readiness is within reach.
Build readiness for anything you are facing – even if it already happened.
Humanize the journey, even when the destination is beyond your control.
“With so much disruption outside of our control, people need an approach to change readiness that doesn’t depend on having control of all the variables.”
– MaryJo Burchard, PhD in Organizational Leadership
Humane change readiness for a world turned upside down.
In this volatile and unpredictable world, you need an approach to readiness that does not depend on everyone being “good at change.”
Our approach finds safe constructive, and nonthreatening ways to discuss immediate needs and concerns, and find solutions that fit the unique dynamics experienced by all parties involved.
Concord Solutions uses DUEL MODEL brand organizational consulting and coaching to guide leaders and organizations through change. Concord Solutions uses CHANGE EXPERIENCE PROFILE brand services to assess and address current specific change needs.
Together, the DUEL MODEL organizational consulting and the CHANGE EXPERIENCE PROFILE business assessment services create a new, meaningful space for solution-based conversations, rather than pressuring “buy-in” or expecting people to “just get over it.”
readiness begins with mindfulness.
change readiness reimagined
Readiness is based on how a change impacts us. We are ready for change that “fits” what is important to us.
When we Pause in response to a change, it is a signal that we sense a key need is threatened or unaddressed in the change.
When we Pounce in response to a change, it is a signal that we sense the change meets (or at least does not threaten) what is important to us.
Change evolves. People are Pausing and Pouncing all the time, in many ways.
These responses are visceral, intuitive responses – like pulling your hand from the fire. Current responses are not about “how good people are at change.” They are based on how a change is impacting people in this moment.
Change leadership consulting and coaching through Concord Solutions reframes change leadership, with research-based tools we have developed over nearly a decade.
We are the originators of DUEL MODEL brand organizational consulting and CHANGE EXPERIENCE PROFILE brand assessment services.
We begin organizational readiness and change leadership by introducing DUEL MODEL brand consulting, giving every person experiencing the change a constructive language to articulate their current needs without being portrayed as subversive, resistant, or just “bad at change.”
Organizational change need assessment has never been more intuitive, with our CHANGE EXPERIENCE PROFILE (CEP) brand services. Concord Solutions delivers precision change readiness consulting, because the CEP “takes the pulse” of each person’s change experience, and assess and address current change needs as they are happening. The Change Experience Profile can map out the current change-related needs of every individual, team, division, and organization, so each group can triage the mission-critical needs most impacting them today.
Using DUEL MODEL organizational consulting to create a shared language and CHANGE EXPERIENCE PROFILE services to assess and address needs, Concord’s immersive change readiness training and coaching builds readiness by converting “support v. resistance” and “speed of adoption” conversations into “needs and solutions” conversations.
This means that while people adapt to change, they are also growing in awareness, empathy, interpersonal communication, engagement, trust, and hope.
Instead of attempting to just motivate everyone to “buy in” without hearing people’s concerns,
- Concord uses DUEL MODEL brand organizational consulting services to help leaders and teams articulate the current impact of the change on each person and team, and
- Concord uses CHANGE EXPERIENCE PROFILE brand organizational assessment services to identify what specific needs are of concern, so they can be addressed.
Concord Solutions coaches, consults, and trains leaders and teams in change readiness using the DUEL Model on its own in small or large change leadership, but as MaryJo Burchard, Principal Consultant and Founder of Concord, is a PROSCI certified change management consultant, Concord can also use the DUEL Model and the CEP as an integrated, specialized consulting and assessment plug-in for pockets of especially volatile, high-risk, or rapid change in tandem with PROSCI consulting for larger, planned, overall relatively stable enterprise change initiatives.
OPEN Readiness CONVERSATIONS
How do you build readiness?
With a customized plan of organizational assessment, coaching, consulting, and training, Concord Solutions can help your organization navigate open readiness conversations using the DUEL Model, the foundation of our unique change readiness assessment, the Change Experience Profile.
Together, we utilize these tools to help you identify and address the needs that the change experience creates or intensifies.
POST-Trauma readiness: it’s not too late to live again
The most important readiness we build often happens after something blindsided us.
When an overwhelming change blindsides you, it can be so life-altering that the event itself becomes the great marker of your life, dividing everything “before” and “after” it happened. When this happens at work, entire teams, departments, and organizations can be forever changed in a moment.
Yet, despite all the ways it may have reshaped your life, your sense of identity, and the way you function (and possibly the identity and functions of your organization), it can still be tough to face this thing that set you on course to become a different person (team, organization) with a different life. Although the change has already swept you into a new reality, maybe you’re still not “ready.” After months or even years, maybe that sense of powerlessness you felt when the moment caught you off-guard still lingers, hovers, festers. Maybe despite the passing time, you still feel captive to that initial anxious state. If you are frustrated by your extended sense of “stuckness,” you are not alone. We don’t get to vote when lightning strikes. “Unready” is the only way some things are ever experienced. But initial unreadiness does not prevent you from becoming ready – ready for the new life you now find yourself living.
Initially, the greatest gift you can give yourself may be the freedom to stay on autopilot until you have enough mental and emotional bandwidth to face down this radical disruption and what it has done in and to your life. But eventually, if you want to move out of survival, you will need to sit in the same room with the frightening, vulnerable, awkward, and messy feelings, and name what happened to you.
Readiness that you build after you have been blindsided enables you to begin to truly live again. But how can you build “readiness” if you cannot go back and unhappen what happened? How can you “become ready” for something that already happened if you cannot return to who you were before it occurred?
One way to start moving forward is to let yourself reframe the way you see the change. Instead of thinking of the event as a single point in time – a single radical disruption, imagine the change as an emerging multifaceted journey that began in a moment and continues to this day. Where has the journey taken you? What have you faced and conquered? Name the milestones and honor what you have survived. Acknowledge the grit and courage you didn’t know you had. This can help you begin to shake free from constantly rewinding to the original moment and start getting curious about the person, team, family, or organization you have become. While some things that could have been will never be, you also have potential within you now that would not exist without the journey you have survived.
We have extensive experience helping individuals, teams, and organizations with this journey through on-site or virtual Trauma-Informed Leaders + Teams sessions. This is neither therapy nor simply informational training describing the impact of trauma and how to help yourself, your team, your students or clients, or your organization in the aftermath. With an Organizational Leadership lens, we compassionately help you explore how traumatic disruption has shaped dynamics of leaders, teams, and individual stories through an immersive, safe experience that collaboratively brings participants on an empathy-informed journey together. Emerge on the other side of the sessions with shared clarity about how you have gotten to where you are, mindfulness of your individual and shared contribution to renewal at every level, and focus on what you can control moving forward.
Making room to heal as organizations, teams, and individuals requires opening up new space for a new and different way to think about and tell your personal and shared story. Giving yourself permission to become curious and explore new ways to think and be takes intentionality. Neurologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once said:
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
To get you started on a new approach to change readiness based on your power to choose your response, click the button below for a free downloadable copy of our Top 10 Tips for Change Readiness.
change readiness resources
PDF Downloads
Challenging Readiness Assumptions
Top10Tips for Readiness
DUEL Change Readiness Model
Pause Messaging Guide
Trauma-Informed Training
Featured Presentations
Open Readiness Conversations
Need Alert – Pause Messages
Leveraging the Pounce Voice
Media Resources
the concord leader blog
Thoughts to feed your curiousity about things that matter most.
What are you waiting for?
