A Sabot in the Works

While I was at the home office, working "without portfolio" I came across an interesting problem.

Beyond the Immigration and Nationality Department's main offices, front-line immigration staff were — erroneously and discriminatorily — often thought of as confirmed Luddites. At a time when the asylum processing system was in crisis, the perceived unwillingness of outlying units to cooperate with technical and process improvements was both a source of friction and a genuine impediment to the implementation of necessary organisational changes.

Being without portfolio I took it upon myself to visit a certain significant location to find out what the real problem was. Not having a portfolio, and hence being agenda-less, it wasn't too difficult to begin with a simple "exchange of views": I explained the issues as seen from "head office"... and they told me why they weren't interested in any solution emerging from East Croydon. Unsurprisingly (to me) most of their objections were reasonable and they all boiled down to one fundamental issue — no one listened to them and took into account their particular situation.

So I asked them to explain the difficulties they perceived with the technical and process developments being discussed and then asked whether, if I could come up with some way of bridging the divide, they would be willing to discuss matters further. The answer was, of course, yes indeed they would: they were neither Luddites, nor saboteurs; they were, as is usually the case, genuinely committed and working hard to achieve the organisations goals. The only problem was that, based upon experience, whatever was imposed from without

• Wouldn't work
• Would very quickly be replaced by something else
• Would probably leave them worse off than they already were

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I went away and built a prototype system that would interface the centre with East Croydon whilst also providing some buffering, and reflected both the local processes and the needs of head office. I then presented it to them — not by giving a presentation but actually by sitting them down with the prototype and working through some representative cases.

Of course the system was not right — there were mistakes in my understanding and process refinements and subtleties to incorporate — but having clearly seen their input reflected in a technical solution they were then ready to engage... and engage they did. A couple of months later, as the system was being finalised, not only was everybody enthusiastic about the new system, when certain significant technical issues surfaced they were even willing to propose modifications to their own processes in order to make it work — and thus were the so-called Luddites shown never to have been anything of the kind.

Following which, it should then have been And they all worked happily ever after...; alas, owing to a certain Not Invented Here mentality back in East Croydon, the final hurdle to formal roll-out and implementation was never cleared and the effort stalled.

What are the lessons from this?

Firstly, that passive resistance or even active obstruction to business change — whether technical or process — is not proof of corporate treason.

The basic psychology of motivation is this: in order to be motivated to do something one has to believe:

• that the goal is worthwhile
• that the goal is achievable in principle
• that one has the personal capacity to achieve the goal in practice
• and, finally, that the value of achieving the goal outweighs the value of the effort required.

Or, to put it in shorthand: Motivation = Value x Achievability x Practicability x Relative Cost.

Failure to appreciate this is a common problem. The British Prime Minister Tony Blair once famously railed against the workers of the National Health Service for their opposition to what the government perceived to be necessary changes to the NHS; this was both a political mistake and failure of leadership. NHS workers, like the vast majority of all workers, being genuinely committed to their organisations goals would, I am sure, have enthusiastically done what was necessary if they had believed in the achievability of a desirable goal. The problem was that they were not merely unmotivated, they were positively de-motivated to cooperate (which problem Tony Blair's comments only exacerbated).

In the case of the Home Office outpost, the value of the goal was not in doubt — what I did was help the immigration staff see how it could be profitably achieved.

Secondly, do not allow the ultimate goal of perfection to prevent any progress at all*: do what works until you find a better way.

It seems obvious, but somehow those to whom it should be obvious frequently fail to see such things.

* Whilst I first came across the idea that "The best is the enemy of the good" in an engineering context (attributed to Voltaire in the words "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien," but apparently of even earlier origin), the mindset it epitomises is almost universal.