I am the proud father of three children, the oldest two (8 and 10) play Little League Baseball. I was lucky enough this year to manage the team for my 8 year old and assist on the team for my 10 year old (next year, thank the gods of baseball and busy parents, they should be on the same team). One of the things we humans naturally do is look for similarities and differences in our day-to-day experiences. It’s part of what helps us to make sense of the world and, early on, to survive: If a certain plant turns out to be poisonous, we’re likely to avoid eating other plants with similar characteristics in the future.

Perhaps my mind is overly attuned to this type of thinking (I’m certain in my undergraduate courses in English at UCLA, I wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of two - three million essays and papers doing ostensibly the exact same thing) but as the Little League season winds down (coincidentally along with this occasional series), I find myself thinking about the following realities of both coaching a little league team and trying to drive change off of a VOC program:

Most of the time we talk about “change initiatives” as giant, global, enterprise-wide projects that take years and face dozens if not hundreds of hurtles and more often than not struggle to succeed. And most of the time they are.

But for many of us, taking the initiative to improve our companies begins on a much smaller scale, within the realm where we can affect direct control. If you are striving to make an impact on your organization below the radar, here are a few key strategies for you to consider …

Everybody knows it is hard to drive change and a tens-of-thousands of people think they know why (just search Amazon.com’s book listing for “driving change”). In this post we list four of the common broad, general reasons change programs fail … and 1 or 2 specific examples for each about how a VOC program can help overcome that particular obstacle.

Here is an example of a small change that had far-reaching implications for one company.

Getting an organization to change can take a long time, even when the CEO is fully aware of a problem and committed to fixing it. A Voice of the Customer program from Knowledge Wave can help both by identifying problems before they spiral out of control and understanding the best places to start making changes.