Over the last 6 months I have been designing, testing and piloting an exciting new Change Management Game for leaders and teams which lets them experience what it is like to lead a complete 9-month change management project over the course of a single day. The development process forced me to think through what I really believe to be the key principles of change management in a sufficiently clear and concrete way to be able to design an online/offline game round them. Here is what I ended up with:

I have been reading about Behavioural Economics (and Behavioural Finance) through the excellent 8-minute summaries from iminds.com. BE explains why we are systemically and predictably irrational in our economic decisions and introduces 2 terms "Bounded Rationality" and "Bounded Willpower" as limits to rationality within which we all operate.

I am working through an intriguing book How the way we talk can change the way we work written by two psychologists of adult learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The authors contend that we are naturally immune to any form of change (with our systems quickly rejecting casual changes) and to make change in ourselves and others we must learn 7 new languages (ways) to think and talk about change.

Fabio Padilla from Brazil has written a very interesting review of Bioteams for his MBA thesis at the Universidade Católica de Brasilia - Universa. Fabio has very kindly allowed me to republish a summary of his conclusions which he has translated from the original Portuguese.

In the recent UK floods we heard a lot about defences failing and phrases being bandied about by engineers and managers such as "a once in a hundred years" event and "could never have been envisaged." However when I hear these types of explanations it always makes me think instead of the crucial differences between a promise, a responsibility and a guarantee.

Bioteams readers might be interested to know that I have just launched Cohort - an Online Change Management Game which challenges players to explore different strategies to gain the support of a group of senior executives for a major change initiative. The game is designed to be used in leadership development workshops with up to 20 participants playing competitively in teams.

John Seddon, in his ground breaking book Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, provides a harrowing view of the "value destroying and non-customer centric system" the UK Public Sector has become locked into in the last 10 years.

When we are dealing with change we need to be able to make quick but robust assessments of the power/influence of the different players. My colleague, Andrew Constable, has developed a concise but comprehensive approach to assessing power which he calls the 8P's of Power.

Gamification, the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications, is a very topical area with many enterprises exploring how they might use it to generate new levels of engagement with their staff or customers (current and prospective). In this article I review some popular gamification approaches/techniques and provide a reading list for further study. I cover 4 key aspects of Gamification: Objectives, Frameworks, Building Blocks and Implementation Risks/Mitigations.

The late Stephen Covey always reminded us that "the main thing was to keep the main thing the main thing !" However when you think about "Change Management" you could be excused for thinking its all about detailed road maps and large tomes of procedures and checklists. These are all important but sometimes they can also sadly distract from the whole point of the exercise. To stop you falling into this trap I offer you my easy to remember 4 point mental checklist based on the human body to help you constantly check that you have not been "detail distracted"!

There are about half a dozen basic dilemma stereotypes which underpin almost all of the operational and strategic issues which challenge leaders today. These are so prevalent and pervasive I call them the META DILEMMAS because they are present in virtually every leadership situation.

"If we want to do something creative, outside the box, innovative and un-traditional I am doubtful that sitting in a traditional meeting room, having a traditional meeting and following a traditional meeting script is going to move us toward that vision". Jamie Billingham summarises best practices for radically improving meetings.

The Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina recently published a useful white paper on the topical area of developing skills for virtual teams. It is available online and in PDF. What I found most interesting was the section on Virtual Team Challenges.

I am always on the lookout for good simple visualisation techniques to support change management. Chris Collison has introduced me to The River Diagram - a great strategic tool for moving a community of groups forward via common initiatives and best practice sharing.

One of the most powerful team exercises is to explore team leaders and team members "mental models" of teams, networks and groups. Mental models are the, often invisible, dictators of what actually happens in a team as opposed to what team leaders would like to happen. Here are some practical techniques for uncovering these "icebergs of the mind" before they sink your teams.

In 1964 psychiatrist Dr. Eric Berne published a wonderful book Games people play in which he identified the different games people play, often unwittingly, in social situations based on his concept of transaction analysis. People in teams play games too including Freeloader, Pseudo-engager, Chase-me, Senior Partner, Inquisitor, Stop-Starter, Overcommunicator, Email Fixater and Attachmentitis.

Once upon a time there were three teams - an Indian Team, a Chinese Team and a Hungarian Team.....Very interesting observations by Leslie Perlow of Harvard Business School on teams of software engineers in different countries.

Lateral leadership skills are what you need to get the job done when you are not the boss of the team

Instantly discover a persons main worry about an upcoming change by how they speak just five words: We cant do that here.

One of the most important team questions, often ignored when a traditional or virtual team is setup, is What type of team are we actually dealing with here?