A630.8.4.RB_SchreterPaul

Tom Wujec concluded that business students are “trained to find the single right plan and execute on it,” which causes them to have higher failure rates than kindergarteners. (Wujec, 2010) I find this conclusion to be perfectly acceptable and it certainly makes sense. Business students are hired to take on a task to which they have no formal familiarity with and as a result they fall back onto what they know, which is to design and build something to the very end and then hope that the execution goes well for them. While on paper it may seem like a good idea, in practice there were a lot of covert elements that were unaccounted for.

Kindergarteners on the other hand start with the marshmallow and make incremental changes over time, figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. This is more or less a process of trial and error, which takes them along a path that eventually leads to an acceptable outcome. While the vision could have been entirely different at the start, the process leading up to the end allowed the teams to fix and correct their own problems and to take ownership over their own future.

Process intervention is about “[observing] individuals and teams in action and [helping] them learn to diagnose and solve their own problems.” (Brown, 2011) Brown mentions that “the actual timing of when to provide feedback to members is a judgment call by the practitioner” which implies that the practitioners can either give members incremental feedback or wait to the conclusion of the workshop. (Brown, 2011) Giving feedback throughout the workshop would be a similar approach to kindergarteners receiving instant feedback to figure out what works and what doesn’t work when building towers. The alternative would be to wait till the end of the workshop before revealing process findings, similar to Wujec waiting 4 months and allowing the same students perform the trick under a more enlightened circumstance. (Wujec, 2010)

What I take from this is that in an unknown or unfamiliar setting where change is demanded, prototyping and incremental changes are key because you quickly find out if that particular change effort is a good idea or bad. This is especially true when the stakes are high because instant feedback across a change effort is needed to better secure the future and in effect it reduces risk. Implementing major change all at once is to risky and from what I learned in the past, if the people don’t own it, they’d reject it.

References

Brown, D. (2011). An Experiential Approach to Organization Development. New Jersey: Pearson.

Wujec, T. (2010). Build a tower, build a team. Retrieved from TED: http://www.ted.com/talks/tom_wujec_build_a_tower#t-149507