One of the talking points in my recent MeshU talk was “lead with action and change, not policy”. For whatever reason, maybe just front of mind, I seem to be repeating this thread more of late.

Whether it’s HR type processes within a company, product design or your software process, it’s rare that leading with policy is effective. Symptoms of this are referred to as ‘adoption’ issues. Why aren’t we doing what we said we’d do? Instead of using policy, cultivate a focus on making small course corrections, of a reasonable scale from an implementation perspective. Watch for the changes that are successful and then find ways to codify those, ie make them policy.

In my opinion, policy should be a communication and sharing strategy rather than governing or leading. Does this scale? I have no clue. Certainly you can take the small change approach within smaller groups, then codify the proven ones to a larger population. I don’t want to tackle the scaling issue here, just convey a simple approach that works for me personally.

This approach is heavily influenced by Jeffrey Pfeffer‘s book The Knowing Doing Gap. For a shorter summary read, try this article titled “Why Can’t We Get Anything Done?” The basic premise is that organizations struggle with major gaps between what they know(policy) and what they do(action). The painfully obvious solution being that if you only create policy through action then you have less of a chance of having a gap.

Bottom line, use policy less as a tool to create change and action and more as a way to communicate(share) successful change.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 8:13 am and is filed under Office Gossip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.