“That’s how we’ve always done it.”

"The other “commandment” is to become very suspicious anytime you ask, “Why do we do this like that?” and you receive the answer, “That’s how we’ve always done it.” If no one in the organization can explain why a certain practice is the best, or why the product has to offer certain features, that may reveal a bad habit. I suggest several activities the leaders of organizations can do to get to the bottom of this puzzle. First, write down key business processes and ask yourself if you understand why the organization is doing it this way. Then ask others in the company if they understand why. Finally, ask newcomers to the company — after they have been with the organization two or three months — what processes they have seen in the organization they do not understand.
...
You propose that an organization implement “change for change’s sake.” Why?
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There is value in the process of change itself. Many organizations are attached to certain processes and do not realize that when these processes become less relevant or do not work as well, it is time to change. I suggest not waiting for trouble; be proactive about making changes.
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When processes become routinized, silos develop across firms, communication and cooperation fade away, and certain departments begin to command a disproportionate amount of resources. If the company waits for these things to emerge, it is often too late and too difficult to change. Instead, the company should adopt minor but proactive changes on a consistent basis."

Trechos retirados de "How — and Why — You Need to Break Bad Business Habits"

"only 54%"

"Since the mid-2000s, organizational change management and transformation have become permanent features of the business landscape. Vast new markets and labor pools have opened up, innovative technologies have put once-powerful business models on the chopping block, and capital flows and investor demand have become less predictable. To meet these challenges, firms have become more sophisticated in the best practices for organizational change management. They are far more sensitive to and more keenly aware of the role that culture plays. They’ve also had to get much better on their follow-through.
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the success rate of major change initiatives is only 54 percent. This is far too low. The costs are high when change efforts go wrong—not only financially but in confusion, lost opportunity, wasted resources, and diminished morale. When employees who have endured real upheaval and put in significant extra hours for an initiative that was announced with great fanfare see it simply fizzle out, cynicism sets in."

Agora imaginem o quanto o mundo muda e muda a uma velocidade mais forte, o quanto essas mudanças requerem novas estratégias, o quanto essas estratégias são apenas hipóteses que têm de ser testadas e afinadas ou revistas, o quanto a execução de uma estratégia assenta na implementação e integração de projectos de mudança em processos... projectos de mudança?

54% nos Estados Unidos! E por cá?


Trechos retirados de "10 Principles of Leading Change Management"

"Never blame your predecessor"

Um conjunto de boas sugestões.

Caro Eduardo, "Never blame your predecessor", faz-lhe lembrar alguma coisa?

"A 10-year longitudinal study on executive transitions that my organization conducted found that more than 50% of executives who inherit a mess fail within their first 18 months on the job. We also uncovered numerous landmines for leaders in this situation. And, with the best of intentions, my client was about to step on a number of them. When a leader inherits a mess created by others, especially when arriving as an outsider, the situation can feel fragile and knowing where to begin the long journey of change can feel precarious. Based on our research and my experience, there are six things the most effective leaders do to avoid failing in a new role.
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Resist the temptation to emotionally distance yourself. Difficult and unfamiliar circumstances can make leaders feel vulnerable. To combat their anxiety, they actively avoid being implicated in the mess in subtle but damaging ways. Four weeks after my client’s arrival, I noticed a distinctive pattern in her language. When referring to the significant challenges of her new organization, she consistently spoke in third-person references — they, them, those people. And when speaking about possible changes that needed to be made, she spoke only in first-person language: I will, I don’t.
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Never blame your predecessor. It’s a natural temptation to blame the past regime when entering organizations in disarray. In one meeting, my client’s frustration got the best of her, and while looking over the past quarter’s budget, she blurted out, “What on earth was he thinking?” Well, since “he” isn’t there anymore, everyone else in the room was implicated by proxy. Nobody knows better about the mess they are in than the people in it, much less about how it came to be. You are better off simply making no references to decisions or actions taken prior to your arrival. Your best response when being baited to blame those that came before you is simply, “We can’t change what happened then, but we can change what we do going forward.” People appreciate when you take the high road.
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Minimize references to past successes. Absent any substantial experience in your new environment, the likely place to reference your track record is past successes. Chances are that you were hired into the role because you had relevant experiences. But talking about those experiences doesn’t help you leverage the wisdom from them.
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Test the reliability of your data. While unvarnished data can be hard to come by when facing harsh headwinds, it’s even harder to come by when everyone wants to appear innocent and important.
...
Be transparent about how you will make changes. There are lots of rules about how fast an entering leader should make changes and how big they should be. Some suggest waiting 90 days, even up to a year, to learn the organization before upending anything. Some say clean house on day one. The speed of change will depend on your particular situation and what the business can tolerate. If immediate change is needed, make it. If you aren’t sure, then investigate and diagnose before you make your moves. My client’s thoughtful approach served her well in this regard. She was very transparent up front about how she would assess the organization, how she would approach making changes, and in what time frame. Her “leading out loud” allowed others not to wait in dread and also not to remain in denial. My client’s approach was to start with small wins championed by people in her organization."

