Speaker 1You've probably heard the phrase that the only consistent thing in life is change or words to that effect. And it's true. And it's part of the reason why change communication has become a much more sought after skill in recent times. And if there's one person who knows a thing or two about change communication and how our profession has evolved, it's Dr. Jen Fram. Jen has spent three decades helping people make sense of change. She's a global expert in organizational change, transformation, and change communication. And she's known for translating complexity into action. She describes herself as equal parts, true teller, ambiguity tamer, and practical problem solver. Jen is the co-founder of the Agile Change Leadership Institute, where she has helped thousands of practitioners and leaders build the capability to lead through complex, continuously evolving environments. She's also the author of quite a few books, including Conversations of Change, Change, and Change. She's also the author of a book called Change, Change, and Change. Change Leader, the Agile Change Playbook, and she's just recently released her newest book, Change Communication. Now, originally an academic, Jen's doctoral research examined how change communication shapes change receptivity. And it's work that continues to underpin her thinking today. She has designed and delivered change across industries ranging from wine sales to wedding dresses, veterinary pharmaceuticals to energy utilities. And she's worked across government, corporates, and nonprofit sectors. Across more than 80 countries. Now, in this conversation, Jen explains the difference between the different types of change communication, and we explore how that can relate to culture. She also shares her views on how the profession will continue to evolve. And she shares some top tips grounded in neuroscience that you do not want to miss. So without further ado, here's Jen. Jen Frown, welcome to Less Chatter, More Master. Meloitte, so pleased to be here. I am very excited to be here. I'm very excited to have you on the show. A bit of a fangirl, not going to lie. But before we kick off, can you tell our audience a little bit about you? Who are you? What do you do? How did you come to develop your expertise in this space?
Speaker 2I'm Melissa, yeah, of course, of course. So I'm what, you know, I guess I've got a couple of labels to who I am and what I do. One of them is I'm a comms lifer. And, you know, in context of this conversation today, it means I've worked in communications. Pretty much since I was 19 through to now, you know, my more mature years. And that has primarily been in the space of marketing and then change management. So I've got a PhD in change management. I've been an academic. I've been a change consultant. I've been a change manager. And I'm now the managing director of the Agile Change Leadership Institute and with online training for change managers and leaders in being adaptable and agile in our current organisational context. And most recently, I have published Change Communication, Less Noise, More Meaning, Change That Lands, a book which kind of captures my past, my present and my thoughts on the future.
Speaker 1Love it. Now you are a multi-author, but this latest book, which arrived in my PO box not long ago, tell me what inspired you to do this? Yeah. It's a great question.
Speaker 2And I think where it came from was I noticed probably about two years ago, I felt like change communication was having a moment again. And what I mean by that was I recall 15 years ago, change communication was a discipline all of itself. So, you know, I did my We were going through a phase where every project had a change communication advisor or a change communication specialist, and people were hired for that specialization. And then over the years, what then happened was they were not being hired for change comms anymore. You would have a change and communication manager. And then even that dropped off. And so there was just this kind of inherent assumption that change managers would pick up the comms. But they actually had no background, no training, no discipline. And about two years ago, I saw that change comms were starting to own the space again. And we were having people that were at least being asked to take the role of change comms specifically, which, you know, made me think, well, the timing is probably right to pull together everything that I know about this. And so I actually started with a masterclass in this. And I ran that for about 18 months before I wrote the book. So I was kind of testing all the material on the masterclass participants before it finally all came together. It's what you've got in front of you there.
Speaker 1Love it. And it's interesting you say that because, yeah, my first book came out two or three years ago. I feel like that's something I should know. But anyway. And it was about change communication. But it's interesting because I have found that most people who have bought it, I mean, there's a lot of comms people who have bought it, don't get me wrong, but a lot of change managers, because like you said, getting going, yeah, they're meant to do everything. They're meant to do all the change piece, the training piece, the comms piece. Like, apparently you are just a magician now
Speaker 2and you can just go do it all. And a lot of change people come into the discipline through things like education. Engineering or more technical sides of the business. And so words aren't necessarily their strength, let alone, you know, the philosophy or the theory behind communication. And so it can be a real deficit and a weakness for a lot of change practitioners.
