Back in my days as a management consultant, when I would land up at a new client, I would instinctively notice a few things in the client organization that needed to change. Some of it seemed so obvious to me that at times I would wonder why the clients didn't see it themselves.
Now - a bit older and hopefully a little wiser - when I come across something that to me seems like an opportunity for change, I hold my enthusiasm and start doing a bit of fact finding. The bigger the change opportunity seems to me, the longer I spend trying to find out why in the first place it is the way it is.
Often, the answers are pretty revealing but they usually fall into two key buckets:
1. There are processes, systems, rituals, ways of working, etc. that were designed for a different context. They worked beautifully back then and got so well diffused in the organization that people continue to adhere to them long after the context has changed.
2. Most processes and initiatives in large organisations are optimized for the 'whole' at the time of design. But as they get adopted by different parts and by each individual, they get further optimized in organic ways that often are not anticipated by the orginal designers. The result is something which is efficient (path of least pain) in parts but inefficient (read ineffective)as a whole.
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Once you understand the root cause, often the solution is a focused fix in some places rather than a huge transformation and change management initiative.
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