Change Champions: A Dialogic Approach to Creating an Inclusive Culture

For four decades, the authors of this powerful new book have helped organizations, large and small, transform their cultures to be more inclusive and made diversity a strength. In this book, Fred Miller, Monica Biggs, and Judith Katz share their experience using “change champions” for cultural transformation, rapidly changing the core narratives in an organization that shifts day-to-day conversations, actions, and decisions in positive directions.

Change champions are people from all parts of an organization who volunteer to be advocates for a new way of thinking, talking, and acting. This short book shows you how to prepare leaders for a change champion intervention, how to select change champions, and the critical process of building this group into a connected, caring community by ensuring each of the champions goes through a transformational journey personally and collectively. You learn how to support the initial activities of change champions as they advocate for change in their day-to-day work, how to help their supervisors support their change champion, and how the change champion’s role evolves as the culture shifts in the direction you are trying to go and becomes ready for bigger shifts.

Numerous examples and cases will demonstrate the different steps in the unfolding change champion journey to produce a more inclusive organization. This book is a key resource for those wanting to improve inclusion, leverage diversity, equity, and access to achieve higher organizational performance.

But this book is more than that, as the change champion method can be adapted for any change requiring an organization-wide shift in thinking and acting. Leaders and professionals who have struggled to increase, for example, safety, sustainability, psychological safety, customer focus, and even cost consciousness may find the change champion approach just what they need to break through the resistance of a strong culture.

The change champion method is a different kind of Dialogic OD intervention from the others in our series, but it meets all the criteria for Dialogic OD, fits well with a Dialogic Mindset, and is a proven method for fundamentally transforming organizational culture.