by John Brooker | Apr 3, 2015 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Free Articles, Innovate, Overcome Challenges
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by John Brooker | Feb 27, 2012 | Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 57 Taking time to capture stories during and after a project could help make explicit a lot of tacit data. “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it” Winston Churchill” What is the best story in your organisation? Being the season of the “greatest story ever told”, I found myself at the Christmas concert of the youth orchestra in which my daughter plays. My son and I sat right at the front with my daughter a few feet away in the “pit”, waiting for her group to perform. The music started and the band kicked in to a variety of classic songs from the likes of Lionel Ritchie and the Beatles. Despite not having heard many of them for over ten years, I found the lyrics popping in to my head and I began quietly singing along, until I saw the horrified look on my daughter’s face (seriously uncool to sing along Dad!). Reacting to her press of the metaphorical mute switch, I turned my head away and singing mutely, I pondered from where these lyrics had popped up? Perhaps they are stored in some obscure memory bank and the “vault” is opened by a combination of musical notes? After the concert I thought about tacit knowledge in organisations, all those valuable snippets of information, insights and understanding that are not written down and are often lost. What organisational equivalent of “musical notes” does it take to elicit these tacit nuggets and make them explicit? Do we all have to line up and sing a company song each morning, I...
by John Brooker | Feb 17, 2012 | Innovate
YES! AND… Creative Gorilla # 49 If we consider how change will affect people in detail, we are likely to avoid their resistance… “The national budget must be balanced. The public debt must be reduced; the arrogance of the authorities must be moderated and controlled.” Cicero 55 BC When creating transformation, how might you make it easier for people? Imagine you are roused by the sound of somebody rifling through your dustbin. You tell them politely to “clear off” and they retort that their actions are legal, they are a council official investigating if you have mixed a plastic bottle in with the garden waste. You return to bed, sure that you are having an Orwellian nightmare. Welcome to my local Council’s world. Recently, they informed us that we must now recycle all waste and separate it in to three bins. If we contaminate a bin with the wrong material it could result in a fine of £1000. I empathise with the recycling cause and the reason for the change (the cost and environmental impact of dumping waste) but this was a classic example of poor change management. Three symptoms are: They gave one week’s notice of the change They didn’t gear up to take questions about the change, so the local media gleefully reported complaints from householders who, like my wife, waited forever when telephoning the council The only permissible recyclable food waste bags (sole distributor, the Public Library!) are not available until three weeks after the scheme’s introduction We have found it awkward to implement the recycling mandate. I waste five minutes sorting the rubbish to...
by John Brooker | Feb 5, 2012 | Facilitate meetings
YES! AND… Facilitate. Innovate. Transform – Creative Gorilla # 36 There are a number of reactions people can have to unexpected change in their work. By understanding a model of change, you can influence them in more effective ways. “Ch-ch-changes.Where’s your shame? You’ve left us up to our necks in it” David Bowie Lyrics from Changes Just after six this morning we awoke to a shock wave from (we discovered) an explosion at a distant petrol storage unit. Two hours later, we received a call to tell us that the dance instructor providing the entertainment for our daughter’s birthday party was ill. Two unrelated events, but in terms of unexpected change, they are both a “foreign element” disrupting the status quo of our life. How can creative leaders cope? Time for a model. In this case, the Satir Change Model as shown in the next column. Knowledge of this model and the stage we are in helps us to use appropriate responses to change, so that we can learn and grow from the experience. ©Diagram ~ Steven M. Smith Let’s consider the Satir process using our party situation: Old status quo The party is organised and all is well. Now along comes that “Foreign Element”. Time for… Resistance At this point, there are some standard ways we could resist the foreign element, which may or may not be valid: deny it has happened and hope for a miracle (“Perhaps a parent is a choreographer”); dispute the need for change (“We’ll muddle through”), avoid communication (“Why did we answer that telephone?”); blame others (“Why couldn’t she have got out of her...
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...
