The bicycle story of unlearning & re-learning
Many large scale transformations in technology companies end up being less effective or just moderately successful because the ‘people’ component of the [People / Process / Technology] combination frequently gets overlooked. It is very important that the people on the ground, the team, is fully on-board with the proposed changes and their motivation to make the change successful is intrinsic — It has to come from deep within. If the change and purpose is not fully understood, people start spending very long working hours doing the ‘ regular stuff’ and the ‘ new stuff’. This works in the short term, but eventually fatigue takes over and starts yielding unwanted results.
During many such transformations, the performing organization also develop new ways of doing business through effective leverage of established process models; Off late, with a lot of focus on Lean methods. A transition to a new operating model demands that we do some amount of unlearning and relearning. The unlearning of doing the ‘regular stuff’ and learning of the ‘new stuff’ is very easily said than done. I have used story telling techniques and a few analogies to help teams understand what that really means. One of them is worth sharing.
Consider your job as taking a backpack of critical supplies from point A to point B as fast as possible. The size and weight of the backpack depends on what role you play in the organization. At the beginning, when you started off, the business demands was such that the time taken for an easy stroll from A to B was acceptable. Over time, with the increased expectations of speed and productivity, you increased your productivity to a brisk walk, a jog, a run and eventually a sprint from A to B. The business expectations continue to mount and where do you go from there?
Think of the new operating model as a bicycle given to you by the organization to move faster from A to B. Now, there are 2 options in front of you — (1) You can ride the bicycle with the backpack; (2) You can carry the bicycle on your head along with the backpack and continue to run. The choice is yours. The technique of working your muscles for running is very different from cycling as most of us will know for sure. And we will all agree that we can’t run and cycle at the same time without running the risk of injury by falling down.
Letting go of some of our deep beliefs about how to do work is very essential if we need to learn the new tricks of the trade.
Note — I didn’t use a motorized vehicle in the example above intentionally, because there is no substitute for hard work.
#learning, #leadership, #management
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
