Starting where people are

First thing to realize is that every person in a company comes with a different set of experiences and thus is starting from a different place about how to do their job and how it should fit with the everyone else's work. So if you are trying to get a business organized and moving in a consistent way, you need to first come to this realization.


Carnegie Mellon University has spent a great deal of work on their Capability Maturity Model (CMM) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model#Capability_Maturity_Model_Structure]. This model helps to classify whole companies. The first level of improvement has to do with doing the same process reputably. The next level of improvement has to do with just getting written down what people do. The point here is that each person is at a different level. Some people may not have any process at all because they have always been told what to do while others may have something written done to vary levels of details. Thus each person needs to be working on their next level of "capability" before a whole company can reach that level. Why not just get everyone to jump to the desired level? Well, this leads to the title of this blog. Would you expect that a baby just learning to crawl could just suddenly start racing? Of course not, first they have to learn to walk then run then they can learn to race.


This is also a natural level of resistance to change. The more you change a way you want someone to do something or behave, the more resistance you get [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistance_to_change]. So you need to take a person from where they are at in "capability" and focus on their next level, not just where the company wants everyone to be. Unfortunately far to often, the company suddenly wants to race because of financial or competitive pressures and the well intended champion fails because of the level of resistance from the organization. In short, it's like inertia but also like herding cats. It takes a lot of energy to move a company from one point to the next, especially if there is no past history or cultural of "learning" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_organization]



Most books on management teach you how to "run" or "race" since the authors are typically in a publish or perish situation and must talk about the latest findings on how to "race". So this blog will talk about getting people to "walk" rather than "crawl" and then to "run" rather than "walk". See this blog for classical book references on these areas: http://mosherslawetal.blogspot.com/