Trechos retirados de "Leading Effectively When You Inherit a Mess"

"the rapid testing of many modest innovations"

Fantástico!

Que memórias!

Chegar ao Twitter e apanhar uma ligação para um artigo, "All Management Is Change Management". Ler o título e perceber que o nome do autor é Robert H. Schaffer.

Fico logo em pulgas. Será que é o mesmo Robert H. Schaffer que escreveu "The Breakthrough Strategy"?

Leio o artigo e no final vejo a foto do autor e confirmo que é o mesmo Robert H. Schaffer que tanto me ensinou e que citei nestes postais:

• A dança da chuva e outros rituais (Julho de 2006)
• Simplex (Abril de 2006)

Quando não sigo o principal conselho de Schaffer arrependo-me: concentrar um problema grande numa cascata de problemas mais pequenos e capazes de serem resolvidos mais rapidamente.

E o que diz Schaffer neste artigo?

"all management is the management of change.
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If sales need to be increased, that’s change management. If a merger needs to be implemented, that’s change management. If a new personnel policy needs to be carried out, that’s change management. If the erosion of a market requires a new business model, that’s change management. Costs reduced? Productivity improved? New products developed? Change management.
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The job of management always involves defining what changes need to be made and seeing that those changes take place. Even when the overall aim is stability, often there are still change goals: to reduce variability, cut costs, reduce the time required, or reduce turnover, for example. Once every job in a company is defined in terms of the changes to be made (both large and small), constant improvement can become the routine. Each innovation brings lessons that inform ongoing operations. The organization becomes a perpetual motion machine. Change never occurs as some sort of happening; it is part of everyday life.
...
Leaders should view change not as an occasional disruptor but as the very essence of the management job. Setting tough goals, establishing processes to reach them, carrying out those processes and carefully learning from them — these steps should characterize the unending daily life of the organization at every level. More companies need to describe their work in terms of where they are trying to go in the next month or next quarter or next year.
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How do you transition into such a company? The simple answer is to skip the months spent creating a comprehensive plan to make the company more change-oriented. Instead, focus on some important goals that are not being accomplished. Have teams carve out some sub-goals they will aim to achieve in a few months. [Moi ici: Este é o velho Schaffer!] They should be asked to test innovative steps they think will make a difference and to learn from the process. Maintaining a short time frame for these experiments permits the rapid testing of many modest innovations. Of course, these are steps to advance major strategic goals, but the emphasis should be on executing specific changes — with each success followed by a new round of more-ambitious goals to tackle."

"To discover that the unfamiliar is the comfortable familiar they seek"

"People will do a bad (a truly noxious) job for a long time because it feels familiar. Legions of people will stick with a dying industry because it feels familiar.
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The reason Kodak failed, it turns out, has nothing to do with grand corporate strategy (the people at the top saw it coming), and nothing to do with technology (the scientists and engineers got the early patents in digital cameras). Kodak failed because it was a chemical company and a bureaucracy, filled with people eager to do what they did yesterday.
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Change is the unfamiliar.
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Change creates incompetence.
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In the face of change, the critical questions that leaders must start with are, "Why did people come to work here today? What did they sign up for?"
...
The solution is as simple as it is difficult: If you want to build an organization that thrives in change (and on change), hire and train people to do the paradoxical: To discover that the unfamiliar is the comfortable familiar they seek. Skiers like going downhill when it's cold, scuba divers like getting wet. That's their comfortable familiar. Perhaps you and your team can view change the same way."

