Your car won’t start. Something is dreadfully wrong. You call your kindhearted neighbor who is a mechanic, and he comes over to look at it. He diagnoses the problem fairly quickly and tells you the starter is broken.
Notwithstanding your awareness of the problem, you don’t have the slightest idea about how to change a starter. You don’t have the tools nor do you have the time to actually repair the problem. Even your financial resources are stretched to the max. Besides that, you now have to find a different way to get to work and you have to figure that out now before you are late! What do you do? You call in sick, stay home and go back to bed.
Oh the pain of change, especially forced change. Quite often, we know the problem (the starter is broken) and the solution (we need a new starter). But the real difficulty lies in actually resolving the problem (having a new starter installed).
We worked with a client that had some throughput issues in his manufacturing plant. It became clear the the constraint to his financial success was getting a new operations manager who actually knew how to run the plant efficiently. The current manager was young, inexperienced and not trained in the ways of operations management. The manufacturing system was running amuck and lacked focus. This inefficient system was costing the owner money.
Good news arrived when the feeble operations guy handed in his resignation! The pain of firing him was averted. The only change needed was to hire a proven professional. The financials agreed with our assessment. The cost of a new person would raise operating expenses about $20k a year but the throughput was guaranteed to go up a minimum of $30K. It seemed like a no-brainer.
We knew the problem (remove the opps guy). We knew the solution (replace with a rockstar) but our client balked and said that he did not want to hire a new person (wait, what?).
Change sucks! Even when it is clear as day, change can be hard as diamonds. Why is that? When the change seems so clear, why do so many people resist it?
We want to know your thoughts! Let the replies begin…