Avoiding Resistance
Recently, I visited Lincoln Cathedral with my daughter. It brought back happy memories of a few days in Lincoln when I ran a residential school for the Open University (OU) Creativity and Innovation MBA course. I took the students to the Cathedral to help bring the course work alive. While at the Cathedral, one task I asked them to do was to find five different ways people might use the Cathedral.
What uses do you think a Cathedral might have? Some suggestions I recall from the students are that it is a place:
- To pray and meditate
- That inspires people
- Provides a livelihood for stonemasons
- That is able to raise funds
- That provides companionship for people who might be lonely.
You will likely have others. Now imagine that masonry falling from the roof is making the Cathedral hazardous. What is the solution? The simplest thing to do, surely, is to close the Cathedral and get the work done. The stonemason will be happy; there is more work and it is easier to do with the Cathedral closed.
How will the other users react to closure though? If the Cathedral is closed, the income dries up. Worshippers will be unhappy and where will people find companionship? The person responsible for the roof repairs might find that a problem, which at first sight is fairly simple, (fix the roof), in reality is quite a messy matter to resolve when taking the wider system of the Cathedral in to account. Will they find unexpected resistance to their plans because people have different perspectives?
Why is this important? If you have a problem that at first sight seems quite “tame”, I suggest you spend some time to consider the wider system in which it fits and identify if other people might have different views on the problem. It could save you a lot of difficulty when you come to propose a solution, helping you to avoid resistance.
If your initial analysis suggests that you DO have a messier problem than you thought, and you wish to investigate those different views, you might consider Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). The “Soft” in the title does not refer to the problem itself, but to the way you address it. Checkland and Scholes developed this methodology to deal more effectively with messy problems in organisations.
SSM involves interviewing people impacted by a situation to develop an initial “rich picture” of the situation and the interrelating perspectives, (see Yes! And Blog 162 for more detail on Rich Pictures). Next you bring those people together to present this picture to them and refine it as a group.
SSM has further steps that lead to people taking action to make the change. However the purpose of this article is not to explain SSM. If you would like to know more, I found an excellent paper that you might like to read based on the Construction Industry, please (click on the link), that explains the Methodology and provides useful case studies to illustrate its use.
To Close
When we left the Cathedral we went for a drink in a local pub, The Wig and Mitre, before returning to the venue for a tutorial. I expected to chat about everyday things but one student asked if we could talk about the tasks they had undertaken because he was so inspired by his visit. There followed the most memorable tutorial I have ever had, mainly led by the students. We discussed the uses and metaphors the Cathedral had evoked and looked at drawings they had made of something in the cathedral. Two hours later we left the pub inspired and in a very good frame of mind.
In the OU course notes they use the potential closing down of the last pub in a village as an example issue (which justified our visiting the Wig and Mitre!). Different uses for the pub included a place to drink, a business and a community hub. I don’t recall its use as a venue for learning being an example, but it certainly adds a different perspective and might lead to an interesting solution.
John Brooker I Yes! And. Think Innovatively.
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About the author
John Brooker is a former Senior Vice President of Visa and is now the MD of Yes! And where he has worked internationally with multicultural teams since 2001. John has developed the Team Impetus Model, based on Solution Focus, to help teams develop strategies to achieve targets and resolve complex challenges. He has also developed his Inn8 Approach to help teams maximise opportunities innovatively. You can listen to clients discuss these approaches at our website, www.yesand.eu
John is a Board Member of the international Association for Solution Focused Consulting and Training.