Trechos retirados de "In search of familiarity"

Facilitar a mudança

"Forget efficiency. Motivating true change requires unhurried, face-to-face, one-on-one conversation. Email doesn’t do it, nor do memos or webcasts. If a specific work group or person is very important to your organization’s future, and they are resisting needed change, you have to take the time to talk with them in person, and to do it under as little time pressure as possible.
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Focus on listening. No matter how brilliant your plan or persuasive your argument, you must make everyone feel understood. That starts and ends with listening. When you’re in these conversations, make sure to take up no more than 20% of the airtime, and when you do speak, try to repeat back what you’ve heard as much as possible.
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Be open to change yourself. A resistor who senses you are listening only so you can get what you want won’t open up and definitely won’t get onboard. You must have an open attitude — be ready to learn something new and, if necessary, modify your plans. Show that resistors’ opinions and feelings matter to you and will shape your thinking and actions.
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Have multiple conversations. We’ve found that effective dialogue with resistors typically requires a minimum of two conversations. In the first conversation, you listen and diagnose the roots of the resistance. In the second conversation, your goal is to make clear that you have reflected on what you heard; to outline what will be different, or not, in your approach to the change based on that conversation; and to explain why. Even if you’re not changing your overall plan, we’ve found that anyone who truly listens to opposition will have their thinking changed in some way. So you can at least be genuine about that.
The time in between these two conversations is critical. We recommend at least two days, depending on the scale of the change. If you respond immediately, either during the initial talk or within a few hours, resistors won’t believe, perhaps rightly, that you’ve fully considered their point of view. But don’t wait more than seven days, because at that point the person feels dismissed and forgotten.
Effective change management is critical to the vitality and progress of every organization. Where most people trip up is in failing to manage resistance effectively. Doing so requires an ability to listen to your opposition, diagnose their antipathy, consider their thoughts and feelings, and explain how it has changed your thinking, if not your plan. This is a time-consuming but effective process."

Trecho retirado de "Overcome Resistance to Change with Two Conversations"

Começar pelo fim (parte II)

Depois de ter escrito "Começar pelo fim", ontem à tarde em "Guided Change" sublinhei:

"Over the past many years I have worked with some powerful teams help clients with change. In every interaction, the clients that were the most successful had a clear picture of what change would look like and feel like. By creating what they wanted to become and mapping it out, could individuals, teams or whole organizations understand the path that they needed to take and the obstacles to overcome. Most importantly, they knew they had a guide to help them when they faltered or got off course."

Recordar Ortega Y Gasset em "O meu presente não existe senão graças ao meu futuro"

O passado não é tão imutável como parece

Descobri a conta de Kevin Dulle no Twitter (@IdeaFreak) onde encontrei esta imagem:

E como um seixo atirado a um lago, o que ficou a ondular na minha mente foi aquele:

Talvez seja impossível mudar o passado e o que nos aconteceu.

No entanto, é sempre possível mudar a nossa interpretação sobre o que nos aconteceu. É sempre possível rever os acontecimentos e reinterpretá-los à luz do que entretanto aprendemos e vivemos.

Estou a lembrar-me, por exemplo, do funcionário que caiu no desemprego com o encerramento da fábrica que o empregava e que se viu obrigado a alargar a sua zona de conforto, sendo hoje empresário numa PME de sucesso. Estou a lembrar-me também da novata que caiu no desemprego para proteger o lugar dos mais antigos e que se transformou em empresária de sucesso.

