Short thought brains2go offers up some mental doodlings

Making change stick - the hard part

Isn’t knowledge management really about relationships?

A good project start makes for better delivery

"Let’s re-organise!"

Making change hold – the hard part

Senior executives spend so long articulating strategy they think it’s real - and stride off into the sunset believing the company will magically begin changing.

This belief is interesting since no one changes unless they really want to – their hair, their car, their dog, their house.

Of course people can be made to change when they don’t want, but this is called ‘coercion’. Coercion takes a lot of energy – and people don’t always stay changed afterwards.

Companies try to do too much, too quickly and all before people really want to change. Change champions have to run harder to put pit props under the change once it starts, while senior executives move on to the next challenge.

Designing sustainable change, rather than a quick hit, leads to a programme that concentrates on helping people want to change.

If people really don’t want the change, senior executives and change teams with pit props will never make it hold. Top

Isn’t knowledge management really about relationships?

The desire for control in organisations is so strong it drives management of the unmanageable – knowledge.

Ralph Stacey said: “Knowledge is not a thing, or a system, but an ephemeral, active process of relating.”

You can’t force someone to share knowledge – even if you know they have it. The early days of knowledge management tried to get people to write down what they knew, but it was hard work.

Yet still companies emphasise knowledge content at the expense of the ephemeral, active process of relating. It's better to put people in touch with each other, so they can share knowledge.

Building relationships and knowing where to go to develop new knowledge is at the heart of ‘knowledge management’. Before the days of networked computers, scientists and engineers developed new knowledge through networks of relationships.

By concentrating on the relationships that take knowledge around the organisation, the content will take care of itself. Top

A good project start makes for better delivery

Projects fail where scoping and planning are given too little attention.

Scoping is like completing a jigsaw – until you tip all the pieces out of the box, find the corners and finish the edges, you have no idea about the size of puzzle.

Projects may go off the rails mid-way, or die a slow and lingering death, but it’s not always clear that many problems were created at the outset.

Where the project is core to the business, it needs several people to empty the jigsaw out of its box.

While there’s a danger of an ideas deluge, it’s better to get everything out on the table early and people engaged in the change by shaping it.

Better scoping leads to better planning, which in turn enables better project management and delivery. Top

"Let’s re-organise!"

Complex companies require complex relationships for effective operation but this complexity makes senior executives nervous, bringing a desire to simplify.

Simplification, to reduce overhead costs, generally focuses on manipulating structure. Here the organisation is treated as a plumbing system – move the pipes, take out some costly boxes and reconnect.

The cycle goes something like this:

• The organisation appears too complex – is it performing to its potential?
• Management switch the pipes to simplify – but vital connections are severed
• Bureaucracy emerges to manage connections and temporary posts become permanent
• Organisation appears too complex…

To secure the future, businesses must be flexible, innovative and responsive. While flexible organisations aren’t cheap to run, they are more responsive.

In flexible organisations people take the initiative to innovate, but doing this relies on performance clarity and effective behaviours.

Changing behaviours is notoriously difficult – and by comparison changing the structure isn’t, so this is the path everyone takes.

But without effective behaviours, the structural change won’t last.

The key is to change the way people work, rather than where in the organisation they sit. Build the behavioural foundations for flexibility and change capability and most structures will work. Top