Complacency

“Curmudge, if you were going to give just one book to a new Lean Coach-in-Training, what would it be?”

“Without question, Jaded Julie, it would be John Kotter’s Leading Change. But you know that I am too cheap to buy a book for every hard-working, intelligent, and talented person to come down the pike.”

“Okay Scrooge. What would you recommend?”

“Of course I’d recommend Kotter’s book, but for someone who is short of time and money, I’d advise reading Kaizen Curmudgeon. And a good place to start would be our posting ‘way back on October 29, 2007, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Transformation.”

“Well as it turns out Curmudge, the newer members of our team already have Kotter’s book, and they have been asked to write about a topic close to John Kotter’s heart, complacency. Furthermore, they are willing to contribute their writings to Kaizen Curmudgeon.”

“Guest authors? Saints be praised; it’s a miracle!”

“The specific assignment for the new Lean coaches is to explain in their own words Kotter’s statement,’Never underestimate the magnitude of the forces that reinforce complacency and that help maintain the status quo.’ Here are their one-page papers, Curmudge, but please spare the red pencil when you edit them.”

[Later] “The first thing I noticed, Julie, is that no one has defined complacency. We’d better do that: ‘A feeling of quiet pleasure or security, often while unaware of some potential danger; self-satisfaction or smug satisfaction with an existing situation.’ With the help of dictionary.com, we all should now be on the same page.”

“Let’s start with Ieva’s contribution, slightly edited. Despite her European heritage, it looks as if she started writing English composition at the age of three.”

“Instead of looking at others, I would like us to take a look at ourselves. Our organization adopted the Lean philosophy approximately four years ago and has come a long way in not only talking but also walking Lean. Even with impending health care reform, we feel that our present organization is a good place to work, is competitive, and provides outstanding care to our patients. Sounds complacent?? …Perhaps. This is how easy it is to slide down the slippery slope of complacency. Complacency is not a single sin that we commit; it is comprised of various elements that usually involve human nature, happy messages from senior management, low overall performance standards, and internal measurement systems that focus on the wrong performance indexes. We have been diligently working on aligning our goals and strategies and also set our bar high when it comes to metrics. But still, once in a while, we encounter the presence of the ugly ‘c’ word, complacency. As Kotter wrote, ‘People will find a thousand ingenious ways to withhold cooperation from a process that they sincerely think is unnecessary or wrongheaded.’ Thus other people’s complacency—or even obstruction—may be out there, but we might be too self-satisfied to realize it. Even high performing organizations can slip into the lull of ‘we are doing so great.’ The above quote to me means that we need to always be vigilant and aware that despite our progress, we may not let our guard down and feel that we have ‘finally made it.’ The sense of urgency needs to be ever present in our actions to ensure that we do not become too comfortable.”

“Justin takes a somewhat different tack. He believes that Kotter was writing about the difficulty in changing the culture in an organization, specifically addressing those individuals who don’t actively resist change, and who don’t necessarily support it either.”

“In a well-established organization, the cultures and habits of employees can be difficult to change. Employees who have had exposure to current corporate culture my actively resist or thwart efforts to implement change. These characters are obviously the easiest to identify, due to their visible determination to disrupt change, and are usually the clear target for ‘reeducation’ by those implementing change.

In addition to the employees who actively resist change, there are also those who don’t voice their opposition to change. They might even verbally agree with the proposed changes, but act in a way that doesn’t support them. There could be many ways these types of employees discourage change, such as: overstating performance measures, rigging surveys and systems to ensure no issues arise, downplaying or denying crises, and denying the urgency for change. These individuals are subtle in how they enhance complacency, and are usually difficult to immediately identify. They often pose a larger risk to change than those who actively disapproved of it because they quietly but persistently spread their views to others. Kotter states ‘… those who were relatively unaffected by complacency … and thus concerned about the firm’s future were often lulled back into a false sense of security by senior management’s ‘happy talk.’’ Senior management may unintentionally discourage the need for change by influencing those who once believed change was urgent.”

“Curmudge, it seems to me that Kotter was being overly tough on management. Managers have to walk a tightrope between sharing good news when the news is good and reducing the sense of urgency.”

“Speaking of tightropes, Julie, you and I must be careful in our editing that we don’t discourage the writers from future participation.”

“Hang in there, Curmudge. As a last resort, we can say that you really are a curmudgeon, i.e., a nasty old man. Meanwhile, let’s invite our readers to come back next week to read the work of more guest authors.”

Affinity’s Kaizen Curmudgeon