The (Reluctant) Hero’s Journey Through Change
Let’s face it, change is hard. Even when the person wants the change, or sees personal value in a change, the emotional and mental process can be daunting. Usually we have no control over the change being asked of us. We can only control our response. The worst thing you can do as a leader is pretend everything is fine, that your workers are thrilled with the confusion and ambiguity that surrounds large scale change initiatives. Ignoring the people part of the change leads to anxiety, rumors, and active or passive resistance.
During a particularly tumultuous reorg of the learning and development departments, leadership tasked us to form cross-funtional teams and come up with a PechaKucha presentation for our first all-hands quarterly meeting. Each team chose their own topic; working with SMEs, intake processes, images for eLearning, etc. My team decided to tackle the topic of change itself and normalizing the emotional journey we were all undertaking.
PechaKucha’s 20×20 presentation format shows your 20 chosen images, each for 20 seconds. In other words, you’ve got 400 seconds to tell your story, with visuals guiding the way.
This project was such a fun collaboration and a big hit at the department PechaKucha festival. Leveraging the classic hero journey and the modern epic of the Star Wars saga, allowed us to talk candidly about what was being asked of us as a department and how we could choose to deal with the challenge. It makes my geeky heart happy!
Final Presentation
StarWars-Journey-through-change-FinalConcept Mindmap
Designing the Lesson
StarWars-Design-DocBrainstorming and Analysis
PechachuAnalysisFlow Outline
There were five of us on our cross-functional team; analyst, instructional designer, operations admin, elearning developer, and facilitator. We each had to present four slides, talking through our points with the supporting slide image.