Engine For Change

We’ve been sold a lie.  The lie is that organizations (or children) can and should be perfect.

In organizations, this need for perfection induces people to run from anything labeled failure.

In children, it induces them to run from any new learning that they may not get right on the first try.

So few of our attempts in life work out on the first try.  If we know that is true, but we still buy into the perfection myth, then we just won’t try.  Our organization will fall into a status quo and our children will lock themselves down at one achievement level and climb no higher.   We can’t seem to see that as we run farther away from failure we are actually getting closer to it with every step.

Over the years, some kids movies have fought against the perfection myth.  Below are two examples of this fight.

If you haven’t seen Meet the Robinsons, enjoy this little clip where failure is celebrated as a virtuous, necessary step, providing you “keep moving forward.”

In this song from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, we’re reminded that failure produces some of our best learning, if only we’ll admit it as a failure and learn from it.

In organizations, you can create an ability to learn from failure by modeling your own ability to learn from it.

In your team meetings, celebrate your failures along with your wins and highlight what you’ve learned from your failures.

Create safe ways for your teammates to fail and learn.  Safe failures have consequences you and your teammates can recover from.

There is no perfection in people or in organizations and without admitted failure there is no learning, so let’s embrace our own failures, learn, and be better tomorrow.

Let’s grow our own well-earned roses of success.

Why not try?

Please stop ordering wide groups of people to attend training classes.  You’re making it easier on you as an implementer when you insist on treating all the people the same, but you’re destroying a grand opportunity to learn a lot about the people of the group and to serve them better.  Wrapped up in that loss is the loss of better outcomes for your organization.

Try another way.

Consider using opportunities for training as ways to differentiate people by their talents (see this Gallup Management Journal article) or by their willingness to adopt and adapt to new knowledge (see Roger’s Innovation Adoption Curve below, from suewaters site).

Let’s say you want better writers in your organization and you choose to deploy a writing course for all employees.  Here’s how that plays out if you seize the opportunity to drive change instead of driving people.

First, you’d offer the first classes to your best writers, or those most interested in improving their writing and let them choose to get to attend.   You’ll discover your innovators (the people who were writing well already) and the early adopters (the ones willing to jump on board with only the slightest prompting).

Next, reach out to targeted people in the early majority by suggesting this course is one of several ways they could improve their writing.  See who takes you up on the offer, or who chooses one of the other options (e.g., a book list, peer mentoring).  All you care about is that they write better, not that they take a writing course.  Don’t confuse your means (the course) with your ends (better writers).

Finally, allow people to admit they are in the late majority or the laggards without shame.  Perhaps their strengths aren’t in writing and getting them to be better at it isn’t worth the time and energy you and they would have to put into it for the modest to non-existent gains you would achieve.  Find them a place to play to their strengths where writing is less important to organizational success.  Consider their lack of interest in the training a cost savings over what you would have spent on their unsuccessful mandatory training.

I will consider all my hours of writing on this blog doubly worth the effort if just one person is saved from a training class that they manifestly don’t want to attend that works on their weakness that if they had any free will left in their job they would never, ever choose to do again.  We can’t afford to waste money on training people to be something they don’t want to be.  Let’s work on improving what they are good at and using all of that to make our organizations the best they possibly can be.

Why not try?  Who’s with me?

Stuck with a problem you can’t solve?

Read something.

Sit with the thoughts your reading provides you.

Then act.

It really is a simple recipe.

If you want some hints of good reads for your type of problem, just e-mail me or post a comment.  I and the other readers can surely help you out.

Some days you’ll be part of meetings and you’ll be trying to drive change while everyone around you is talking about driving people.

Don’t give in to the peer pressure to drive people.

Raise the standards of the group.  Drive change.

People will notice and they will be grateful for your example.

Why not try?

The speed of change follows the form of the change.

If you form a team of forced conscripts (the voluntold) and give them a vague purpose, you’ve built yourself a horse and buggy.  Top speed: 30-40 miles per hour

If you form a team from the voluntold and give them a compelling purpose, you’ve built yourself an old time steam engine.  They’ll keep moving down the track as far as the leader ordering them forward has laid the track.  Top speed: 110 miles per hour

If you form a team of people interested in an idea, but under-supported and challenged with a modest vision, then you’ve built an economy car.  It gets many miles for every dollar you pour into it, but top speed is 118 miles per hour (assuming you’re in a Ford Fiesta with limited drag).

