Do you Face the Pain?

When you see something wrong in your organization, do you fix it? Or are you more the type to ignore it and hope it goes away?

In our business we come across quite a number of people who are more the breed that put off making any needed changes in their organization until they’re drowning deep in pain and frustration. It’s bad enough sometimes that they reach a point where they need a rescue line to bail them out.

It’s not uncommon for organizations to go through a period of growth where they become far too busy to address the numerous challenges that go along with that growth.  Instead of confronting the creeping deficiencies as they appear, they side-step the obvious and hope for the best. That is – until these deficiencies result in what I call a “Defining Event”. A defining event could be any number of undesirable results (catastrophic even) such as: a project that went way over budget; a legal dispute with an owner or subcontractor; an embarrassing shortfall in productivity or performance; loss of business; safety incident; etc.

There are a load of reasons why people avoid addressing the pain head-on.  First of all, people are born procrastinators. It’s pretty rare for someone to fix something before it becomes a real problem, even though they know that the longer they dodge the issue, the bigger problem it becomes. People also fear change. Even though they may be very aware that their current methods are inefficient, difficult, error-prone and time-consuming, these failing methods are a pain they know. A familiar pain that they’ve just learned to deal with – and for some reason the perceived pain of fixing it seems somehow worse than continuing to suffer through it day after day.

We’re funny creatures.

I hate to say it, but a good portion of our business success is a direct result of disorganized organizations. We of course prefer it when businesses are proactive and see the need for software like 4castplus well before it turns into a rescue mission; but in truth, about half are the type to ignore the problem and hope it goes away. Which of course it doesn’t.