Who are change makers and what do they do?

Our new book on Organizational Change Management: Inclusion, Collaboration and Digital Change in Practice offers advice to #changemakers – but who are change makers and what do they do?

Our approach puts the change experience as the starting point, so that we can identify targets and lessons for current and future professionals who become change makers.

As a writing team we had quite a lot of debate about what to call the people who were our target audience for this book. In previous literature (including our own research) we often talk about change agents. We debated this term, we talked about calling them champions, we talked about more generally targeting middle managers or change leaders or change managers, and eventually we landed on the term ‘change maker’, who we defined as someone who becomes the architect and builder of change in organizations.

To MAKE change is to construct, create, and concoct something out of the resources that are available. We wanted a term that we felt encapsulated the creative and collaborative role that these individuals play within organizations that captured the value that they add to the change process.

Change makers are proactive and purposeful in promoting, enabling change in organizations. They imagine creative ideas and craft innovative solutions to problems, and they engage in collaborative work and processes and organizational redesign.

Change Makers play a pivotal role in change implementation. But they’re also bounded by the ultimate decision-making power of others: senior leaders, executives, business owners often determine change strategy, but Change Makers are the ones that implement it and put it into practice.

So this is a book written for Change Makers in organisations today and the future Change Makers in our classrooms. This is a book to teach you how to manage creativity, power and resistance; how to lead, include, listen and shape others; how to collaborate and evaluate; and how to make change from within organizations.

Get your copy from Amazon or from Sage directly