"Stretch goals"

Um excelente artigo na HBR de Janeiro de 2017, "The Stretch Goal Paradox". Talvez um dos melhores artigos que li na revista no último ano:

"What executive hasn’t dreamed of transforming an organization by achieving seemingly impossible goals through the sheer force of will? We’re not talking about merely challenging goals. We’re talking about management moon shots—goals that appear unattainable given current practices, skills, and knowledge. In the parlance of the business world, these are often referred to as stretch goals,
...
Stretch goals are often viewed as truly important sources of individual and organizational motivation and achievement.
...
“More often than not, [daring] goals can tend to attract the best people and create the most exciting work environments…stretch goals are the building blocks for remarkable achievements in the long term.”
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No wonder many executives conclude that stretch goals are a great way to magically resuscitate or transform an ailing innovation strategy.
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But that’s not the case. Our research, which we first outlined in a 2011 award-winning Academy of Management Review article with Michael Lawless and Andrew Carton, has shown that stretch goals are not only widely misunderstood but widely misused. Organizations that would most benefit from them seldom employ them, and organizations for which stretch goals are probably not a good strategy often turn to them in a desperate attempt to generate breakthroughs. Neither approach is likely to be successful. This is what we call “the stretch goal paradox.”
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So, before launching stretch goals in sales, production, quality, or any other realm, how can you be confident that your grand aspirations will trigger positive attitudes and actions rather than negative ones? When facing radically out-of-the-box opportunities or threats, you can’t just rely on intuition. You need clear guidelines for assessing and addressing risk. You have to know when stretch goals do and do not make sense, and when to employ them rather than set more achievable objectives.
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Predicting the Outcome of Stretch Goal Use
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Two critical factors consistently seem to determine success at meeting stretch goals. Though they appear straightforward, often managers ignore them or don’t appreciate how they’ll affect a firm’s abilities."

"Fogo no rabo"

Em 2008, em "Schwerpunkt", usei um termo que uso nas empresas desde 2002: fogo no rabo.

Por vezes lido com empresas, empresas que não são grandes, empresas que deviam ser ágeis mas que têm um ritmo muito lento. Digo-lhes que lhes falta "fogo no rabo" para correrem a sério.

Em "Why CEOs Should Commit to Many Small Battles Instead of a Single Big One", aplicado às empresas grandes, apresenta-se um conselho sobre como fugir ao ritmo de mudança lenta das organizações grandes.

"As CEO, you can fight back by sponsoring micro battles — discrete, narrowly defined, customer-focused initiatives pursued by small cross-functional teams. Micro battles force everyone to behave like insurgents, focusing only on what’s essential to meet a narrow goal.
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How? Consider a typical corporate goal: Grow sales of electric hand tools in Western Europe by 4%. That might encourage people to work harder, but it doesn’t require that anyone work differently or think outside their own department. A micro battle, by contrast, has a tightly drawn goal: “Let’s win 50% share in Western Europe of the do-it-yourself store business for mid-priced circular saws by displacing our main competitor.”
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To win such a battle, you need a team made up of people who are closest to each market.
...
The team also needs people who provide crucial support—a supply chain expert, who can help drive down the cost of mid-priced saws, and a consumer insight expert, who understands consumer preferences for hand tools."

Claro que estas micro-batalhas têm de partir da orientação estratégica senão resultam em "much ado about nothing"

"taking responsibility for making it a success"

"I also knew that most people in large organizations like ours would have a hard time joining movements like the one we started. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s just that most of the time, executing today’s strategy using current information is the more comfortable path. That’s what we all learn to do in school, after all. But using yesterday’s information to execute yesterday’s strategy is a terrible excuse for not moving forward. All of the information in the world will not guarantee success if it’s based on yesterday. Sure, you can hire third parties to design your vision and strategy for you. But then you’re not taking responsibility for making it a success."

Trecho retirado de "Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindset for Strategy and Innovation"

Keith Jarreth e as PME (parte III)

 Parte I e parte II.

