Colleague Dan Moody – who is a trained chef – had an interesting observation about work expectations (https://lnkd.in/exR_wuhJ). He contrasted the detailed instructions in cookbooks for those learning versus for those who are trained chefs. The latter are more like quick reference guides to different dishes with few if any detailed “how to” instructions or even quantities.
Organizational change approaches (especially ones like “agile” dealing with uncertainty), often make the problem worse by expecting people to do what they cannot.
Those approaches expect people to have sufficient expertise to effectively “inspect and adapt” existing culture, politics, processes and organizational systems to achieve desired change results. The problem is that they often don’t have that expertise, nor can they acquire it fast enough to fit change expectations. Using Dan’s example, we are handing them the highly trained chef version cookbook when they need the learner’s version.
There are ways to help people along to gain “just enough” expertise to change their particular areas of work. Those are usually rejected because the timeline often don’t fit with corporate impatience and lack of understanding what is being asked of people.
This is greatly amplified when a “transformation” is going on, affecting the culture and internal politics at large, many processes, and many organizational systems (if not all) at once.
Which is why there are so many requests and searches for change (or agile) “checklists” … in cooking terms, a specific recipe that, in theory, “anyone” can use with little or no experience. Unfortunately, there are no exact recipes that fit all organization situations and all organizations … only “trained chef” guidelines.
Hence the need for change “chefs” (or sensei, as a related concept) to help people make the change. Yet the current expectation in most organizations is for detailed cookbooks for their specific change, not chefs (experienced change agents) that can fit the cooking concept to the situation at hand and guide the learning chefs (learning change agents … effectively everyone) in sustainable change.
One of the best ways to deal with this paradox is a learning program that produces change as a product of the learning.
Ours are structured to do just that, with the benefit of also paying for themselves via ROI. Contact us to discuss how to apply the concept to your needs.
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