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Understanding Motivation: Can It Help Influence Willingness to Change?
What motivates people? Does it matter? Do we need a shared purpose to align around? If we don’t have a shared purpose can we find a way to respectfully understand where people are and what motivates them? Motivational Interviewing supports autonomy, mastery, and purpose. And respectfully meets people where they are. Can that influence willingness…
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Understanding Resistance to Change: Can it Help Influence Willingness to Change?
You can’t make other people change. Sure you can change their environment and they will either: Change and fit well in the new environment Or not change And leave the environment Or not leave and either Not fit with the environment Or not let the environment change The discrete options are for the purposes of…
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Willingness to Learn and Change
Willingness to learn and change is one of the core factors (maybe the only one) for lean efforts to be successful. If you are willing to learn you can work through all of the challenges to meet your objectives. It can be easy to ask this as a yes or no question. If no, do…
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Why I do what I do: Where I am coming from
Advice for interacting with others frequently includes: Know your audience Meet the learner where the learner is And sometimes you will hear: Let the audience know you Let the learner know where you care coming from and how it impacts your teaching / coaching The structure of a blog isn’t all that conducive to getting…
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Every situation is different: Why I love contingency theory, but not how it is sometimes used.
“It depends” is by far one of my favorite answers when someone asks if they should do something. The answer to the questions asked are dependent on what they are trying to achieve and what their current reality is, which they have a far better understanding of than I ever could possibly have. There is…
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Blogging on a Blog: The Key to Lasting Behavioral Change: Think Goal, Not Tactic
I read a fantastic blog by Elizabeth Grace Saunders at the Harvard Business Review Blog Network a couple days ago about focusing on goals rather than tactics and couldn’t help myself from thinking about how it supports and helps explain aspects of lean thinking. The gist of the post is to not get too focused…
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Why ask why?
I tend to ask why a lot (especially for someone who isn’t under 5). Sometimes when I note the importance of why people think I am a ‘lean zealot’ obsessed with getting to the root cause via my 5 whys, which isn’t it. It is seeking to understand: Why do we do what we do?…
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How we approach improvement: Does it matter?
There is an assumption that lean efforts have two purposes: 1) A business objective / problem to be addressed (The purpose usually made explicit). 2) Development / enhancement of a problem solving culture: improving people’s (who do the work) problem solving and improvement skills. The first objective can be met with many means. It often…
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PhD: 7 years of thinking
I was very fortunate to have the luxury to spend seven years thinking deeply while pursuing my PhD. My dissertation title is: “A Contingency Theory Approach to the Deployment of Lean Principles: The Case of Advanced Research and Complex Product Development Environments.” The non-academic version of the title: There is no best way: Every situation…