A Journey of Perpetual Reinvention by Steve Patten

When I started off in computers over 30 years ago, I had been attracted to an industry that was new and exciting and that promised a leisure society in a decade or two.

The leisure society turned out to be a sci-fi fantasy and today in the age of the blackberry and "always on" internet we are working harder than ever. There was more to come, I quickly got disillusioned with delivering computer programmes and systems that seemed to create more problems than they solved. There was a missing piece of the jigsaw.

So I became an early adopter of "Business Process Engineering" (BPR) using my project management background as my ticket into this new and exciting world. Surely if we created great computer systems and we had joined up effective processes we would have effective solutions. I read all the books and became a "Hamer and Champy" bore (I am sure the more mature agents of change among us will remember them). Unfortunately, as I am sure we have all experienced BPR, it still didn't have all the answers in terms delivering change effectively into the business environment.

Finally, it dawned on me that when things do work well, it is because the "people" do something special and the reverse is also true. Great people can often make lousy systems and half-baked processes deliver outstanding results.

So for the third time in my career I "morphed", this time, into a "people" person. I studied the leaders of thought on the subject, Peters, Blanchard, Berne & Covey, to name a few. It finally clicked and since then have been successfully helping organisations to change using a combination of my understanding of technology, process and people.

Even then there was still one more vital step for me as far as understanding how to effectively introduce change into organisations is concerned. As I got more and more into the psychology of business change I realised for most individuals there is a very blurred line between life in business and life outside business.

A person can only be sustainably effective if both aspects of their life are in harmony. (this proposition has more recently has acquired the name "work-life balance"). So I trained in a behavioural science called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) under Dr Richard Bandler to learn the skills necessary to be able to coach people to become effective in work and life. Yet another new and exciting world.

15 years on I have been privileged to help many people and lead many successful change initiatives into organisations from a wide diversity of industries facing a wide range of challenges. Along the way I have made many great friends and build a network of "agents of change".

Not withstanding the importance of effective Change Governance, which has been the foundation of my career, the new and exciting field of "Change Leadership" has emerged. It has captured my imagination through its awsome capacity to deliver return on investment (ROI).

All this knowledge and experience has been encapsulated into "The Synergy Programme", an effective and repeatable programme for engaging and aligning people behind a corporate objective. It benefits both the staff and the company and costs so little when compared to the investment in systems and process changes.

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