And the best thing regarding such invitations is that you can’t say if a meeting reached its goals - there is just no goal (at least no clearly stated goal). This could have some meaning to a person, who sent an invitation, but others mostly do not know what it’s all about. Best case, you will receive an invitation with the time, room and some vague topic (like “Processing session”). My answer is pretty straightforward: agenda and ground rules.Īn agenda seems like an obvious idea, but most organizations with dysfunctional meetings do not use them. Everyone disengaged, no one listens to each other, and most of the times no decisions are made. We’ve been there: a presenter mumbling something while showing (boring) slides, others are checking e-mail, typing something, or just surfing the Internet (O, such a cute puppy!). Among other things, an agile mindset implies that we maximize value and avoid doing things that create waste, and everybody knows how wasteful a meeting can be.
Because meetings are a good reflection of what a company culture looks like. And the first thing that I am looking at when meeting a new client is their meetings. The claim is that nudges are at least as effective, if not more effective, than direct instruction, legislation, or enforcement.” (Wikipedia)Īs an agile coach I aim to help companies become more agile, which implies changing their culture. It “is a concept in behavioral science, political theory and economics which proposes positive reinforcement and indirect suggestions to try to achieve non-forced compliance to influence the motives, incentives and decision making of groups and individuals.
There is even a scientific theory on this - Nudge theory.
And such a behavior change looks like something effortless to a person. The idea behind that is quite simple: we lead a person’s attention, and the attention frames actions to the desired behavior. I see this as a beautiful example of an elegant, simple, an yet very effective solution. (This leaves us with a question on what guys are aiming at when there is no fly). The company claims that this trick reduces the amount of missing “goals” by 80%. The idea is that a man will aim at that fly, and it will increase precision. To address this problem one company that produces sanitary equipment proposed to add an image of a fly in the toilet. Sometimes we men are… not very precise when doing visiting the toilet. One of the famous examples of small changes with big impact is the story with a fly in a toilet. This theory leads us to the idea that sometimes it’s not the scale of your efforts that defines the success or a failure of the change, rather it is the character of the change itself that really matters. These two have a lot in common: they both start with a small group of people, eventually spreading within the whole population, and they mostly have similar dynamics. How small changes make big differences” introduced the idea of viewing cultural change as an epidemic. Malcolm Gladwell in his book “The tipping point. When this view meets the change management mindset, that considers change as something temporary that has to be managed, it creates all sorts of culture improvement projects (most of which will fail). As Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. This is caused by the fact that culture is a very complex and robust system, so it is really hard to change.
When we think about changing organizational culture, what comes to mind first is a big project, involving an enormous amount of efforts on all organizational levels.
0 kommentar(er)
