Change programs are notorious for coming up short in achieving the results that were expected from them. Research indicates that only 16% of such change efforts are successful. Yet despite this poor performance, we rarely confront the constraints that cause us these stumbles. As a result, we're stuck with technical debt that is a drag on subsequent performance. It is almost like we enjoy pouring money down the drain.

Change initiatives usually promise revolutionary outcomes rather than evolutionary refinement. When we consider these alternative paths in politics and hockey, a pattern emerges:

When a company starts losing money, or a whole industry starts losing ground because of a new technology, most of us follow leaders who call for revolutionary change—even if no one really knows what change is needed. Leaders who advocate the status quo look like dinosaurs. Read more »

A timeline is a retrospective representation of a linear sequence of significant events which have occurred during the accomplishment of some activity. A timetable provides a corresponding, forward-looking series for pre-arranged events, and is often organized as a tabular list. Such timetables are used to plan and track such activities for performing and reporting on future work. Each of the events associated with these timelines and timetables may be comprised of either top-level milestones or more detailed inchstones. Read more »

In becoming more effective, either as an individual or a business, should one only focus on the business results that are desired, or are the means to those ends equally important? Is it enough to care passionately about goals and be able to clearly articulate their importance and why they matter to customers, or is it equally important to chart an efficient path which will reach those goals, navigate and anticipate risks along the way, and respond effectively to issues as they arise? Which of these two types of criteria - results vs means - is best for our use in evaluating performance? Which is more important as leverage to enable improvements? I'd like to tackle these questions indirectly, by showing how they relate to an important current problem at the national level. Read more »

Often there is a need to organize many people, in a concentrated period of time, to accomplish highly important goals. In such situations, it is important to find just the right amount of project managment to achieve the following goals:

• motivate all teams to make the greatest progress possible in a fixed period of time
• organize the teams so that they can work independently, but share information important to all
• ensure that teams have what they need to accomplish their work effectively, and
• a means of pacing and keeping score

Too much project management, and the team feels micro-managed; too little, and the goals aren't accomplished, people can lose their focus, or the wrong goals may be achieved. The ideal is to establish a protocol which allows for easy customer goal-setting and prioritization, accountable and self-directed work-groups, and a visual means of demonstrating progress and highlighting help needed in accomplishing the goals. Read more »

I belong to a large Methodist church, and if you know Methodists, you'll appreciate the saying that most Methodists churches are committees masquarading as religions.  Each Methodist church is run by and organized around the committees that help it function.  To the extent that many churches have a committee of committees.  In most Methodist churches, a tremendous amount of work gets done by volunteers who work on committees.

Now, I bring that up because most committees and most teams operate in very much the same way.  People from different backgrounds and with different interests are brought together to attempt to create something of value, pooling their time and resources to gain something greater than the sum of their parts.  Otherwise, we could assign a few people to a task and have each of them work on the task individually and just sum up the work.

Teams and committees fail to work appropriately in several situations: Read more »