The Change Ninja Handbook: An Interactive Adventure for Leading Change (Paperback or Softback)

** Business Book Awards 2023 Finalist **

“An essential guide for any professional interested in understanding how to implement and influence change”
Prof. Adam Boddison, - Chief Executive, Association for Project Management

Leading change in organizations is always hard, but this original, game-based handbook will at least make it much more fun! Based on real-life case studies and reflecting the most common challenges facing any change ninja, this is a story where you get to make the decisions at each stage, and discover the impact of your choices.**

This interactive approach will appeal particularly to non-linear thinkers and those who learn best through action and application. It’s pragmatic, focusing on tips for getting people on board and on identifying small, doable ‘ninja moves’ that gain traction and build momentum by stealth.

After lots of training in things like project management, agile change and leadership, Dr Tammy Watchorn discovered none of this really helped as the focus was always on process rather than people. By understanding how people work instead, she soon found she could deliver successful change by stealth with ninja moves.

Dr Tammy Watchorn’s experiences of leading transformational change in complex highly resistant environments led to The Change Ninja Handbook, a choose-your-own-adventure guide to making change happen. As a teacher, trainer, facilitator and coach, she works at all levels within and across organizations with a strong focus on change management, neuroscience, behaviours and resistance to change, effective delivery and productivity.

Then one day, she unexpectedly encountered a huge life-changing situation, an emotional, overwhelming change project that she hadn’t asked for and didn’t want. So she decided to use all of her resources, the tools and methods she taught others to use for change at work, to see if they worked just as well when the stakes were very high and very personal. She became her very own case study, and now she’s sharing the results so that you can Ninja your own life’s lemons into lemonade.

Eddie Obeng’s project career began as an engineer researching the implementation of novel biotechnology, for which he filed a global patent. His engineering skills won recognition for his design and project execution of the most energy efficient refinery in Europe. Later at Ashridge Business School, whilst studying the impact of speed and scale on business, he took on the project management suite of courses only to discover the approach and content was obsolete. In the 1990s he was a pioneer in focus on the art-of-project management – the human and context as well as broadening the science-of-project management to cover more open, foggy projects that required agile flexible methods These are covered in the first edition of All Change!
His Global TED Talk introduces the World After Midnight model (WAM) that makes sense of our 21st century challenges. Applying the model across business challenges produced ten books including two Financial Times best sellers. Duke CE call him ‘the Rock Star of Business Education’.
Eddie created the world’s first Virtual Business School, Pentacle, in 1993. The model was to interlace learning and application. Pentacle has been operating on campuses in an enterprise-metaverse, QUBE, for over ten years. In the words of the Wall Street Journal, QUBE ‘is a campus filled with meeting rooms a, common areas giant screens and whiteboards’. To The Economist, QUBE ‘creates a fuller sense of shared experience, spontaneous human reaction and relationship building’.
The impact of Eddie’s project management tools and method innovations earned him a lifetime achievement Monty-Finniston Award. Eddie’s influence on the global Design community stems from his role on the Board on the UK Design council and in the re-invention of IDEO.
Eddie is a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Henley Business School.
He also holds a helicopter pilot licence.