This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 12:11 pm by Dawn and is filed under XML and learning standards. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
From Seth Godin’s book, small is the new big:
… As we’ve turned human beings into competent components of the giant network known as American business, we’ve also erected huge barriers to change.
In fact, competence is the enemy of change!
Competent people resist change. Why? Because change threatens to make them less competent. And competent people like being competent. That’s who they are, and sometimes that’s all they’ve got. No wonder they’re not in a hurry to rock the boat. …
It’s easy to forget that learning new things and facing new challenges involves being, let’s face it, incompetent. That’s never fun. Remember when you were learning how to ride a bike? You were frustrated at first, you felt like a dolt, you had skinned knees and a bruise on your shin, you wondered if you’d ever be good at this, even though everyone told you you’d pick it up in no time.
Even though you might not think about it often, you probably still shy away from new things to some degree when you’re worried that you might look incompetent trying them. You’re an adult, right? You’re supposed to be good at things. You’re supposed to know what you’re doing. You’re supposed to look like you know what you’re doing.
Yet the world is changing fast — I’d support that point with a link, but I’m not expecting any argument about it — to a degree that makes most of us feel like we’re always falling behind.
As things change, we become incompetent automatically; sometimes in small ways, sometimes in big ways. We just aren’t sure what’s the best think to do next. We want to retreat to the safety of what we’ve always known and done. Except … it isn’t safe anymore, it’s now incompetent. The old ways become insufficient to the task at hand and if we’d already known how to operate in this new environment, what we were doing before would have worked just fine.
When organizations recognize that this is happening, that they need to change with the times and they don’t have the collective wisdom to be able to do that yet, they often turn to training to teach their employees new skills.
Unfortunately, they send competent people to that training.
They’ll probably get something out of it, but an environment of competence is often an environment where new insights are unwelcome. A new insight means telling someone else that their favorite program is wrong. Or admitting that the way the person who has that insight has been working, maybe for many years, is wrong.
Being wrong was embarassing when you were learning how to ride a bike. It might cost you a raise at your next performance review when your company is learning how to adapt to new market conditions.
So how can you make sure that when someone in your company learns something new or has a good idea that you’ll all be bad at trying for a while, that they’ll speak up about it instead of smothering that suggestion in its crib? Well, it all comes down to company culture. Try this … do the following statements sound like things that might come out of the mouths of leadership at your workplace:
“Sorry, Jane, I guess I was wrong about that and you were right.”
“Hey Joe, you’ve been doing good work for a long time, but we need to change. We hope you’ll be willing to stay on, though, and try it the new way so we don’t have to break in a stranger.”
“Team, the market is changing. We in management aren’t sure yet what the best way forward is, so we’d like your help spotting new opportunities.”
If it’s inconceivable to you that anyone on senior staff could say those things, you’ll have a hard time sending volunteer incompetents to training; people who are willing to ask for clarifications when they don’t understand, engage with the material and come up with original questions that aren’t covered in the manual. Your nervously competent employees will come back to their desks, embellish what they were already doing a little, and leave management frustrated that they don’t have much creativity in the corporate talent pool.
But see, there’s nothing wrong with your employees. They just want to keep their jobs. I’m sure you understand.
They see management unwilling to be wrong, and they don’t want to cross the boss either by pointing out how things could be different, or by assuming an attitude towards change that’s out of step with the culture of the people who sign their checks.
It takes a particular sort of environment to unleash creativity, an intentionally supportive one. People need permission to fail when they’re trying new things. They need to know that when they crash the bike, their work group won’t be the mean neighbor kid with the loud laugh, but the family cheering section that helps them figure out what went wrong and try again until they get it right.
Employees who can safely be wrong sometimes can renounce their competence when they go to a training, and offer genuinely new gifts to their workplace when they return.
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