In a workshop on change, someone asked,
“Where do we start?”
I thought that was a wonderful question.
My response,
“Start with what you got.”
- Inventory what you are doing, data capturing, what are people sharing, how are they sharing, what is the current landscape.
- Take this landscape, and share it with everyone in the company ask, What are we missing? Is this what you currently do? What steps are we forgetting?
- As a team, please identify what you want to keep doing, plus the reasons you want to keep doing it. Please identify what you want to stop doing, plus the reasons you want to stop doing it.
- Compare what you are doing to what you are mandated to do (required by external governing bodies)… consider do you need to keep doing those things the way we are currently doing them?
- Identify what you want to do more of and differently.
- Work to create small experiments to make changes from #5.
- Encourage people doing the work to monitor what they are doing from #6 and ask themselves, What about what we are doing? Do we want to keep doing? What about what we are doing? Do we want to stop doing? Create a way to document and chart the responses.
- If it is useful, return back to #1 and start again.
Someone in the audience did not like my response. They commented,
“We should ask ourselves what do we want to be and want to do. Your suggestion skips the vital piece of creating a ideal vision of where the company should be.”
I listened and said,
“My concern with creating an ideal vision is that we may overlook all the good and useful stuff we are currently doing. Creating ideal visions makes the CEO and management team experts. Leaving the staff and customers as passive acceptors of the vision. Removing the people who do work from the work to be done.“
The participants went back and forth for a while. It was an interesting conversation.
When I got home and reflected upon the interaction, I wondered, does it really matter?