Speaker 1And I think the flip side I see of that too is, I'm not sure whether you sit with the people you work with, but there seems to be this assumption, well, if you can do internal comms, you can do change. Or if you can do any kind of comms, you can do change comms. And in my mind, they are two different specialties. And I've worked in internal comms and worked in change and comms. They are two very different things, but the assumption is they will just pull in this person from the internal comms team to come and support this project. And you're throwing them in the deep end too with that.
Speaker 2A hundred percent. And that's one of the very first things that I put in the book. So there's a level setting to explain what is the difference between internal comms, change communication and marketing comms. Because I've also heard it's just all marketing, right? Oh, you don't change comms. Oh yeah, we're just marketing the change to people. And certainly I've been on the receiving end of that instruction. So you're so right, Mel. Like there is such, there are overlaps and there are things that we can borrow and take from each other. But if we're not clear on what the distinctions are, we can make a real mess of it with what we're doing. And
Speaker 1you're just setting up the project to not fail, but just have a really hard slog to get everybody to where they need to be. To make the thing happen.
Speaker 2Have a really rotten time as a practitioner as well. It's not fun being an internal comms person on a change project and not getting the outcome or the results because there's some elements that you're actually just not even aware of.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. So in the book, you talk about change comms having three very distinct roles. So monologic, dialogic and sensemaking. Do I get those three right? You absolutely do. Yeah, there we go. So what do these mean? And how do we put them into practice? That's a big question, I know.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a really useful question because I think it really is the foundation of what's in the book. And it was what came out of my PhD research. When I went into the research, being a practitioner in the field, at that point, change communication was all about tell people about the change, right? And that very much fits what we know as the monologic change communication model. So think monologue, think one person doing all the communication. It is about information provision. We talk about it being instrumental. So your change communication is an instrument of the change. It is very much infused with power over. The change practitioner or the change comms practitioner or the leader who has all the knowledge has power over the people receiving the information. And so they get to decide what is communicated, when it's communicated, all of those things. And that, by and large, is the dominant model of change communication in our organisational life, right? It's what we've all come through with. We saw with the advent of continuous change, once organisations started implementing multiple changes concurrently, we saw, and certainly when we looked at Sengi's work on the learning organisation, this understanding of the importance of change communication. That dialogue in navigating continuous change came through. And thus, we have what's known as dialogic change communication. And if we think about that concept of power, in dialogic change communication, power is shared. So we're working in this spirit of, of transparency and trust and respect, mutual respect. Me as a change practitioner, I don't necessarily have more knowledge than any of the audience, you know. We see this in the conversations about co-creation. Code creation in change is dialogic change communication because we're coming together in dialogue to create more change. So it's very much about, you know, the objective behind it is, do we want to create more change? That's when we use dialogue. And then third is this concept of sensemaking. And in every organization I have ever worked in, in every organization you have ever worked in, there's been this undercurrent of people talking about what the change is. And that might be gossip. It might be rumors. It might be the informal change champions who genuinely know what's going on and sharing it. The challenge for change practitioners come is that in the past, that has been. Either weaponized or demonized, like, you know, it's just gossip. Don't worry about it. Whereas actually it's a really, really important barometer of how well the change is going. And if you are not making space for the sensemaking, which is essentially what's going on there, or you're looking for ways that you can put cues into the sensemaking that are helpful for people, then you actually lose control of the change completely. And so for me, that. Third type of change communication, which I call the background talk of change, is really about, again, the power becomes owned by the people, the recipients of the change. And they take control of whatever it is that you put out there. Now, how that all comes together and why it's really important is that you can use those three models of change communication to sequence in a change project. Right. Right. Get started. You're not sure what you're going to be doing. Great time for dialogue. You get more clarity on what you will be doing. Let's bring in the monologic change communication to provide stability for people. You want to make sure that it's being understood the right way. Let's create space for sensemaking. And so it's that sequencing of the three types. You think of yourself as the conductor of the orchestra where you can make really sweet music of change communication.
