Change Champions
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Change Champions

Fred Miller, Judith Katz and Monica Biggs

About Change Champions

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.

The Authors

Fred Miller

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Fred is the CEO of The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. He is an OD Network’s Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, named a Pioneer of Diversity by Profiles in Diversity Journal, and received the Forum on Workplace Inclusion's Winds of Change award. In 2018, he was awarded an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from The Sage Colleges. Co-author of four books and numerous articles, he is a past member of the Board of Directors of ATD, OD Network, NTL Institute, and Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc.; he currently serves on the board of Day & Zimmermann.

Monica Biggs

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Monica is an OD consultant with over 30 years of experience assisting organizations in creating and sustaining high performing, inclusive work groups; coaching executives; and developing leaders. Associated with The Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, Inc. since 1997, she now serves as a Senior Consultant Emerita. She holds a doctorate in human resource development from The George Washington University, has taught organizational studies at Russell Sage College, and has co-authored several articles on inclusive leadership.

Judith Katz

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Judith has distinguished herself as a thought leader, practitioner, and strategist. She is the recipient of the Organization Development Network Lifetime Achievement Award and as one of 40 Pioneers of Diversity. Judith holds a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts. With Frederick A. Miller, she has co-created many key concepts in OD to create inclusive collaborative workplaces and achieve higher organizational performance, such as Interaction Safety and Conscious Actions for Inclusion. Her ground-breaking book, White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training (1978), was the first systematic training program to address racism from a white perspective. Judith is a past member of the Board of NTL institute and currently serves on the Fielding Graduate University Board of Trustees.

To contact the authors, email kjcg411@kjcg.com.