Initiatives si. Fads no.

Dear Bob …

I wonder if you might be able to comment on what seems to be the biggest problem we have in my company.

I have been here for over 30 years in the IT staff. About 15 years ago we began “managing by initiative”. First we had 5S (which essentially was keep your desk clean), then came World Class Company, then came P+ (Productivity Plus) and then about 3 flavors of SEI. Whenever a new IT management fad takes hold the company grabs the mantel and off we go.

What happens here is that we change the initiative to suit our culture, instead of letting the initiative change the culture. This means that we will do an initiative about 3-5 years, declare victory and move on, even though nothing substantial has changed. Of course, the executives have tons and tons of data that says they have succeeded. What is frightening is that our upper management never seems to know what is going on, and our first level manager cannot say anything without being branded a non-team-player.

I personally thought that if done right P+ (or for that matter SEI) would have been a great way to do business but we changed it so much that it went from being a great “guide” on doing business to a “cook book” for doing business where everything is spelled out and you just fill in the blanks.

Any comments?

– Initiatived out

Dear Out …

Aw, gee, and I just recommended launching a few high-profile initiatives as levers to change the IT culture, too!

You’ve identified a sore spot for anyone in the consulting business: Staying on the right side of the line that separates healthy change initiatives from fad-o’-the-month timewasters. Regrettably, this isn’t one of those deep canyons that’s easy to avoid. Quite the opposite: There is no identifiable line at all.

New leaders generally are neither asked to follow the same, well-worn roads as their predecessors nor are the good ones inclined to. Strong leaders ought to both have vision (a sadly abused word) and the ability to paint a compelling picture of it so as to engage those who will need to actively pursue it in order to make it real. Some make it happen. Others don’t, and are replaced with other leaders who have a different vision of the future. In this latter case, what had been a leadership initiatives turns out to have been a fad. So avoiding the problem completely is out.

Companies can improve the odds a bit by choosing leaders carefully, by working hard to make sure the various initiatives undertaken in the company are mutually reinforcing, and also by peeling the onion a few layers before adopting an idea touted as the latest panacea because some company that tried it happened to also enjoy business success. Some business leaders, desperate for a vision to call their own, are all too ready to accept causality when there’s only evidence for coincidence.

There’s one more, very important dimension to this, which you identified in your question: Making it an honest try at change instead of transforming a good idea into the same old same-old. That requires a rare change in mental habit: Instead of working hard to find reasons this is really the same old stuff, everyone in the organization, from top to bottom, needs to find ways whatever-it-is is different and better.

Many of us saw this in action years ago, when any number of batch COBOL programmers, introduced to object oriented analysis and programming, declared that it was no different from what they’d been doing for years. In one sense it was true: OO requires that you declare variables and write code. In most senses it was an excuse to avoid acknowledging that some hard-won skills would no longer be valid.

That’s a hard thing to do. Getting employees to do so requires … well, leadership again: Persuasion, coaching, and an ability to challenge without alienating. Regrettably, most leaders instead turn into the worst offenders, very likely because their names are on the old ways of doing things.

– Bob

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