One of the toughest challenges in improving a process is understanding what challenges are solved by the current process. It’s really easy to see what might be working with a current approach, but it’s much more difficult to see the problems that are no longer occurring due to the existing process.
This is a common challenge with meetings. I’ve seen teams work together to create effective standing meetings, only to have a new exec decide standing meetings are bad and require they all be removed. All of the problems that were solved by those meetings became problems again and the entire company came to a halt for several weeks and slowly worked its way back to a semblance of productivity after a couple of months (through the returning of standing meetings.)
So how does a new leader avoid reintroducing solved problems?
- Find balance & prioritize. There’s a spectrum between moving fast and learning the landscape. It’s important to find a balance, and I would suggest being diligent about understanding the size of potential impact for any changes.
- Gather context. Listen to tenured people and ask them how the current process came to be. Often the contributing factors no longer exist, but sometimes they do. Are there other ways to account for those? Also listen to less-tenured people to understand the challenges they currently face.
- Incremental or dramatic approach? People often respond to incremental approaches more easily than more drastic changes. Incremental changes are useful in helping refine. However, if the gap between where you are and where you want to be is large, then bigger changes may be in order. There is far less risk in small changes, and larger changes take a much deeper understanding. Sometimes people will still be holding onto first base unless you transport them to a new stadium where that’s not even an option.
Finally, sometimes reintroducing solved problems is preferred. When that’s the case, make sure to speak to it. For example, a product release process may help ensure everything that ships is perfect. But the effort to get there may be much more than shipping imperfection and being able to roll back (if needed.)
In the end, the outcome you want is that the changes solve more (and more significant) problems than they create.