Lilia Efimova points to Introducing New Ideas Into Organisations, in particular the collection of patterns [PDF, 454 kB].
This is 123 pages, so I’ve only just started to work through it, but on first reading it’s fascinating – you know the “ah ha” moment when someone codifies stuff that you’ve been doing intuitively…
Certainly I recognised many patterns here as things I and others have learned the hard way as ways of introducing our ideas into the daily life of the organisations we work with – and I think many of us will also be able to learn from it.
The patterns are grouped into the following categories:
* Roles
* Events
* Keeping the Idea Visible
* Dealing with Sceptics
* Early Activities
* Reaching Out
* Convincing Others
* Teaching and Learning the Idea
* Long-term activities
I’m sure this will be a great resource for coaching – an inherent assumption of the NLP approach is that if you can identifiy the patterns under a successful piece of behaviour you can teach it to others.
Real life processes are messy and complex – changing them can be risky. With this in mind I’ve started a project in the organisation where I work looking at how we can understand better the problems in our area of the business and find out where to focus our improvement efforts.
We’re using an approach based on the Theory of Constraints. Lots of people have written more eleoquently than I on the details of TOC (See links at end of article) but although labelled “theory” this is a very practical approach that helps you answer three ‘Big Questions’:
- What are we going to change?
- What are we going to change to?
- How are we going to do the change?
We are still at the early stages – understanding how the area we are looking at really works – but already we’re finding that the approach is a great help in seeing what is really going on. As one of the team put it:
When you used to ask me why something didn’t work I could only say “well it’s everything” – now we understand things much better. I don’t think anyone has ever looked at these processes in this way.
That comment illustrates the double appeal to me of these methods – the diagrams and hard logic please the analytical part of my mind but beyond that there is the human benefit from working with a team to help them understand and express their issues in a systemic and systematic way. OK some of that might just be Hawthorne effect but I also believe there is something fundamentally empowering in helping people improve things that matter to them and express their issues in logical ways that can be used to influence others
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