Speaker 1Oh, I love it. So a couple of things on that. One is the monologic and dialogic. It feels like, and you're the researcher here, so correct this if I am wrong, but I'm making an assumption that you will find more or less of these in different cultures. So if you're working in a tight culture, the monologic, that direct tell and they will do kind of style is going to be more prevalent. But the dialogic is going to be much more prevalent in the loose cultures, like the ones that we tend to work in or more collectivist cultures. Would that be a safe assumption?
Speaker 2Well, definitely. So the way I looked at it in the research was around the importance of aligning the capability or the competency with the expectation. And whilst I didn't measure culture, I think broadly speaking, you're very correct. So when I did my research, I had two case studies. One was a highly unionized organization. So they had expectations of consultation. They had expectations of dialogue. And their initial leader was very big on that, and so they felt they had great change communication. The new leader that came in was very top down. I'll tell you what we're doing and, you know, that's the way we're doing it. And all of a sudden their measures of change communication started to drop, not because of what they were actually hearing, but we had moved from dialogic expectations to being met with monologic capability. Now, converse. Obviously, the other organization, the culture was very command and control, and the new leader came in who wanted to create a learning organization, who wanted to open up dialog, who wanted to do co-creation of the organizational strategy. And we're talking many years ago now. And so that was completely misaligned, and they thought he was a terrible leader. They thought he didn't know what he was doing. He kept asking us questions. And so it was that real misalignment. It was a misalignment between a capability and an expectation. And so I think organizations have distinct cultures which represent expectations of what does good communication look like in the organization. You know, am I told? Am I included? To what extent? All those things start to color whether you think you've had good change communication or not.
Speaker 1Yeah. And it also brings me to, we do live in a much more uncertain world. I mean, sometimes when we're communicating change, the power of the head is uncertain. They haven't actually figured it all out yet. They just know that we have to do this change. They're not quite sure what the impacts are yet, all those sorts of things. And for some people in uncertainty, they really thrive more from having that monologic communication. Like, can you just tell me what we're doing? Just tell me what I'm doing and when I'm doing it, because I hate uncertainty and I just want clarity. And then you've got others who are like, well, I want to be part of helping to have, to change this, to solve it. I want to. I've got so many questions. And so that dialogic seems to come more into that space too. And it's about, well, how do you navigate both of those things when uncertainty is around us all the time now? It's not new. And I think the tricky bit about
Speaker 2this is the extent to which you're going to lean into learned helplessness. And what I mean by that, when you have an audience who just wants to be told what to do, right? They're not tolerating the uncertainty. They just want clarity. And only when I get clarity will I be able to do X, Y, Z. What you're actually doing by giving that clarity, even if it's in the moment, is you're supporting what's known as learned helplessness. You're not helping them build a capability and a resilience with continuous change. And it's just quite unrealistic that you will always be in a state. And it's completely unrealistic for leaders. To be able to provide clarity in environments of high uncertainty. So it kind of, it sets you up to fail with trying to do that. And so for me, the trick is around how do we include expectation management into our communicative activities? And that might be if we're going to do a town hall or something of that nature where you're going to get up the front. You've got your leaders are going. You're going to say, hey, this is what is essentially a monologic forum, right? But the caveat is to say, today is Tuesday the 13th. Here's what we know. And you can provide that level of clarity for today only, recognizing, and part of your messaging is here are the things that may change over the next couple of weeks or months or whatever the time zone is appropriate. So I think a lot of good change communication. Now is about expectation management. And it's as much about communicating the process of how we're going to go through change and what's coming up as it is telling people what is changing and how it's going to change.
