You have to make a 'THING'

"You can get anybody to agree anything in a workshop but if you don't change the social context, it all changes when they get back (to work)."

Dave Snowden

We can shift the performance of organisations and potentially the performance of the individuals within it if we focus on the underlying system. 

This would lead us to put effort, time and resources against:

Challenging and evolving the assumptions and beliefs of leaders who own the system

Choosing to re-imagine and reset organisational goals 

Choosing to reset policies, process and measurement systems to enable the new organisational goals

Choosing to change the current organisational rules around incentives and rewards to align with the new organisational goals 

Choosing to change the way that information, ideas and feedback flows through the organisation.

However, this is demanding, politically sensitive, 'risky', long term, collaborative work. (And mostly counter intuitive to industrial leaders who benefit from the security of the current system).

This work is also (mostly) low visibility - certainly in the early months and even years. 

The lack of visibility and 'tangibility' inevitably risks a perception - in industrial, bureaucratic cultures - of a lack of 'progress'. 

So, organisations continue to default to creating a visible, and familiar 'THING':

 A new training course

A new leadership programme

A new 'talent' initiative

A new technology platform

A new internal  'marketing' plan

A new team name and / or team structure.

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