USING CHANGE INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT IN ORGANIZATION DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM FOR HEALTH CARE ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract

Introduction: Organization development (OD) has been used as a strategy to promote organizational learning, improve employees’ efficiency, and maximize organizational outcomes. It also serves as a retreat of the organization and helps bring about staff awareness of needed changes and how these changes can happen. Sometimes, OD’s goal is to promote change leadership among staff in response to needed organizational changes. When this is the case, OD practitioners should consider concepts and theories related to change in designing their OD program and implementation.

Objective: This paper reports the authors’ experiences with the use of change intelligence quotient (CQ) by Barbara Trautlein in designing our OD program.

Methods: The authors designed an OD program based on the change intelligence quotient then implemented the program to 5 organizations/groups, and evaluated the outcomes in terms of participant satisfaction.

Results: Change intelligence quotient (CQ) delineates the interactions among seven types of people or CQ positions, these are, the coach, executor, visionary, driver, champion, facilitator, and adapter. The CQ describes how individual people with unique characteristics would experience and react to different types of changes. Understanding these unique characters help promote one’s awareness of oneself, awareness to others and the team he belongs to, therefore it helps them to respond more effectively to the situations that require changes. In our program, the participants worked in small groups of 5-10. First, we asked each participant to identify himself/herself according to the CQ position, and reflect on it. We then asked the participants to pair with the others who had different CQ and discuss their experiences in relation to interaction for change and how to make it better. The whole group then got together and exchanged their experiences and ideas. They identified the effective communication strategies required for different CQ positions. Following this, all the participants were asked to stand on their CQ marks on a CQ triangle to form the whole organization from which they were made aware of how their organization might perform when dealing with changes. We concluded with highlighting the issues and change management strategies to the managers pointing to the fact that change management required interventions at individual, team and organization levels. Our evaluation from a series of five OD’s revealed that participant satisfaction was high.