Speaker 1Yeah, I love that expectation management. I think it's something we talk about it when we do our work with our clients around making sure you're talking about the messy middle, because a lot of the time the messaging is all sunshine and lollipops and rainbows. And this is going to. It's going to be great. There's benefits, benefits, benefits. It's like, but people aren't stupid. And if you aren't setting up the expectation that there will be messiness, that there will be hard things, then it decreases your credibility as a leader or communicator, whatever. But also it just gets people really frustrated because, again, they're not stupid. It could always come across as quite patronizing, I think, too, to say it's going to be all fantastic.
Speaker 2Absolutely. That's a space that my practice has changed over the years with more knowledge around the neuroscience, because it's more than people aren't stupid. The neuroscience tells that people's brains seek threat before they seek reward. And this is a fact or, you know, a piece of science that's come from the neuroscience space that has really changed the way we think about it. I do change communication now because once upon a time I might have communicated with here are the benefits of this change up front to get people excited. However, what I know now is that if you're communicating benefits, they're not even listening to you because they're looking around and trying to read between the lines to go, what is the threat? What is the threat? What is the threat? And so now I actually lead with the threat and acknowledge the threats up front where it's appropriate to say, OK, some of you are concerned. Some of you are concerned about this and we've heard this. We've heard this. So let's just have a chat about that and then lead to how the benefits will come in. Because unless you're actually talking about the threats first, people aren't in a neurologically safe space to listen to your benefit. So, you know, it's not just being patronizing. It's actually being brain friendly in your change comms. I love that.
Speaker 1And I think, too, when we do our change comms planning, we oftentimes forget that. But reactance is a natural state as well. So it's going to happen. So plan for it. I talked to, as you say, doctors. the dressy elephant in the room. What are people likely to react over and be upfront about it? It's wonderful data.
Speaker 2Yes, it's feedback actually. It helps you with what you have to do more of, what you have to do less of, what's working, what's not.
Speaker 1It's a gift. And I want to touch on the sense-making piece too because I think the other thing that leads to that is a vacuum of information. So if people aren't getting the information that they need to make sense of it, then they fill the gaps, right? So that's where they put two and two together and come up with 25. And as you say, it's natural to expect that. And yet I do find we sometimes come across leaders who get very upset about it. It's like, well, you haven't given them a reason not to come up with their own conclusions. Or it's great feedback because maybe it was the way you said something that triggered this negativity or chain of thought where they've gone down this road in this rabbit hole. And that's important to understand that.
Speaker 2Amazing. Absolutely. And again, this has been a really interesting conversation over the years with leaders, to your point. Because again, we're harping back on the neuroscience here. Our brain is a prediction machine. And if their evidence is not in front of the brain to make sense of what they're seeing, it will fill those gaps, fill that vacuum, right, to create cues into prediction. Predicting what's going to happen. And the leaders often take that very, very personally. That, you know, they see it as a personal fact link. That, and they're being judged in terms of what they've done. Whereas actually it's an invitation, again, to shine a light on, hey, there might be a different way that you could communicate. Or there may be, there's a different piece of information that's really important to people. And then if we put our empathy hat on, you know, if we step into the shoes of our audience and the people that you're trying to influence, maybe we'd say something different, do something different around that. So I love that you brought that up. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1this neuroscience is so fascinating. Anybody working in any type of change or leadership role, you need to get amongst it. You need to. It's just, this is the way humans work and we're working with humans, not robots. So get going.
Speaker 2I just, I just think it, as a practitioner, it changes your practice. Yes, fundamentally. I have changed the way I work so significantly because of, you know, the last 10 years of doing neuroscience studies and workshops and research and stuff like that. Huge difference in my personal practice. Yeah, me too.
Speaker 1So in, as part of the book, you did some research with real life practitioners. I'm one of the real life practitioners. What did you learn from that? What is worrying people or what's exciting people?
