Find a bright spot and clone it.

That's the first step to fixing everything from addiction to corporate malaise to malnutrition. A problem may look hopelessly complex. But there's a game plan that can yield movement on even the toughest issues. And it starts with locating a bright spot -- a ray of hope.

Program management is now the preferred vehicle for bringing about major organizational and strategic change in many sectors. Unfortunately, former project managers entrusted with major programs are frequently not up to the task.

Here are nine questions you can ask to increase engagement when leading change.

Editor's Note: read the comments for some additional useful questions.

Can 'Complexity Theory' explain why strategies and change programs seldom deliver the results that were intended? Does it mean that we should leave everything to chance and abandon any attempts to shape our organizations for the future? In this article Dr Jean Boulton and Dr Peter Allen, from Cranfield's Complex Systems Management Centre, explain how this 'new science' can be used by managers to rethink their approaches to strategy and change management.

Most change programs fail, but the odds of success can be greatly improved by taking into account these counter-intuitive insights about how employees interpret their environment and choose to act.

New leaders want to put their stamp on an organization -- but it's often better for their egos than for their companies. Change for its own sake causes cynicism and resistance among the rank and file. And all too frequently, it's harmful or worse for organizational performance.

Research shows that most transformation leaders go unpromoted, unrecognized, and unrewarded. And their companies suffer in the long run.

Over the next year or two, companies will face substantial challenges. As the recession deepens, the battlefield will shift from great ideas and strategies to strongest execution. The companies that will prove to be successful will be equipped with action plans grounded in practical targets and tools to overcome key obstacles and inefficiencies.

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The inventory tool is the companion to the book The Amaryllis Way - Growing Leaders Who Grow Leaders, a leadership parable that describes a philosophy of leadership. The inventory tool builds on the concepts from the book and seeks to identify your leadership approach. It is designed to help you and members of your team reflect on how you grow people or where you may be deficient. With a healthy dose of honesty, it can provide insight into your strengths and weaknesses, and establish a basis for discussing how to develop people as leaders and as members of a team.

This article examines issues surrounding technological change, including three types of norms (formal, informal, technical) and six rules of thumb for successful adaptation.

A carefully constructed change agent program is essential to any successful operational transformation.

Organizational change is a much discussed topic in the management literature. It is an important issue because proper change management significantly increases the survival an organization in hyper-competitive global business environment. Yet, all too often transformational change programs fail due to a variety of reasons. The purpose of this paper is to describe change from different angles and to utilize the literature information to identify key components of organizational change in order to develop a "Model of Strategically Balanced Change". The author argues that transformational change is a balancing act and should involve the entire workforce. This paper is essentially an information guide about organizational change that can be used by decision makers in industry and nonprofit organizations, by business consultants, and by business educators and students in academia. [BNET Annotation]

When leaders give reasons for change to people who don't agree with them, it's worse than ineffective. A significant body of research shows that it usually entrenches those people more deeply in opposition to what the leaders are proposing.

This is why the traditional leadership approach of trying to persuade people of something different by giving them reasons why they should change their minds isn't a good idea if the audience is at all skeptical, that is, cynical or even hostile. If a leader presents reasons at the outset of a communication to such an audience, it will likely activate the confirmation bias and the reasons for change will be reinterpreted as reasons not to change. This occurs without the thinking part of the brain being activated: the audience becomes even more deeply entrenched in its current contrary position. Reasons don't work, because the audience is neither listening nor thinking.

There's no single, perfect answer for leaders pursuing change initiatives; instead, success requires taking several basic steps. We've codified four elements in an approach we call PLOT: Plan, Lead, Operate, and Track. The PLOT framework--a toolkit for change management--calls for leaders to identify the sources of value and then focus on a few areas for improvement: get the right people in place quickly, rally the troops around milestones, make sure the tough calls are made, and rigorously track progress.

Prosci's Change Management Maturity Model is based on benchmarking research and interactions with companies going through change. The maturity model has five levels or stages, from no change management to organizational competency. This paper gives detailed explanation of each level as well as the action steps your organization can take to move to the next level of the model.

Understanding human systems requires looking from many angles. Based on his 50 years of research into organizational dynamics, the author describes some useful approaches.

Leaders face unprecedented challenges when embarking on large-scale transformation, whether it's entering new markets or recovering from industry turmoil. Here are 10 tried-and-true tactics and common sense practices from authors with decades of experience helping companies implement organizational change.

Organizations undertaking change initiatives must engage employees. Paying the person instead of the job and using variable pay and stock are perhaps the most powerful changes an organization can make in moving its reward system toward one that supports performance and change. These authors describe the reward systems and motivational tools that will move employees to support the organization's change initiatives.

Many companies wait too long to attempt transformations, doing so only when the signs of trouble have become obvious. But that's almost inevitably too late. High performers, by contrast, change before they must, knowing that the best way to transform is from a position of strength.

Organizations undertaking change initiatives must engage employees. Paying the person instead of the job and using variable pay and stock are perhaps the most powerful changes an organization can make in moving its reward system toward one that supports performance and change. These authors describe the reward systems and motivational tools that will move employees to support the organization's change initiatives.

There's hardly a company today that isn't grappling with the difficulty of change. The problem isn't so much figuring out what to change - everyone knows that business has to become faster and better - it's how to get from here to there. Unfortunately, the approach to managing change that seems most reasonable and least arduous also turns out to be wrong. The problem is the seduction of reductionist thinking.

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to get people to alter the way they do things. New research reveals why it's so hard and suggests strategies to make it easier.

This document provides a template that lists the critical steps for creating a change management process, a high-level process flow for planned change management, an emergency change process flow, and a general method to evaluate the success of the process that one has implemented. [BNET Annotation]

Editor's Note: the material is focused on the computer networking world but the process described is broadly applicable.

Breakthroughs in brain research explain how to make organizational transformation succeed.

Editor's Note: very interesting concepts...a highly recommended read.

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Resistance to change is one of the most powerful drivers of human behavior, and the key to dealing with it effectively is to understand both its physical and emotional components.