Launching the Change Initiative

The first implementation step is to determine an overall change strategy (empirical-rational, normative-reeducative, or power-coercive). Broadly and fully communicating the need and desirability of the change is necessary for staff to see the relevance of the change goal. This can include data from the earlier assessment of the problem and how achievement of the change goal will lead to a better future for the organization. Change leaders might show how the change is compatible with the organization’s mission, vision, and values. Change leaders cannot “overcommunicate” regarding the need for change. Creating a sense of urgency needs to be framed from the employees’ perspectives: how the change will address a real problem and what bad outcomes are likely if the problem is not addressed. Communicating the change vision involves referring to the new ideal future of the organization and also outlining the basics of the change process to be used.

Changing Organizational Culture

Organizational culture includes the shared beliefs, assumptions, norms, values, and expectations that employees generally share. While changing culture can be seen as a specific intervention, any change initiative should first look at conditions that need to be changed to ensure that the new culture is aligned with organizational systems, strategies, and goals. Culture change requires totally new thinking and perspectives on the part of employees and thus is extremely challenging and complicated, typically occurring over a period of years. This requires “letting go” of old ways of operating and gradually adopting a new culture with new expectations for employee behavior. Culture change can include hiring and promoting managers who model the new culture’s values and behaviors; changing artifacts, rituals, and ceremonies to reflect the new culture; regularly discussing the new values in meetings and other settings; and leaders modeling the new culture through their daily behaviors.

Flying Less for Work and Leisure? Co-Designing a City-Wide Change Initiative in Geneva

Geneva prides itself on being an international city, home to the United Nations and international organizations. The airport plays an important role in this image, tied to a quest for hypermobility in an increasingly globalized society. Yet, mobility accounts for close to one quarter of the territory’s carbon emissions, with flights responsible for 70% of these emissions. With recent legislation that includes ambitious targets for net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the role of air travel can no longer be ignored. In 2020, a partnership was formed between the City, the University of Geneva, and a community energy association to explore the possibility of co-designing a city-wide change initiative, focused on reducing flights through voluntary measures. The team consulted with a variety of actors, from citizens who fly for leisure, to those who fly for professional reasons, with a spotlight on academic travel. A review of the scientific and grey literature revealed what initiatives already exist, leading to a typology of change initiatives. Inspired by this process, we then co-designed a series of workshops on opportunities for flying less in Geneva. We demonstrate the value of going beyond an ‘individual behaviour change’ approach towards understanding change as embedded in socio-material arrangements, as well as identifying interventions that seek to address both negative and positive anticipated outcomes. We conclude with insights on how a social practice approach to understanding mobility reveals both material and immaterial challenges and opportunities, involving infrastructures and technologies, but also social norms and shared meanings.

Must We Change? the Dark Side of Change and Change Resistance

Organizational change and innovation are generally treated as unquestioned goods, but some have argued that there exists a darker side to these phenomena. Change is often resisted or only grudgingly accepted by those involved and, given the assumed virtues of change and innovation, resistance has traditionally been considered an obstacle to overcome. This chapter will first consider the dark sides of change—that is, negative aspects, in particular change initiatives that are undertaken for ethically questionable reasons, using ethically questionable means, or resulting in deleterious consequences. Second, it reviews resistance to change—that is, an aversive cognitive, emotional, or behavioral response to a change initiative. Using a framework to consider the substance, processes, and outcomes of change initiatives, practical and theoretical implications are provided for a more nuanced approach to acknowledge the connections between perceptions of a change initiative as potential dark side judgments and resultant resistance behaviors.

ESA CCI and C3S Soil Moisture Products: Generation and Quality Assurance

<p>Soil moisture Climate Data Records (CDRs) produced from active and passive microwave sensors are valuable for the study of the coupled water, energy and carbon cycles over land on a global scale. As part of the European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) a multi-decadal CDR is produced by systematically combining Level-2 datasets from separate missions. The combination of individual Level 2 datasets into a single product gives us the opportunity to profit from the advantages of individual missions, and to obtain homogenised CDRs with improved spatial and temporal coverage.<br>The most recent version of the ESA CCI product (v06) provides 3 products: (1978 – 2020), ACTIVE (1991 – 2020) and COMBINED (1978 – 2020). This latest version of the product includes several advances that result in the improved quality of the product. Improvements to the input datasets include updated passive (LPRM – Land Parameter Retrieval Model) data to improve inter-calibration and snow / frozen condition flagging as well as updated ASCAT data from the H-SAF project to improve vegetation correction. <br>Algorithmic improvements include the cross-flagging of snow / frozen conditions to take advantage of the flags provided for each input dataset across all sensors as well as the update of the Signal to Noise Ratio – Vegetation Optical Depth (SNR-VOD) regression used in gap-filling the SNR in locations where retrieval has failed. Additional data is also included through the use of the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission, the FengYun-3B (FY3B) mission and extending the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) dataset used to 2015.<br>An operational product based on the ESA CCI SM product continues to be provided through the EU Copernicus Climate Changes Services (C3S) Climate Data Store (CDS). This operational product provides daily data and decadal (10 daily) aggregates in near-real-time as well as monthly aggregates for the historical dataset. The anomalies derived from this dataset (with a base period of 1991 to 2010) can be seen on the TU Wien data viewer (https://dataviewer.geo.tuwien.ac.at/).<br>The accuracy of each data product is assessed through comparison to in-situ soil moisture observations from the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) as well as modelled data from Land Surface Models (LSMs). Such assessments are undertaken each time a new ESA CCI version is generated, and the results compared against previous versions to assess the evolution of the product quality over time. For transparency and traceability, an online portal is provided for the public to perform similar validations (Quality Assurance for Soil Moisture – www.qa4sm.eu). <br>In this study, an overview of the product generation and the updates provided at ESA CCI SM v06 is presented as well as examples of how the data product has been used. The associated quality assurance requirements, assessment procedures and results will also be presented.<br>The development of the ESA CCI products has been supported by ESA’s Climate Change Initiative for Soil Moisture (Contract No. 4000104814/11/I-NB and 4000112226/14/I-NB). Funded by Copernicus Climate Change Service implemented by ECMWF through C3S 312a Lot 7 Soil Moisture service.</p>