I had a big aha-moment reading a recent Harvard Business Review article. In this text, Clayton Christensen and colleagues discuss that there are different tools to get people to work together and change behaviors. Most change books are about the one method you can use to change organizations. But they actually highlight that there are different ways to drive change depending on the context factors. So they propose to look on the agreement along two dimensions: what people want and how the envision it happen.
Depending on where you are along these axes, different tools are important to support collaboration or change. Especially this cause-and-effect axis is very interesting. I have repeatedly observed that in an intense group there is high agreement on what is wanted, but not so much on the means. The tools they propose are helpful to navigate in this system. The message is that there is simply not just one way to bring about collaboration. You need an understanding on where you are and then what tools you use to drive that. Or as they say it so well themselves:
“One of the rarest managerial skills is the ability to understand which tools will work in a given situation—and not to waste energy or risk credibility using tools that won’t.”
Good stuff!
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