University of Birmingham Enterprise announces the launch of Mindset Dynamics, a new venture that will help businesses and public sector organisations create human connections and develop bespoke, people-centred approaches to transformation initiatives.
More than a third of large organizations have some type of transformation programme underway at any given time1. While there is a lively debate about the ‘failure rate’ of change programmes, most commentators would agree that, in most cases, it is people who derail change initiatives. This is because most transformation initiatives do not connect with what matters most to people and what really motivates them. All the change management strategies and programme management in the world cannot change this reality.
Mindset Dynamics will use the Perception Clarity Methodology developed by Dr Abena Dadze-Arthur from Birmingham’s Department of Public Administration and Policy, which provides insight into how to connect people’s most heartfelt aspirations with those of the organisation’s transformation initiative.
Dr Dadze-Arthur said: “Too often change programmes are designed in isolation, without truly connecting with the people who are affected. The Perception Clarity Methodology allows communications and activities to be tailored, so they become meaningful to people who may otherwise experience change as an assault on their worldviews and values.”
About Perception Clarity Methodology
The Perception Clarity Methodology (PCM) enables organisations to inspire people to put their hearts and souls into transformative initiatives and deliver innovation. It uses a structured, scientific approach to identify the human factors such as lived experience, identities, psychological contracts and conflicting emotions that can stifle or propel people to buy into and champion change programmes.
In doing so, the PCM also identifies the strongly held personal narratives that leaders and change managers can appeal to when announcing or reinforcing change, so helping to shape messages that will appeal to the hearts and minds of the audience and reflect their core values.
Created from lived experience
Prior to becoming an academic researcher, Dr Dadze-Arthur spent ten years working on public policy reforms, in a range of governance contexts in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
She developed the Perception Clarity Methodology while working with the Abu Dhabi Government, on an ambitious programme to improve the agility and efficiency of its services and make them more customer-centric, while also upholding cherished traditional values and customs.
Here she worked on a landmark project to collect insight into the experience of Abu Dhabi's citizens and residents with government services, and this honed her interest in creating human connections and mobilising people who may otherwise feel marginalised by change, or be resistant to it.
The PCM surfaces social realities, entrenched knowledge structures, multiple identities, and shifting psychological contracts and identifies ‘personas’, or archetypes, which provides a clear mapping of how different groups of people within an organisation perceive, and feel about, change. This then allows managers to design change initiatives in a way that inspires people to put their hearts and souls into transformation and deliver innovation.
By 2021, the Abu Dhabi Government ranked third in the Global Competitiveness Report issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF), and the United Nations (UN) delivered a special award in recognition of its role in government modernisation.
Dr Dadze-Arthur further refined and summarised the method in her PhD thesis, and developed it further in a situational analysis and management toolkit, which is now being used by Mindset Dynamics.
The toolkit is easily scalable, and can be applied in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, helping organisations take people with them on almost any issue. Because PCM maps perceptions and not people, the results are scalable, which means the insights equally apply to a workforce of ten or ten thousand employees.
