Andy Schoonbroodt will be speaking at the ACMP (Association of Change Management Professionals) Global Conference 2023. To attend, please visit https://www.acmpglobal.org

This case study shows how combining change management principles with techniques from service design (cultural probes, customer journey mapping, personas and serious gaming) can support individuals with literacy goals in their change journey.

Adults who have difficulty with reading and writing experience negative impacts in their daily lives. They lack self-reliance and have greater dependence on their environment or authorities. Organizations and initiatives are in place to provide support but we recognized a clear opportunity to improve the success rate of these efforts.

As in organizational change, these (social) initiatives are often conceived from the technical side achieving long-term success from such initiatives calls for a people-driven approach to change. Learning to read and write ultimately happens at the individual level and involves a change journey with enablers and disablers, motivators and demotivators at each step.

In this practical case study from The Netherlands, we have taken a different approach than simply launching a new initiative or solution. We worked with organizations and initiatives that are involved in helping learners to improve reading and writing skills; stakeholders who have considerable expertise in this area, are passionate about enabling others, and often already have good solutions.

We spoke with dozens of individuals with literacy goals, as well as government organizations, schools, libraries, welfare and care organizations. Adopting a change management approach, in which the individual change process was leading rather than the solution or institution, we then mapped out the learner’s change journey.

All insights were combined into a blueprint approach, in which the right enablers were used for the right people at the right time. These were then incorporated in a process simulation (serious gaming) to allow professionals from the organizations and authorities involved to experience and learn how to better support the target group in their change journey.