A friend of mine has been working for a large business services firm for nearly a year. A couple of months ago he attended their annual sales and marketing management love in at a top venue near Dublin.
Not usually as cynical as me, he didn’t really see the point this time. Although the business’ profits have fared well through the recession, this had been achieved through cutting investment in change projects. The spending freeze had become an excuse for doing nothing. Low cost and even zero cost projects had failed to get traction in a culture of inertia in middle management
However, he came back from Dublin a changed man. He insisted on telling me how the most intransigent of managers had committed to start change initiatives and agile project teams.
So what’s the big deal? Well, it all ground to halt within weeks. Everything’s back to business as usual. Every project has more reasons to abandon than continue.
Clearly the facilitators did the job that was asked of them. So how do we overcome the challenge of change blockers transforming off site into creators, just to return to their default state back at their desks?
I know the concept of establishing breakthrough itiatives isn’t new. There are lots of books by people far cleverer than me to tell us it makes sense; but I just haven’t seen it work.
I think we need more incrementalism.
Why not create the environment, platform processes, and culture for change to happen all the time. It’s not like we need to artificially create change is it. Change is happening to us all the time. Economic cycles, competition, disruptive technologies, game changing competition; major environmental occurrences aren’t breakthroughs we can plan for. So let’s get used to dealing with them. Let’s develop the ability of our organisations to be agile, and enable our teams to cope with every change, not just those imagined off site.
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