BHG Framework

Whereas management is about working in “the system,” leadership is about working on “the system”—it’s about leading change.

You cannot drive durable change, any better than you can push rope.  And you do not project-manage change, because leading organizational change is not an engineering problem to be solved.  

Leading organizational change is about creating an effective organization out of fallible individuals (of which you are also one). Cultures and human behavior (including yours) do not adhere to the Newtonian, clockwork rules of linear thinking.  In fact, perhaps the most important critical success factor in changing an organization is the leader’s capacity for nonlinear thinking.

And despite what the leadership charm schools may tell you, leadership is not about more polish, more style or more flair.  

Leadership is about more Brains, more Heart, and more Guts.

It means having the Brains and doing the work to learn new, difficult, but valuable things, to stretch your mind with new ideas, to refine your thoughts, to develop knowledge beyond PowerPoint depth, and to subordinate your judgement to your curiosity when you encounter things that you don’t understand.

It means showing more Heart, discerning and caring more about the things that really matter.

And it means having the Guts to take on those problems that really matter, and fearing lost opportunity more than failure.

Brains, Heart, Guts; ergo, The BHG Framework.

And it is called a “framework” for a reason.  It is not a methodology.  It is not a program or project.  It is not a checklist.  And it is not a set of instructions where, if you successfully complete steps 1-n, out will pop a transformed organization.  It is a framework, a set of constructs.  

Think about chess.  It has a framework, a set of constructs.  For example, it’s played on a board comprised of 8×8 equal-sized squares of two alternating colors. Each player begins with 16 of 6 different kinds of pieces, and each different piece has its own prescribed way of moving. However, the framework doesn’t tell you how to play the game; it doesn’t tell you what piece to move when.  Those decisions are up to each player, and there are 197,742 different ways for the players’ first two turns to transpire.  By the third move, the number of possibilities rises to 121 million.  

The BHG Framework is to leading organizational change what the constructs of chess are to chess. In playing chess, your opponent is another person.  In leading organizational change, your opponent is the old way of doing things.

It’s called the “BHG Framework” because it is a framework that defines the field of play and rules of engagement for leading organizational change—deciding what moves to make when, on the other hand, are leadership decisions that require brains, heart and guts.

Origins

The BHG Framework is the product not of academic exercise or intellectual speculation, but of decades of observational research and experiment-driven development under the conditions of real life.

My career has been one of leading organizational change at various levels of various companies.  That experience includes creating 10 new organizations, renovating 4 under-performing ones, and redesigning 2 that were doing OK but were tooled for yesterday rather than tomorrow.

As someone whose formal education was in Quantitative Methods, leading organizational change was something way out of my comfort zone.  So, I approached it the way you would expect a QM nerd to do so.  

I identified leading thinkers on the subject, and I didn’t care where they came from.  I read their articles and books, and I attended lectures, workshops or conferences of those who offered them.  I learned the concepts and theories that they taught.  Treating every organization that I have led as my personal laboratory for leadership experiments, I took the concepts and theories that I learned for a test drive in my own organization.  I kept what worked and tossed what didn’t.  

Because they did come from disparate sources, I took those things that worked and integrated them, creating a unified framework for leading organizational change.  That framework is the BHG Framework.

Doing work that matters for people who care.