Frequently Asked Questions 

The cards are intended for use by change management, transformation, and L&D practitioners – not the participants of your change initiative. That said, the cards are written in a style that's easily accessible to team members at any level.

Absolutely! The content is not limited to a corporate or commercial audience – workshops using the Transformation Tactics have been successfully conducted at educational institutions and other non-corporate organizations.

You'll find many of these tactics in various taxonomies of behavior change techniques. But there are a couple of challenges with these taxonomies:

• First, they're often industry-specific, making it hard for practitioners to quickly grasp the principle and apply it to their own context.
• Second, they're rarely user-friendly in terms of design and layout – often spanning many pages with multiple columns.

Some of the tactics also draw on our own experience in education and industry, where hundreds of thousands of people have used our learning and transformation programs.

The cards give you practical suggestions for how to help members of an organization become meaningfully involved in a transformation, with opportunities for contribution, connection, action, reflection and insight-sharing. Every card includes bullet-point guidance and a practical question that helps you apply the principle to your own transformation work.

Transformation Tactics can be applied to both change and transformation as well as learning and learning experience design. For learning experience designers, the cards allow hands-on engagement and inspire innovative thinking, making learning experiences more interactive, memorable, and impactful. 

You can easily integrate Transformation Tactics with your existing change methodology. Whether you use Prosci's ADKAR framework, Kotter's Eight-Step Process, Kurt Lewin's Change Model, or a custom variation of any of these, the tactics help you come up with new ideas to involve your audience and create the impact you're aiming for.

The tactics are designed to support the design phase of a transformation or change management project. They spark ideas for activating the behaviors needed to achieve your transformation objectives. That said, stakeholders can use the cards at any point to generate new ideas during any phase of the project.

You can use the cards to support a wide range of facilitation exercises. Suppose you're working with a group of change practitioners, and the goal is to use the cards to generate ideas for encouraging action. In that case, here are some of the steps we recommend:

1. Share an overview of your workshop's objectives.
2. Run an icebreaker that gets everyone thinking about change and action.
3. Discuss how each of the catalysts can influence people's behavior.
4. Create a clear problem statement – one that can be addressed by driving the target audience to take action.
5. Introduce the Transformation Tactics Cards.
6. Work in groups to brainstorm action-based solutions using the cards.
7. Get each group to share their solutions with all participants.
8. Commit to next steps.

For more detail on each step, as well as ideas for how to run the workshop, we are setting up a dedicated page, which you can visit soon.

The transformation tactics cards can definitely be reused for different projects. At Cognician, we've used these tactics to drive transformational change with hundreds of clients and programs, thousands of deployments, and hundreds of thousands of employees.

The cards help you identify opportunities to drive specific, tangible, measurable behaviors – input metrics linked to your overall transformation objectives. For example, one tactic suggests posing meaningful choices to your audience. If participants in your change initiative can make meaningful choices about the transformation, those choices give you metrics you can track.

The Transformation Tactics are a response to the universal phenomenon of change fatigue – for which there's no single solution. The tactics offer many ways to subtly (or not-so-subtly) encourage, nudge, or incentivize the behaviors you're seeking, helping you move toward your transformation goals.

When managing complex transformation initiatives with multiple stakeholders, it's even more important to be deliberate about the tactics you use. Different audiences need to be involved in different ways. 'One size fits all' is often a recipe for failure.

With 48 tactics to choose from, you'll find yourself matching specific tactics to different stakeholders. For example, reflection tactics may work well for stakeholders with the time and willingness to reflect. Others may have neither the time nor the inclination – and may be better served by tactics under one of the other seven catalysts.

Resistance to change is a significant challenge in organizations of every size. Transformation Tactics offers multiple pathways to shift mindsets and behaviors. It's up to you to decide which ones will work best in your context. For example, Tactic 30 – Restructure the Environment – recommends changing the work environment to support the desired behavior (or block the undesired one). These changes can have a disproportionate impact on behavior, even among people who resist change.

Yes – the tactics are generic design principles. Whether your audience includes leaders in a financial institution or technicians in a factory, the tactics will spark new ideas to drive engagement.

The tactics are universal design principles that can be applied across any technology – from paper to pixels. At Cognician, we've used them since 2010 to shape how we design transformation solutions for our clients.

The tactics work for global enterprises as well as small teams – and can be used alongside whatever methodologies or tools you're currently using.

Yes – you can contact the authors through their business, Cognician. You can email tactics@cognician.com.

At this time (May 2024) the cards are available in English only. Please reach out to us at tactics@cognician.com if you're interested in arranging a translated version. 

The authors run workshops worldwide – both virtually and on site. They also offer digital learning experiences and certification in the Transformation Tactics methodology. For more information, email tactics@cognician.com.

Yes – Cognician offers an Activation Academy. Please reach out to us at tactics@cognician.com to learn more.

Yes, Cognician offers a Transformation Academy. Please reach out to us at tactics@cognician.com to learn more.

What specific outcomes have other organizations achieved using these tactics?

The tactics were developed by Barry and Patrick Kayton, founders of Cognician. Our clients include Accenture, Coca-Cola, Exelon, Havas Media, Humana, Lloyds Banking Group, Mars, and many other Fortune 1000 companies. All Cognician programs use the tactics to drive engagement and impact.

Examples of specific results include:

• 5% increase in productivity (measured in billable hours to clients)
• 25% improvement in employee security maturity
• 32% rise in software adoption
• 200% rise in workshop prep downloads
• 1,600% rise in manager feedback captured in Workday

The most important success factor for using the Transformation Tactics is clarity:

1. Clearly identify your activation audience (the specific group at the heart of your transformation).
2. Define the activation problem(s).
3. Pin down the activation outcomes you're aiming to achieve.
4. Identify the activation behaviors that will drive those outcomes – what should people start, stop, or keep doing?
5. And finally, track the right metrics. What will shift if you activate the right behaviors and achieve your activation outcomes?

Please reach out to us at tactics@cognician.com if you'd like to join a community of practice. We'd love to hear from you. 

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