Glossary

Celebration Buffer: A commitment to frequently notice, define, and celebrate wins related to your change.

Change Boundaries: The limits of your change, both now and in the future.

Change Agent Essential: A recommendation for action based on experience and results in similar situations; a heuristic.

Change Algebra: A description of a change story using variables to substitute for specific people, change, and organizations.

Change Buffer: Explicit, different thoughts, behaviors, or policies that allow the change agents and the change to vary from the status-quo people and the environment.

Change Corpses: Changes that continue after the life has gone out of them.

Change Paths: Graph comparing driving people to driving change, on an axis of energy to drive the implementation versus distance toward the goal.

Change Scars: The psychological vestiges of bad past change efforts that manifest as physical and emotional reactions to new change.

Concrete Goal: Change attributes summarized into one statement that closely follows the pattern: By <date>, <who> will…<see, feel, touch, taste, hear, experience, or know><what> <where>.

Driving change: Choosing a change for yourself and clearing the obstacles for others to choose the change too.

Driving people: Using some form of coercion (e.g., orders, fear of negative consequences, removal or application of positive consequences) to compel others to change.

Friendship Buffer: – The person or persons you turn to on challenging days to steel your will and give your comfort and strength to continue your change journey.

Leadership Buffer: The protective wing that a leader stretches out to shelter the people who work with them.

Mindset Buffer: A personal commitment to act on your change regardless of the reaction of the people or environment around it.

People Costs: The negative effects of failed changes that people store in their hearts and minds—effects that delay or derail the next change.

Personal Buffer: A buffer you can create and maintain independent of the organization related to your change.

Policy Buffer: A deliberate change to a policy that permits you and  your change to be different from the status quo.

Scalable: Something, once created, that may be used many times without the author investing any more time. [example: I invest an hour in a blog post, but it could be read by 1, 10, 100 or 1,000 or more people and I wouldn’t have to invest another minute.]

Settlers: The people who “live on the land” of your change, whose lives will be impacted by it.

Time Costs: The meetings, projects, initiatives and community forums held for already failed changes.