I gave a presentation at the 6th annual New Jersey Process Improvement Symposium yesterday and talked about four-dimensional improvement. Some highlights:
- Improvement = change + direction + results –>real value
- There are four categories of models those of us who are change agents should know: Process models (Content), Organizational Models (Context), Implementation Models (Conduct), and Change Models (Contact). Any subset will decrease likelihood of success and increase likelihood of unintended consequences.
- All models are widows into a situation, not the situation itself. There is a loss of fidelity, depending on the perspective of the model (window) we're looking through. E.g., viewing an organization from a family dynamics perspective (Satir, Constantine) or from a metaphor perspective (Morgan) give us very different interpretations of the situation. Both may be right and neither is complete.
- As change agents, we need as deep and as broad a perspective as we can get in our work. That means that thinking about, using, adapting, and even dropping models when appropriate are important to our work. In this case, the more tools we have in our kit bag, the better we are, so long as we know what to do with them.
- Oh, by the way: it's not our interpretation of the models that's important here, but our client's. Models are used to attempt a description of a situation to illustrate possibilities and generate useful discussion. Models that are not used in service of the client's insight and action probably shouldn't be used at all.
There's more, of course. I should probably expand on some of this a bit in future posts.
