DaChispa

I had a problem accessing my wireless connection recently so rang my service provider for help. I had a very clear idea of what I thought it wasn’t so kept ignoring the suggestion of the technical guy on the end of the line by telling him ‘no it can’t be that because it hasn’t changed’. Eventually, with gentle persistence, he got me to do what he asked and, lo and behold, the problem was resolved. This was clearly a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing and is a microcosm of another issue that I see all the time in business. We bring in an expert to help solve a problem or deliver a solution and then only implement it if it fits our pre-defined concept of what we are expecting. Maybe if we didn’t frame the problem in the form of the answer we think we want and really listened to what they were saying, we might get better results.

I have learnt a valuable lesson – listen to the experts. They usually have more experience than you and can actually be right!

I went to an event recently to promote ‘The Rock Dynamic’ http://www.rockdynamic.com/ who offer an intriguing approach to team building. They ask the team to create a rock group – complete with publicist and technical support as well as the performers. No musical ability is required and everyone starts on a level playing field. The outcome seems to be that people not only re-discover how their team works, but also surface individual strengths that more formal team building exercises don’t.

After all, everyone at some stage, dreams of being a rock star.

It is astonishing the amount of technical change I have seen in my working life. I vividly remember the first time I was introduced to email. Suddenly I could get messages to someone immediately and scheduling meetings was easy. Human behaviour was still much the same challenge though – to ensure that I could schedule meetings using the ‘new’ technology, I had to take some draconian measures to ensure that everyone’s diary was up to date. This largely involved booking important meetings based on what people’s diaries said. If they were incorrect, they had to cancel the un recorded meetings – people soon got the message.

However, the more times change, the more they stay the same. Administrators still manage their boss’s in tray – electronically now – and I still see the same sort of problems, for example:

- chasing down the corridors has been replaced by the blackberry call
- piles of paper waiting to be filed has been replaced by Word documents hidden away on C: drives or personal storage devices and not in electronic repositories
- the paperless office is still a ways off – people still like to print papers to read and annotate – although environmental changes of attitude are having an effect

However, technology is at the forefront of automating for bad human habits – electronic filing is increasingly becoming seamless and the introduction of better e-readers might spell the end of the reign of paper. Time will tell. I recall that I had a great deal of difficulty introducing the first PC network into one company – few outside of the IT department could see the benefit. It seems crazy now, but who is to say what current pre-conception will be seen as short sighted in a few years time.