I have been meeting with a SCORE client of my husband’s. This unusually capable and handsome man (doesn’t hurt to look, right?) is building a database to track organizational change processes. Since I’ve spent most of my adulthood leading, participating in, and crafting solutions for organizational change, my husband thought I could be more helpful to Steve than he could be.

It turns out I can be helpful. I can tell Steve what hasn’t or doesn’t work when planning, introducing, implementing, and tracking organizational change. I can tell him because I’ve done all of these things–just not as well as I think they should be done. Making change is hard for any person. Multiply that by 10 to 10,000 and you have some idea how hard it is for organizations. But the more important challenge for both individuals and organizations is making sure change is happening and then making it stick. Virtually no corporation does this well. The military does it much better.

I can’t tell Steve how to build a database. God no. I can tell Steve what needs to be built into a database that purports to help organizational change agents build and track a change process. Years of experience and some wisdom about change, my own personal change and changes I’ve led in organizations, help me to be helpful to others with more enthusiasm than experience.