall
APM People SIG volunteer