How Do We Get People to Apply Improved Work Practices?

I am always thinking about how we can get people to really apply improved work practices. In our work situation, people readily accept the ideas and principles we share regarding ways of working on knowledge elicitation and document development, but then I see people routinely retreat to old ways of working. Lots can be done to help counter these tendencies.

A couple ideas come from  a great post I read this morning by Elizabeth Harrin on the blog Project Management Tips.  Her post addresses the very interesting question of  "how do you make lessons-learned stick?"  Two points in her article stand out for me:

1. Do not wait until the end of the project to review lessons learned.
2. Make it difficult for people to do things the old way.

Great concepts and unfortunately, concepts I rarely see implemented.
We get involved in client projects that carry on for months or years--frankly, it is really too late to wait until the project is over to collect lessons learned. I will endeavor to apply Point One in all of my project work with clients. I think we take this approach at McCulley/Cuppan on projects, but not in a consistently applied formal way.

Point Two is a really interesting concept shared by Ms. Harrin, but one that takes steely determination and solid support from the highest levels of the organization. In my work, I find the underlying issue behind this point to be that people just hate leaving their comfort zones, even if they recognize their personal ways of working are suboptimal. Point Two is all about making a retreat to the recesses of comfort zones an uncomfortable process. I recall a number of years ago we had a client who wanted the organization to stop printing and filing paper versions of reports and memos. So they did two things: took away the personal file cabinets and limited access to departmental printers. Initially the situation was like being on the famous British Naval vessel, The Bounty, but all quickly learned to reinvent their personal ways of working, those that could not tolerate the demanded change in habits soon left the organization.

These two points connect back  to another important concept I picked up on a post by Wendy Wickham on the blog: In the Middle of the Curve.  She suggests that business training typically is centered on developing knowledge (she refers to it as brainpower) and takes little time to actually help people understand how to manage it. This is so true. It is one thing to intellectualize ideas and concepts, but the challenge is to actually apply the ideas and concepts. Pausing mid-stream in a project can help and changing work environments to prevent a retreat to old habits can too (though this approach comes pre-loaded with the potential for encouraging bad morale and other social issues that can sink a project real fast.)


Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog