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How well did I lead my change to Bangkok? It’s now roughly 2 years ago that I landed for the first time in Bangkok. I only heard of Thailand as a holiday destination for backpackers and sex-tourists and my expectations of Bangkok were neutral at best (Djakarta and New Dehli, where I had been a few times the years before, serving as reference).

Leading my own change

And I didn’t come for holidays. I came to work. So when I boarded the plane in Amsterdam on a cold winter afternoon, I felt burdened and somewhat concerned by the daunting change ahead of me. It was a leap of roughly 9000 km in the void. Would I be able to pull it of? How would I cope under circumstances I could not even fathom? It would have been much easier not to go…

And 2 years later, I enjoy it. And I enjoy it a lot. I’m proud I made the step and took up the challenge. By times it has been very difficult. But I’ve grown, professionally and personally. I set up my own independent practice in an unknown country and unknown region.

What I did right and what I did wrong

Now it’s time to look back at what I did right and wrong. And for that I’ll use Kotter’s 8 steps.

Although my organisation could not be any smaller (I’m a free-lance professional), I cannot find any direct reason why Kotter’s model would not be applicable to the situation of rubenvanderlaan.com. After all, we’re all tied up in complex interdependent systems. The only thing that might be truly different is that the boundaries of my system are loose: the people around me have no loyalty to my organisation. So change strategies needed to be adapted to that.

So I have an entry on what I did right and the one on what I did wrong.

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