by John Brooker | Feb 2, 2012 | Facilitate meetings, Innovate
YES! AND… Facilitate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla # 33 Company policy and procedures are fine, but sometimes there is a need to improvise . “I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life than on the nature of those events themselves.” Wilhelm von Humboldt, German Statesman Do you or your organisation cope well with unexpected events or are you held back by inflexible policies? Imagine you went online to cancel a full cost airline ticket you had purchased. Due to a software error on the site you were unable to cancel it. On contacting the company’s call centre you were told that you would have to pay a £15 surcharge for cancelling by telephone. That happened to me this week. I suggested perhaps they could use some initiative and discount the charge as they were aware of the problem. No, the charge was company policy. I felt my blood pressure rising faster than an empty 747 as my mental “stall warning” kicked in. As the word implies, many organisations value the ability to organise. A great deal of effort and training goes in to developing and using policies, processes and procedures (organisational “scripts”), to ensure consistency of performance and to attempt to exert control over events. However, reliance on these methods assumes that the organisation’s internal and external environment will remain reasonably stable. For good or bad, unpredictable events happen and those organisational “scripts” can fail. It’s at this point that people need to be capable of improvisation, be they an operator or a manager. Not at the...