"When we see skilled performers succeeding in difficult circumstances, we habitually describe them as having triumphed over adversity, or despite the odds. But that’s not always the right perspective. Jarrett didn’t produce a good concert in trying times. He produced the performance of a lifetime, but the shortcomings of the piano actually helped him.
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The substandard instrument forced Jarrett away from the tinny high notes and into the middle register. His left hand produced rumbling, repetitive bass riffs as a way of covering up the piano’s lack of resonance. Both of these elements gave the performance an almost trancelike quality. That might have faded into wallpaper music, but Jarrett couldn’t drop anchor in that comfortable musical harbor, because the piano simply wasn’t loud enough.
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“What’s important to understand is the proportion between the instrument and the magnitude of the hall,” recalls Vera Brandes. “Jarrett really had to play that piano very hard to get enough volume to get to the balconies. He was really—pchow—pushing the notes down.”
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Standing up, sitting down, moaning, writhing, Jarrett didn’t hold back in any way as he pummeled the unplayable piano to produce something unique. It wasn’t the music that he ever imagined playing. But handed a mess, Keith Jarrett embraced it, and soared.
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Keith Jarrett’s instinct was not to play, and it’s an instinct that most of us would share. We don’t want to work with bad tools, especially when the stakes are so high. But in hindsight, Jarrett’s instinct was wrong. What if our own similar instincts are also wrong, and in a much wider range of situations?"

Agora, a situação de Keith Jarrett começa a ter semelhanças com a mensagem do livro de Malcom Gladwell sobre David e Golias...
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Quantas PME, quando o mundo muda, e o mundo muda cada vez mais e mais depressa, não querem mudar, lutam contra a necessidade de mudar ou pedem ao governo um apoio para que não precisem de mudar?
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E as que mudam e descobrem que depois da tempestade chegam a um porto melhor do que o anterior?

Uma preocupação recorrente

"Creating meaningful, long-lasting change must start at the top and filter through the whole of an organization. It requires understanding the depth of the need, developing a smart strategy and high-quality execution.
...
the truth is nearly 70% of transformations fail or don’t live up to expectations. Frankly, I’m surprised it isn’t more. They rarely fail in strategy, but in adoption, experience and execution.
...
“It is not how you start, it is how you execute.”
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The follow-through on execution is often the missing, and most important, piece of the puzzle. [Moi ici: Confesso que é uma preocupação recorrente na fase das iniciativas estratégicas de um BSC numa empresa. Há uma resistência a essas coisas fatelas como a calendarização, ou prestação de contas] And by execution, I don’t necessarily mean technology implementation."

Trechos retirados de "Your Success is Based on Execution, Not Implementation."

A importância de criar etapas proximais

"Error 6: Not Systematically Planning for, and Creating, Short-Term Wins
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Real transformation takes time, and a renewal effort risks losing momentum if there are no short-term goals to meet and celebrate. Most people won’t go on the long march unless they see compelling evidence in 12 to 24 months that the journey is producing expected results. Without short-term wins, too many people give up or actively join the ranks of those people who have been resisting change.
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Creating short-term wins is different from hoping for short-term wins. The latter is passive, the former active. In a successful transformation, managers actively look for ways to obtain clear performance improvements, establish goals in the yearly planning system, achieve the objectives, and reward the people involved with recognition, promotions, and even money.
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Commitments to produce short-term wins help keep the urgency level up and force detailed analytical thinking that can clarify or revise visions."

Uma preocupação antiga no nosso trabalho, transformar sucesso distal numa série de etapas proximais, onde cada uma é uma oportunidade para celebrar o progresso.
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Recordar:

• Uma sucessão de pequenos projectos que produzem resultados rapidamente (Dezembro de 2012)
• Desmascarar mitos (parte IV) (Setembro de 2010) 
• Small Wins (Junho de 2009)
• Fazer a mudança acontecer (parte VII) (Junho de 2009)

Mais do que evidências, persistência!

"For the rest of us, though, the flip isn't something that happens at the first glance or encounter with new evidence.
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This doesn't mean the evidence doesn't matter.
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It means that we're bad at admitting we were wrong.
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Bad at giving up one view of the world to embrace the other.
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Mostly, we're bad at abandoning our peers, our habits and our view of ourselves.
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If you want to change people's minds, you need more than evidence. You need persistence. And empathy. And mostly, you need the resources to keep showing up, peeling off one person after another, surrounding a cultural problem with a cultural solution."

