Thursday, September 8, 2016

Change failures I've seen

Change fails when:

  • current delivery systems or system interfaces are insufficiently known or understood
  • systems are not studied for change opportunities or responses
  • where the work of change is on separate projects that deliver lovely pieces of paper, but no renewal, renovation or abandonment of systems.

It also fails, or is hampered by:

  • under-resourcing
  • neglect of subject matter experts (who probably know more of issues and opportunities than any consultant will imagine), and
  • no communication at a sufficient level of operational detail to be meaningful in the real world of productive systems.


An example.

I once worked for a large corporation where we executives trotted off to a very expensive conference, in a high price venue to dream up change projects. A bunch or 'projects' came out of it, of course.

Not about places in our current systems that we could look for change and refinement, but work in the parallel universe of pieces of paper...nothing happened after our huge investment: investment wasted.

Although I did learn how to use data validation lists in Excel...a very expensive training.

Better would have been a day discussing Deming's work (some similar views at Curious Cat although this tends to be a bit 'tooly') and how we could reform our business in productive response. Alas.

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