Speaker 2Yeah, that was really interesting because the, so the process, so I had 12 experts in change communication. You were one of those and the other 11 were, I think we were across eight countries and primarily most of the people came from a very strong communication background. What I found the most interesting about what came out of that was that came out of that micro study or a Delphi panel was a focus on the profession and the occupation more so than the practices and tools of change communication. And what this meant was like a signaling of the importance of change communication moving upstream. And what I mean by that is the ability of people who've got strength, confidence and change communication to be on the front foot of design of change rather than on the receiving end of here's your change, now go and communicate it. So using all that knowledge around neuroscience, around dialogue, around sequencing and expectation management up front so that you are actually being consulted and advising on what it's going to take for the change to land as opposed to being the receiver of here's the change coming down. The pipeline to communicate it. So I think that was very interesting because it was framed up around the future of change communication. So that was a very big finding that came out of it. There was a relative positivity about AI. And I perhaps might have expected there to be more negativity about AI for people in change communication. However, there was this sense of as long as the guardrails are there it's a positive thing for us. So I think that was good. And again, it was about how does the profession use judgment and wisdom more so than getting into a content creation environment. So I think that was really that showed a real strong maturity in the space there. So there, there are a number of different things that came out of it, but I think they were the two things that really stood out for me. And the third was how much those findings were mimicking what's happening in the change management profession. Yeah, right. So we're having in the change management space, we're having exactly the same conversations around how does change management end up upstream before you've even designed the change. You're actually talking with your change practitioners. How are we using AI? In a way that's responsible is using our wisdom that we're not becoming a content creation, you know, kind of thing. So that was really interesting.
Speaker 1Yeah. It's funny you say that because earlier this week, I was down in Sydney and working with a change team to really delve into like what is our value proposition in a world that is increasingly, you know, impacted by AI. But we also did some horizon scanning and looked at all what else is going on in their particular industry and what to expect in the next three to five years too. And, you know, they raised a really good point around, you know, we worked, they worked in an organization where leaders value outputs. They want to see all the change documentation. They want to see the things, the artifacts. But the reality is that AI is going to be producing a lot more of that stuff. So how do you demonstrate the value that you bring when leaders see value as outputs? And in my mind, yes, okay, that's the shift that actually they're just going to have to, like leaders are going to have to navigate themselves around where the value lies. But it's the human element that is so important because no matter what your tool you use, no matter how you create your plan, the end user of that plan is still going to be a human being. And if people want connection, we are tribal people, we are social people. We want to be able to connect and we want to feel valued. We want to feel listened to, we want to feel cared for. And an AI bot can't do that for somebody. An AI can't tell a leader, hey, this person over here is really upset. I think what you should be doing is blah, blah, blah. I feel like that's a world according to Mel anyway. That's where demonstrating value with less through data points and more through those stories is going to be so important.
Speaker 2Well, I would, yes. And I actually think part of the answer is the data points in the sense that change and communication practitioners have got to get a lot better at having these conversations with leaderships around what is important and how are we measuring it. There is value in having data points that you can lead a conversation with a leader, whether you're a change or a communication practitioner about what is working. And being able to say, okay, you've asked for all of this, all of these artefacts, how has that shifted the dial? Vis-a-vis, we've done these workshops, we've gone and had these conversations, we've done this, and it shifted the dial this way. And perhaps this was also flagged in the Delphi study, the importance of having the business acumen and the ability to have conversations about data. Because in my experience, it's the one area that change practitioners are probably lacking the most in, and there is a craving for it from the leaders. When they see that you have commercial acumen, you become their trusted partner. And so without the ability to have that conversation and have the metrics that matter, then you're going to get stuck in this hamster wheel of, but they want this artefact, they want this artefact, they want this artefact.
Speaker 1Yeah, they want to see the pretty thing on the page. They want the dashboard. Yep. Every time. Now, I had two more, four more questions for this part of the interview. The first one is, if somebody is listening to this episode and they are brand new to change communication, whether a change manager, a comms person, or a leader of HR person, and they want to build that skill, where would they start?
