KaizenTip 107: Invisible Counters
The whole team at Kaizen Training wishes you a fabulous festive season - and may 2009 be your best year yet!
This week's KaizenTip comes to you from Haider Imam of Kaizen Training.
This is a really ‘tough’ group – the facilitator can tell as they walk into the workshop.
How? Something about the penetrating quality of eye contact as they each come to shake hands with him; sizing him up, seeing if it is going to be another one of those lip-service workshops, you know, the ones where nothing happens afterwards. The ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ as one participant recently described other consultants’ interventions.
Sensing this, he starts the workshop with a well aimed, powerful and poignant quote that has them all nodding and chuckling in agreement, then eases into drawing out the group’s personal and organisational outcomes. Their answers make sense, yet he feels a disconnect between the words and the emotions behind them. A lack of congruity, in other words.
In a moment of lucidity, the reason suddenly presents itself to him through the participants’ non-verbal signals…
When he gives a specific example of how this intervention has already made a sizeable difference in their organisation, the group state suddenly shifts from cynical to curious. They know of this particular change and want to know how this came from the workshop. After another specific example, they move from curious to encouraged, and a third example takes them from encouraged to excited.
It transpires that after seeing so many (in their eyes) ‘failed’ interventions, broken promises from senior leadership and ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to challenges, they had lost all hope of a company-wide intervention actually affecting the status quo. They had thought that this workshop was just another token gesture, a tick-in-the-box. They begin to realise they were mistaken.
So, what is the learning here? Among other things, that when the group was alerted to some ‘COUNTERS’, attitudes changed.
For those of you familiar with Solutions Focused approaches, you’ll know ‘counters’ (as defined by Paul Z Jackson and Dr. Mark Mckergow in their classic ‘The Solutions Focus – Making Coaching & Change SIMPLE’) as
• Examples of the solution happening already
• Evidence of parts of the solution happening already
• Skills and resources that will help to create the solution
• Co-operation from others involved
For many leaders in large, complex environments, the amount of energy needed to tackle organisational issues single-handedly is just too much. So when they see little evidence of progress, they give up.
But when they see, hear and feel evidence that the changes are ALREADY happening around them, it can give them just enough energy, purpose and passion to join in and drive change.
This week’s Call to Action