PAPod 617 - Rome Wasn't Built at 8 a.m.: The Case Against Immediate Improvement

PreAccident Investigation Podcast

Todd Conklin argues against the dangers of 'big-bang' organizational rollouts, advocating instead for incremental, step-by-step improvement.

Key takeaways

• Big-bang software or system rollouts often lead to 'organizational whiplash' and operational failure.
• Slow improvement acts as a filtering process to eliminate 'flavor of the month' fads and bad ideas.

Main topics

• Incremental improvement
• Change management

Notable quotes

Rome was not built in a day.

Conclusion

Meaningful organizational change is a slow journey that requires patie

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Rome was not built in a day. Or that's what they say all the time anyway. The one I think of all the time is if you run a big bang rollout of a new computer program throughout your entire organization at one time, like you launch it on Monday at 8 a.m., it will fail. Speaker 1 (0:35) Hey, everybody. Todd Conklin, Pre-Accident Investigation. How are you? Man, it was an awful week for me. Just not the best week ever. And, yeah, it just wasn't. It just wasn't. Sometimes you have good weeks. Sometimes you have bad weeks. This one was kind of an achy week for me. But life moves on, slowly but surely, in the midst of tragedy and horror. all sorts of stuff. You know, you just keep plugging along. All of us have been there. So you know what I mean? How was your week? I hope it was a heck of a lot better than mine. That's for sure. Holy crap. It couldn't get worse. So let's just put it that way. But the pretty interesting kind of future ahead of us here. I just can't figure out. The world is just, it's a It's a mess. That's the word I would use, is mess. And messy people are kind of in charge of stuff. And it's just weird. It's an interesting time to try to thrive. But our jobs don't stop. We don't get the luxury of stopping. And that's kind of what I want to talk about today, because I think today's a really interesting day. And I'm not sure if we'll talk along today, but that's all right. Well, I just wanted to get back together. I didn't want to miss a chance to chat with you because I've been thinking about this a bunch. You know, improvement is a really slow journey. The idea that we're going to flip a switch. and change our organizations or change the world, pick whatever you want to change, change anything, is attractive. I mean, it's kind of sexy. It's just not terribly practical. And we know, because we've talked about it a bunch before, and if you look up the theory, the academic writing on this, although I would suggest the academic writing around improvement is good, but I think... You're better served by talking to applied people, people who actually do this work, as opposed to study and think about this work. There's a huge difference. It's the argument between does the ivory tower of the academy, do researchers who research the phenomena of organizational improvement know as much as people who actually are in the trenches performing organizational improvement? And it's kind of, you know, what's better, chocolate or vanilla? I mean, there are clear opinions on it and probably everybody's right. But I don't know. I've thought about this a bunch, kind of my whole career, actually. And I think the idea that organizations get really, what's the word I want? They set very high expectations for improvement to happen immediately and then forevermore stay improved. And both those things are probably ultimately flawed. The immediate improvement doesn't happen. Rome was not built in a day. And if you roll a software system out, I promise you, it'll be buggy. There'll be problems people didn't predict, and it will fail. And it will shut your operations down, and you won't be able to put time in the time system or use the travel system. You guys have all been here, so you know exactly what I'm talking about. That's all kind of wrapped up. believe it or not, in the very work we do as well. Because our notion of making the world a safer, better, more reliable place isn't happening with the flip of a switch. It doesn't happen immediately. It'll never happen immediately. It never has happened immediately. It's going to be a series of incremental improvements that move kind of slower than the organization wants it to. And honestly, it... It allows observation,