Do you see problems or opportunities?

Geoff Roberts choice, flexibility

Mug with writing "problem or opportunity"I got a very short e-mail from a colleague first thing this morning; all it said was “Can I meet you for a coffee this morning?” Now this colleague is generally very upbeat and positive, so what was it that resulted in my first thought being “I wonder what’s wrong?” Perhaps it was the sparseness of the e-mail; perhaps my recent history with the organisation for whom she works (which has not been happy) predisposes me think of problems rather than opportunities; perhaps I even have a broader disposition to believe that people are more likely to contact me when things are wrong than when they are right.

I admit to being a bit of a Mr Fixit, whose first thoughts on being presented with a problem are often “Do this, do that, do the other” rather than “Well what do you think the options are?” A constant challenge of my, and no doubt others, coaching practice is to avoid this tendency to offer solutions and simply to sit and listen, asking good questions and reflecting the opportunity to solve the problem back to the client.

It turned out that the meeting presented both a problem and an opportunity. A problem because we are losing another key member of staff, and opportunity because its offers the chance to re-examine our management structure and the roles and responsibilities of the senior staff in the organisation.

Today’s challenge to you is to think about your default position when somebody contacts you or makes an announcement. Do you default to thinking about all the problems, challenges, all of the negatives about the situation? Or do you default to thinking about the communication more positively, looking for opportunities and believing that what you are about to hear has the potential to be all for the good?
There is a link back to last week’s topic about metaprograms because a further pair of metaprograms relate to whether or not we tend to move away from pain or move towards pleasure. I will write about this “Towards/Away From” pair of metaprograms in a future blog.

What colour pen are you using?

Geoff Roberts change, flexibility, Prince2

I was sat having lunch and attempting to draw some of the detail of buildings around the central ‘Place’ of Monpazier in SouthWest France when this little gem struck me – “With a black pen, you can only draw shadows”. Now I am no artist, so to some of you that might be no great revelation, but to a change specialist it reminded me of the need to use the right tools for the job.
When exploring how to go about designing and implementing change, one starting point might be to establish whether or not the big challenges are going to be about redesigning the technology or about the people – they need fundamentally different approaches, black pens or coloured pens.
The black pen on a white background might well be appropriate for procedural/processual redesign of how a task is to be done – and PRINCE2 might even be an appropriate tool. There is right and wrong involved, process optimisation, rational decision making and all that stuff that keeps some very expensive large consultancies in business.
Conversely, no matter how good the process you design, without the support of the people involved it can and most likely will fail. There is plenty of evidence about change efforts (including mergers and acquisitions) failing to deliver their stated goals – and almost universally the reasons quoted relate to human issues not technical ones. The mindsets, and tools, associated with technical process design are not necessarily appropriate when the challenge is to engage and motivate the people involved. Any change agent who thinks that people’s attitudes, organisational cultures and the like can be changed to a timetable – “it’s Thursday so it must be Module 17b” – is doomed to failure. The tools of organisation development have many more colours than black and white!
It’s no good using black and white media when you need to paint a coloured picture.