In our consulting practice in Australia, we have found the following
mechanisms crucial to handle effectively in overcoming resistance from the
corporate culture and getting "buy-in" to our Dynamic Decision Support
work.
At the bottom of the resistance mechanisms which we see, is the manner in
which individuals are rewarded for their efforts based upon the
performance measures which are applied to them by management. The
individual's understanding of this relationship as it applies to their
career progress, wealth generation and ability to be a "good provider" is
what cements certain fixed positions which resist change. Unless, a
proposed change can be shown to have a positive impact on this
relationship, the change will be resisted consciously or unconsciously.
This shifts the "problem" to the quality and effectiveness of the
performance measurements. It is here that we see that most of the
"mischief" has been done. There are many conventionally accepted
approaches to this, which are simply incorrect both to the performance of
the organization as a whole, and as a reflection of the merit of the
individual. An obvious one is "over-efficiency" where managers
incorrectly assume that full resource utilization and 100% efficiency from
workers is consistent with getting the best from the organization. This
is simply incorrect, as for instance the Theory of Constraints work of
Goldratt ("The Goal") has shown. The well-known problem of
"sub-optimizing" behaviours where managers manipulate local circumstances
in order to look good, while creating all sorts of difficulties for other
departments is another one. We have developed "wholistic performance
indicators" and a special modelling feature in our software to approach
these issues.
Another area is the emergence of discrete chaos when the impact of
variation, such as bursty demand, overwhelms simplistic capacity planning,
and then spreads like a bushfire around the organization. In these
situations, managers end up blaming line personnel for being lazy and not
working to capacity, and the line personnel blame the managers for not
providing enough resources. The real culprit is the conventional culture
which accepts assumptions of uniformity as being effective ways to
overview the organization. This in turn really involves the lack of
acknowledgment of the organizations true dynamics. Unfortunately, it is
the dynamics which produces the revenues and quality.
A related issue is simplistic notions of capacity.. which really needs to
be conceived crisply and can rarely be dis-associated with reliability...
i.e. tolerance, cost and recovery times from partial and full breakdowns.
In a nutshell then, in our experience, many apparently psychological
issues such as resistance to change, the attachment to polarities and
fixations in the mental models of executives have as their root cause the
way the individual perceives the impact of performance measurement on
their ability to reap rewards from the organization. Our approach to
alleviating these problems is based upon obtaining measurements from
simulation models which conserve the dynamic characteristics of the both
the organization and its environment, while ensuring that the high level,
typically financial information, is consistently derived from those same
dynamics.
Hence, the challenge we face in this process, is in gently persuading
senior management that our measurement methods deliver a competitive
advantage over the conventional approaches, the high degree of
visualization in our models goes a long way to achieving this. However,
it must be followed by effective communication of these changes in the
reward mechanisms at all levels of the organization.
Doug Seeley, InterDynamics: Compuserve 100433,133 Fax:`+41 22 756 3957
Geneva
"Choice and Chance are One."
100433.133@compuserve.com