See, I do have my occasional moments of profanity profoundness!
“The people in the room aren’t the problem, they’re the solution.” – @JayWll #kaizen #wisdom
— Matt Edwards (@wastedgenius)
We were talking yesterday morning about an upcoming Kaizen event that one of my colleagues will be running as part of a process improvement initiative that she’s spearheading. Apparently there’s a whole blame game thing going on between the groups that participate in the process over why it’s broken, and she’s concerned this might influence the way her event unfolds.
This was my advice: Acknowledge in the introduction that there are issues, but affirm that everyone in the room owns the whole process (even though they may only be a subject matter expert for a part of it). Recognize that all the participants are there because they see there’s a problem, but certainly not because they are the problem. Quite the opposite, in fact.