Posted in Uncategorized | Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 | Trackback
Shankar Vedandam has written another fine piece in The Washington Post. Learning from Goalies I keep finding great lessons about change management in his Department of Human Behavior column.
When faced with crisis (i.e. financial meltdown, competition eating us for lunch, etc) we tend to have a bias toward action. It is as if we believe that doing something is better than just standing there. It’s as if the research suggests just the opposite: don’t just do something — stand there.
Researchers looked a goalies behavior during penalty kicks. They could stay in the center, dive to the left, or dive to the right. Goalies tend to choose to dive to the left or right. When a goalie dives left or right his/her change of blocking the kick is about 13 percent. But if the goal stays in the center, he/she is successful 33 percent of the time. Even with that higher success rate, goalies just can’t seem to help themselves — and they dive.
I think this says something about change in organizations. Do you agree or not?
Posted in Uncategorized | Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 | Trackback
Shankar Vedandam has written another fine piece in The Washington Post. Learning from Goalies I keep finding great lessons about change management in his Department of Human Behavior column.
When faced with crisis (i.e. financial meltdown, competition eating us for lunch, etc) we tend to have a bias toward action. It is as if we believe that doing something is better than just standing there. It’s as if the research suggests just the opposite: don’t just do something — stand there.
Researchers looked a goalies behavior during penalty kicks. They could stay in the center, dive to the left, or dive to the right. Goalies tend to choose to dive to the left or right. When a goalie dives left or right his/her change of blocking the kick is about 13 percent. But if the goal stays in the center, he/she is successful 33 percent of the time. Even with that higher success rate, goalies just can’t seem to help themselves — and they dive.
I think this says something about change in organizations. Do you agree or not?
April 9th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Rick: I continue to find your thoughts and comments useful. I read your article about what leaders of change can learn from goalies immediately after I had completed a phone call with another person in our organization. I called him(the person in our organization) to determine who had participated in a workshop - a workshop for which no one had a list of participants. I had been asked to create and send a written message to everyone who was at the workshop. This is difficult to do if there is no list of who was at the workshop.
Now back to him - the person I called. I asked for names (sounds like action). He provided names of persons at the workshop, but then said something like “just thinking out loud, but what about involving ….. (names of various persons, and a reason why we need to send information to each person even though they were not participants at the workshop). He provided several names and excellent reasons for involving each of them in what happened at the workshop and letting them know about the next steps.
He has thinking, not just taking actions. The next time I need to listen to someone who thinks, rather thay just acts, I may call him again.
Larry Beckon
Michigan Department of Transportation
April 9th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Larry -
Thanks. It is nice to find people who are willing to think without necessarily acting.
Rick