A long time ago, in a bureaucracy far far away a policy wonk named Nick was tasked with creating a wiki dashboard that showed – in real time – what everyone across the policy sector had on their plate.
The idea was to help the sector coordinate its business better and encourage a more proactive, rather than reactive, approach to information sharing.
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| “hard as nails” by PixelPlacebo |
Nick was still relatively new to the department and took to his task with great rigour.
He built a series of nested (bilingual and accessible!) wiki templates so each person would only ever have to edit their own page.
He focused tested the design with users, and feedback was overwhelmingly positive.
He incorporated keeping the dashboard up to date into the Human Resources Action Plan.
He arranged for training on how to use the software.
And if memory serves, he even managed to get the project into a senior manager’s performance agreement.
After about 6 months of work, despite all of the measures outlined above, the initiative was dead in the water.
The reason it didn’t work was that populating the template was largely seen as a duplication of work by people in the department who were already required to fill provide the same information in their quarterly reports.
Staff pushed back on the duplication and returned to their old ways, feeding the machine vertically rather than sharing horizontally.
Eventually Nick abandoned his efforts and scuttled the pages.
The lesson …
We often get so caught up in nurturing change that we forget that we must also fend off competition that could undermine its viability; that the real secret sauce to change isn’t seeding the new ideas, but rather killing the existing lines of business that compete with them.
IMO the only way one can “kill the existing lines of business” is by getting the people, who are involved in the existing line of business, to commit suicide…. Can be done but it isn’t going to be easy!
Agree with Henry here – it’s not the new process, it’s the people. Changing them will always be the hardest part!
I agree. All significant change involves loss. Even if people agree that the current system is disfunctional, they at least feel competent in (and are often rewarded for) using it. Getting people to accept change means getting them to agree to give up the security that goes along with doing nothing.
“The reason it didn’t work was that populating the template was largely seen as a duplication of work by people in the department who were already required to fill provide the same information in their quarterly reports.”
Why didn’t you also set up the wiki to automatically fill in the quarterly reports when they populated the template? It’s just been my experience that when you introduce the better new application, it has to be 10-times better before people even consider it. In my research on mental models, I am often surprised at how much people will put up with when operating their current system rather than go to a new system that promises to fix most of the current problems. The old “devil you know” syndrome.
In a similar case to the example above, we were able to accomplish the change by co-opting the senior-most decision maker into only accepting the reports online, electronically, and in real-time. Our solution wasn’t a wiki, but it was similar. Once the announcement was made, it took about six months to get the existing middle management team on board. We lost two in the process, and heard every classic excuse in the book – from “we’ve had no training” and “it’s too hardto learn,” to “I’ll get to it later” and “later” and “later” and “you’re not going away yet?”
Good answers on this string all around. People are often resistant to change unless properly motivated. Even then, passive aggression can take a lot of patience to overcome.