What are the benefits?
All too often - given the day-to-day pressures of our jobs - when faced with a change implementation we slip into old familiar strategies - despite their frequent lack of success in the past. The Tipping Point workshop can help focus management teams on creating better more successful organizational change implementation strategies.
Who should participate?
The intended audience for the workshop can be managers responsible for implementing the change or organizational development professionals. The workshop works best when the participants are all involved in the same organizational change effort.
What is the flow of the workshop?
Learn the background behind the simulation – including systems thinking and the theory behind the Tipping Point.
See the specifics of the computer simulation, by demonstration and sample runs.
Break out into teams to discuss and devise a simulated organizational change strategy.
Come back together as the larger group to try out each team's strategy on the computer simulation.
Return to team discussion to ground the concepts in terms of specific application to their organization and their change effort.
Report out to the larger group the how new concepts can be applied in their  implementation plans.
How long does it take?
In the half-day workshop participants use the simulation to experience and ground the concepts in the Tipping Point model.

The full-day workshop allows participants  to apply their learnings to a real change initiative and create action items for success.
Why does it work?
The computer simulation is a powerful way to introduce the dynamic Tipping Point model of change.
The workshop brings out participants' expertise and experience. The simulation is a focal point for discussion and dialogue. The friendly competition aspect gets people to talk about organizational change. People learn from each other.  
The discussion brings out otherwise hidden assumptions about how change happens. Team members learn about each other's ideas and together create a larger common idea of how change can be fostered in an organization.
The simulation incorporates interactions between factors that can affect change, and it demonstrates long-term as well as short-term impacts. This gives unexpected results which encourages participants to think "outside the box". 
Summary: Learning by Action works!
The workshop is effective because it gets people involved. It's fun. The simulation is engaging to play with it. The competition built into the workshop adds a dimension that increases people’s involvement. While devising strategies to beat the other teams, participants discuss their ideas and hidden assumptions about organizational change. Once people are involved and thinking about change strategies, they can then have a more serious discussion on organizational change. This helps teams form strategies that are richer and understood fully by the entire team.
Time for grounding the lessons learned from playing and discussing simulated strategies is built into the workshop. This provides participants the opportunity to think about how the variables that they have used in the game can be made real in their own work environment.
The assumptions and equations built into the simulation are close enough to participants' experience to make the game realistic, to demonstrate valuable interactions, and to make the lessons learned applicable to their own organization. It is important to remember that the simulation is generic; it conveys concepts. It it not intended to give numeric predictions. 
Participant Comments Articles
Examples of Organizational Change Initiatives

All participants receive a workbook as well as a copy of Creating Contagious Commitment: Applying the Tipping Point to Organizational Change.  

The workbook is an integral part of the workshop. Participants use it to record aspects of the theory and develop strategies to use on the simulation; plus it provides structure for additional exercises.  

Creating Contagious Commitment goes into more depth on the concepts presented in the workshop.
About Organizational Change
It is often said that change is the only constant in today's organizations.
Many organizational changes are critical to business and organizational success. Despite this, organizational change is often met with indifference or even resistance.  The difference between success and failure of a change effort can lie as much in the way that the change is implemented as in the actual change itself. Organizations need both to identify the changes required for their business and also the ways in which they can maximize the adoption of a change among employees.

More on the Tipping Point Workshop
The Tipping Point workshop is built around an interactive system dynamics computer simulation that captures key interactions inherent in implementing organizational change. It helps managers understand how to spread “contagious commitment” to an organizational change among employees by applying lessons learned from public health. In the workshop, participants can try a variety of strategies to foster a successful and cost effective change effort. They can immediately see the effects of their strategies – and discuss them with their teammates – in a safe, simulated environment. 
The workshop's strength lies in leveraging friendly competition to foster dialogue and discussion on organizational change. This conversation is key. It uncovers hidden assumptions, and highlights team members' individual knowledge. This serves to create a richer collective understanding of ways to effectively implement change.

....

The Dance of Change (Doubleday/Currency, 1999) by Peter Senge and his colleagues  (which follows the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by giving more examples of applying systems thinking and other learning disciplines) has a description of applying the Tipping Point Workshop.

For more information see http://www.fieldbook.com.

The "Infectious" Spread of Change is an article, originally published in the Systems Thinker in August 2000. It describes using the Tipping Point workshop in a significant organizational change at Nortel Networks.  

From Public Health to Organizational Change, appeared in in the Systems Thinker in September 2003. It goes into some depth on the theory supporting the Tipping Point simulation.

The Systems Thinker is published by Pegasus Communication: http://www.pegasuscom.com.

Comments from Workshop participants:

“Amazing program you put together!!!!”

“It was very beneficial to us as a team and a company.” 

“I found the workshop to be very helpful to our current project”

“A wealth of content in a short time.“

“The Tipping Point workshop helped me think in terms of the elements involved in change and in making change.”

“Very appropriate to our current change.”

"It really made me question my assumptions."

“The discussion with my teammates on the interaction between variables was valuable.”

“The analysis was powerful.”

“The workshop enabled me to see practical applications of new concepts.”

“The dynamics demonstrated by the simulation and the accompanying exercises are very effective.”

“Helped me to see the factors impacting organizational change from within an organizational structure.”

For more information on a workshop in your organization, please Contact Us.
Tipping Point Info Sheet Tipping Point Brochure

3-min Slide Show (requires PowerPoint 2002 or later)
  
Creating Contagious Commitment

Certification Training
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