Trecho retirado de "The flip is elusive"

"As pessoas mudam quando:"

Excelente figura, excelente resumo.
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Primeiro, esta outra figura que uso nos projectos balanced scorecard:

Os resultados na perspectiva clientes são consequências da operação dos processos críticos. A operação dos processos críticos resulta de acções e comportamentos das pessoas.
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As pessoas mudam quando:

• Têm líderes que dão o exemplo;
• Percebem o porquê;
• Adquirem a formação e experiências; e
• têm mecanismo de feedback e reforço.

Imagem inicial retirada de "The four building blocks of change"

De que falamos quando falamos em transformação?

De que falamos quando falamos em transformação?

"When executives say transformation what do they really mean? Often, the word confuses three fundamentally different categories of effort.
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The first is operational, or doing what you are currently doing, better, faster, or cheaper.
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The next category of usage focuses on the operational model. Also called core transformation, this involves doing what you are currently doing in a fundamentally different way.
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The final usage, and the one that has the most promise and peril, is strategic. This is transformation with a capital “T” because it involves changing the very essence of a company.
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Defining what leaders mean when they drop the word transformation matters, because these different classes of efforts need to be measured and managed in vastly different ways.
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Not all of these efforts are of equal impact. Focusing on “today better” operational efforts does nothing more than create parity with the best executors of yesterday’s model. It is a recipe for short-term survival, not long-term sustainability. Leaders instead should be thinking about how to blend together operational model and strategic transformation to execute what Innosight calls a dual transformation. “Transformation A” strengthens today by reinventing the core operating model. “Transformation B” creates tomorrow’s core business." 

Trechos retirados de "What Do You Really Mean by Business “Transformation”?"

O que pode correr mal

Vi esta figura ainda antes deste século ter começado. Nunca a esqueci:

Sistematiza o que pode correr mal num projecto.

A velocidade da mudança

"Technology did rule many issues in 2015. And not only did tech dominate the news, it often moved too quickly for politicians, regulators, law enforcement officials and the media to understand its implications. This year we began to see the creaking evidence of our collective ignorance about the digital age."

Ainda não tinha terminado este trecho já a minha mente tinha recuado a 1981 e me impelido a ir buscar o livro à prateleira.

Há livros assim, livros que se lêem uma vez e que se revêem muitas mais vezes, livros que sabemos que nos marcaram e que contribuíram para a forma como vemos o mundo. Depois, lembrei-me de procurar no blogue e encontrei uma referência ao capítulo 27 "The Political Mausoleum":

"A Third Wave civilization cannot operate with a Second Wave political structure."

Como penso muito em metáforas pensei logo num mundo em mudança acelerada e em políticos que se movimentam com o auxílio de arrastadeiras:

Por favor, leiam a fonte da citação inicial em "For the New Year, Let’s Resolve to Improve Our Tech Literacy"

Mudar custa mesmo muito

"But businesses, like families, develop customs and norms that are completely absurd to outsiders. Sometimes, of course, such customs are appropriate and well-suited to their specific business. But often they’ve simply evolved to become ordinary course of business, even though they’re destructive and inefficient. Sometimes, even certain insiders see the destructiveness and inefficiency but are afraid to say so because they’re uncertain how the person/people in charge will react.
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A fresh set of eyes can see (and say!) things that insiders cannot. If business leaders are receptive, they might just be treated to eye-opening insights by consultants that can lead to monumental shifts in business performance. If not, they might remain mired in their inefficient ways of doing things."(1)

E conjugar com:

""If this wasn’t the best way of doing things, I’m sure it would have disappeared by now," is a logical fallacy and an unfortunately common refrain.
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The other part of the problem is that best practices are a misnomer. Often what we call best practices were at one point good or smart business moves, but we seldom do the work to determine how long they stay the "best" or whether they're universally applicable."(2)

(1) Trecho retirado de "Shameless Consultants"

(2) Trecho retirado de "The Problem With Best Practices"