Driving Change Why Are Your Ideas Being Rejected? - Bartosz

This resource first appeared in issue #21 on 25 Apr 2020 and has tags Strategy: Change Management

Driving Change: Why Are Your Ideas Being Rejected? - Bartosz

Many of us have highly technical training and so we’re always looking for things to optimize; when we move into working with lots of people we keep doing that, and initially we often find it mystifying that our suggestions for doing something in a clearly better way get turned down!

But change involving people is a lot of work, so change takes a lot of buy in. And people systems are and high-dimensional, so local optimizations may violate constraints we’re unaware of. This article talks a bit about that, and the importance of talking to people to make sure you’re solving the right problem (as above) as well as making sure your’e solving it right.

I’m still sheepish about the fact that when I first learned about “prewiring” proposed solutions or changes it was a revelation. Apparently the idea that I should, you know, talk to people who would be affected before proposing a “better” approach to something was an eye-opener to myself not that long ago.