If you form a team of people who are begging for a chance to work on a change and they have an aspirational purpose (like transforming your organization), then they have formed a rocket ship.  Top speed: 17,500 miles per hour (assuming they’re traveling in a Saturn V rocket)

The danger you have in driving change is that sometimes you will travel so fast that the people you need to watch you will miss you flying by.

If your organization is stuck in the horse and buggy days of change, you will need to  prepare them to see you when you fly by in your rocket.

Take regular pictures of where you are at.  Capture daily or weekly status (progress toward goal or number of plan steps completed) instead of the usual monthly or weekly status.  Change your scale on your chart so it appears similar to the monthly or quarterly graphs the leaders are used to seeing.

Then, create a second chart comparing your daily/weekly progress to another change effort that measured their progress in months, quarters or years.

Only by showing them side by side will leaders of horse and buggy changes begin to see the true power of your change and the way you are doing it.

Let’s drive change, flying forward in our rockets.  Who’s with me?

This week’s theme seems to be education: what it is and what it has done to us.

Watch this RSA Animates video on changing education paradigms then dig into Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams.

We’ve got a tough job ahead of us when we’re trying to drive change, trying to initiate something, trying to make the world tilt just a little (or a lot) by our presence.

Yet, it is a job worth doing because the old models of factory rules, unquestioning obedience, and “trust me ‘cuz I’m the boss,” are fading.

The new era belongs to the drivers of change, if we’re willing to drive it.

I’m willing.

Are you with me?

Have you ever gone to a day or two of training and felt overwhelmed by all you’ve just learned?

How can you possibly implement all the great ideas crammed into your brain?  You can’t.

Here’s my tip: Pick one.

Next time you go to training, pick one (just one!) thing to do right away when you get back to your work, or your organization, or your life.

Then do that one thing RIGHT AWAY.

Don’t wait for next week.

Don’t try to schedule it in when the timing is better.

Do it right away or you’ll never do it.

Pick one thing.

And, keep driving your change.

During a class on Friday I was reminded of a very important point: Your team needs a real purpose, something big worth accomplishing that you can only do together.

Without a purpose, team’s don’t necessarily dissolve.  Usually they do something far worse: they continue meeting but their goal (unstated, of course) is their own comfort.  I don’t know about you, but I’m often more comfortable when not meeting with a group without a purpose.

If your team is struggling, if you aren’t feeling uncomfortable (at least a little bit) in your meetings, and if you just wonder why you’re all still meeting, remember your big purpose. There was something that brought you together.  There was some mountain you wanted to climb together.

What’s your purpose?

Say it.

Shout it.

Share it.

Then, keep driving change.

How much must you polish a new idea before you can share it in your organization? How perfect must your Power Point slides be?  How redundant your connections to top management?  How detailed your diagrams?

As you polish, perfect, over-engineer and detail out your idea, the costs of worry pile up: lost time, opportunities and learning.

The costs climb and climb because worry breeds worry.  We know, yet we seem to forget, that our organizations don’t benefit from polished ideas.  They benefit from implemented ideas.  Said another way,  your idea doesn’t matter until you actually DO SOMETHING.

How can we overcome the costs of worry and start doing something new in our organizations?

Leaders: Set the playing field and then let people play.  “Any idea that costs less than $100 to implement and doesn’t impact project YZ can be implemented immediately without higher approval.”  Blanket permission is a beautiful thing!

Idea Generators: Create a playing field out of bare ground. “Boss, I’m going to work on problems related to project WXY.  I’ll only come to you with my ideas if my plans require Group 7 to do something new.  How’s that sound?”

All: Do all that you can to oppose/avoid/destroy the costs of worry.

Don’t create a Power Point presentation that no one would look at if you hadn’t forced them into a room for an hour.

Don’t plan for five different potential outcomes just to show you’ve really thought through the issue.  If your idea calls for one plan for one scenario, just say so and stop there.

Don’t become someone who induces worry in their peers or subordinates.  Talk about how you can make change and ask them what they think about the problem.  See what you’ll learn.

It’s not enough to come up with good ideas.  We must overcome the costs of worry.  Until we DO SOMETHING none of our worry matters.

Stop worrying and let’s drive change together.

Why not try?