Managers at my place of work dearly love to use this quote: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” They attribute this to Einstein and it makes them feel smart; smarter than their employees for sure. They can quote Einstein, and he was brilliant (at least as a young man), therefore they must be brilliant.
Unfortunately, no one is quite sure that Einstein ever actually said it.
The quote is sure to tick me off, because the implication is that I’m too stupid to figure this out for myself. I feel chided to change. Well, folks, if you want to change, it helps to know what to change to.
Change is good. Change is hard. Michael Hutchence told us, “Don’t Change”. Seasons change and so did I, according to Burton Cummings . Carlin put a dollar in a change machine but nothing changed. The great guru said that it is not necessary to change because survival is not mandatory.
Let’s consider this for a second. An organization that does not change will die. Might not be today, might not be tomorrow, but eventually… Therefore, you must do something different to stay alive. I get that, and I suspect most people in middle management get it, too.
What should change do for you? In terms of the Theory of Constraints, the change should enhance your throughput, decrease your inventories or decrease your costs. If it does not help your goals it does not help you. Choose what you want very carefully.
I am in the middle of this rant for a couple different reasons. Reason 1 is because some numb nut at a corporate conference used the quote today; ironically, I wrote the first paragraph yesterday. Reason 2 is that my boss wants to change a bunch of things critical to how we do our business. These changes will benefit us and it will improve our department. I’m generally in favor of change and I fully support the things he wants to do. There’s just one problem – they are all changes.
Change is a deviation for the norm. [ooh, chalk up another one in the duh freaking obvious column.] Remember the days of VCRs? For you young kids, a VCR was basically a cassette for your TV. What? What’s a cassette? Hell, never mind. Anyway, a video cassette recorder was renowned for being confusing to operate. No one could take it out of the box, plug it into the back of the television, and start enjoying The Holy Grail right away. The rite of passage was an hour or two with the manual so you could figure it out. That or our parents just handed us the instructions and said, “Have at it.”
The change came with a fairly detailed description of the steps you needed to take to reach your goal. The RCA plugs came out of the back of the VCR and went into the back of the TV (if you were lucky). Fifty-seven steps were necessary to record a program. People who did not learn the manual, either for themselves or from a teacher/mentor, did not benefit from the change in the slightest. To this day I do not think my dad ever recorded a TV show. Not one.
Where is this going? Let’s go back to my problem (remember this is always about me) and the changes my boss wants. I need to convince the folks below me on the totem pole of life that this change will benefit them; otherwise why would they take the slightest interest? And by the way the change needs to be good for them or they have no impetus for doing it. WIIFM?
Once I’ve convinced them of the goodness of the change, I need to get them doing it differently. I need to write the VCR manual, because I’m fairly certain few of the supervisors have ever seen a VCR before. In our actual case, since I’ve beaten the VCR analogy beyond recognition, one of the changes is the method we use to measure our work. Right now we assume it is right because we trust our vendors. Occasionally we get hosed by our vendors and we don’t figure it out soon enough. We need standard operating procedures (SOPs) for the supervisors and hourly folks to make their way through the labyrinth of doubts that come from doing something differently.
Anything else is the definition of inanity…
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