Speaker 2I think, I actually think they start with joining something like IOBC. a professional net, because I think. yes there's your book they could read there's my book they could attend um we have got peers who have got courses all those kind of things but there is so much value in shadowing and having conversations with experienced people in the field and so professional associations become your grocery space of how do i meet the people in the field um we have podcasts on it right there's you know there's people get very hung up about what's the right course to do and i'm such a big fan of informal learning right um or low-cost learning there there are books there are podcasts there are youtube clips there are all those kind of things but i think until you're actually speaking with people who work in the space to say so tell me what you've learned and where did you learn it and what was really important to you that helps you navigate um and so that would be my first stop i love it
Speaker 1yes and i'm a big fan of everything you've just said to the podcast there's youtube there's um events you can go to that you can learn from panels like it's it doesn't have to be as you're saying a formal course although your agile lean change course is available should anybody want to go partake and and last question for this part of our interview with your book change communication who is it for why should somebody go
Speaker 2by it so the book has been written for change practitioners who feel uncomfortable with their performance in communication it has been written for communication people who are being asked to step up and do change it has been written for leaders who are frustrated with why is the change not benefiting from just do another communication right um above all else it's been written for people in organizational life who are so curious about how can we make this change better um that's why they should read it and i've you know deliberately structured it with the past being you know here's where we've come from because i believe that there is value in looking back there are elements that we want to take with us um the present is the biggest part of the book because that's all the practices you know that uh we want people to learn from and we want people to learn from and we want people to learn from and we want people to learn from and we want people to learn from and then the future is how do we actually get ready for where we're heading and recognizing that some people's future is right in front of their nose and other people's future is 10 years down the track
Speaker 1so a really good point yeah well thank you jen i have three questions that i ask every guest on the podcast are you ready for those oh sure let's do it uh the first one is what is an unexpected or left to field way that you learned a valuable lesson about communication
Speaker 2it's a bad lesson i
Speaker 1mean
Speaker 2it's a good lesson but no it's a bad memory so at one stage while i was um a part-time student full-time i was i was one of those pesky mature age students i am i'm one of them i was working as a customer service agent for a flea and tick control uh manufacturer pharmaceutical company and i used to handle the 1-800 number and i had this call where a woman was calling me and i was like oh my god i'm going to be in trouble i'm going to be in trouble and i was like oh my god i'm going to be in trouble i'm going to be in trouble i'm going to be in trouble and the woman was partially sobbing into the call because her they'd used the product the dog had died it was um paralysis tick for those particularly in queen plains um and i responded with all my data in front of me you know well the product is 97 efficacious and she replied my dog is 100 dead oh she noticed it's just not all that has one of the most uncomfortable left of field learnings for me around empathy and how you communicate with people yeah so please i got to share that story again not
Speaker 1well i appreciate you uh fronting up to it yet second question what is a book or a podcast you love and would recommend to our listeners oh easy um switch the heath brothers
Speaker 2which it's it's not a it's you know i think it's probably getting close to 18 years old now 20 years old um but it's a magnificent book um it features very heavily with applied positive psychology um one of the authors is a psychologist one is a sociologist there are so many great stories in it and it has influenced my work incredibly i
Speaker 1love the bright spots yes there was a great story in there i think was around the bright spots of maybe somewhere in southeast asia and actually went to the local community and said well really how is the children how has this community done it and just replicate what they've done because yeah they've done it yeah that would be a brilliant book highly recommend as well and last question if you could wave your magic wand and change one thing about communication at work what would it be
Speaker 2just one thing yes just one from the top five um that every time we go to send another communication post another communication upload another communication we pause for 60 seconds and we ask ourselves will this make the situation better well like take a breath
Speaker 1do that before you speak too oops then before you move hi um the care of paws that's it yeah before you exist today just take a breath but well jen has been absolute delight chatting to you and if people want to find out more about you and your work the agile leisure institute your books what's the best place for them to go
Speaker 2um look i think linkedin is probably the easiest place so i'm always very happy to connect with people on linkedin um and you know that then points you to various websites and
Speaker 1ways to connect with people on linkedin um and you know that then points you to various websites and um i'm always surprised to find all of the the things that i have the immense joy to play in wonderful well we'll put links to your linkedin and your websites in that show notes as well uh jen thank you again so much for joining us on less chatter more matter today a joy to be here with you thanks so much mel thank you
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