Unlearning doesn’t necessarily mean forgetting past lessons, but it does require us to reinvent ourselves and do some re-thinking — another nature of the improvement beast.
New thinking doesn’t always throw out past lessons, in fact it often is built on what we’ve learned. Unlearning or rethinking involves challenging the status quo but can still mix the old with the new. The trick is knowing what should stay and what should go.
“even Deming spent a great deal of time copying Shewhart’s ideas and devising ways to present them in his own way. Students of continuous improvement are therefore students of history to some degree.
There have been multiple instances where one ‘expert’ or another took something, ‘improved it’, and re-published it as new thinking. This sometimes creates friction between authors and confusion around who exactly is an ‘authoritative source’.
This is the nature of the beast.”
Rolling Uphill
When we’ve spent years — sometimes decades — mastering something it is human nature not to challenge it, and therein lies the rub. Einstein said it well, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.“
The Unified Service Management (USM) method is like this. USM does not replace existing practice frameworks (in fact it compliments them), but it will challenge some traditional thinking, particularly around processes and organizational maturity.
[NOTE: This ‘Mindful Monday’ post was originally drafted Friday and scheduled for publishing on Monday, but as luck would have it it’s a rainy day and I saw a post from Chetan Nagaonkar with some comments from Jan van Bon so I figured I’d publish it today… nice to see that the USM community is on the same page … rainy days are good for being mindful😉.]
Customers need a way to continue to leverage existing and emerging best practice frameworks, but they must also simplify service management for the enterprise in order to meet the needs of the digital future.
As your organization evolves, so should your management system, and this can be a source of discomfort.
“Questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong. Reconsidering something we believe deeply can threaten our identities, making it feel as if we’re losing a part of ourselves.”
“we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones.”
Grant, Adam. Think Again (p. 4). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
But fear not, the USM method provides all service teams with the freedom to leverage any organizational topology and any combination of practice frameworks.
Find out about the USM method by registering for a free workshop or scheduling a free consultation, and remember:
“it’s not so much changing your answer that improves your score as considering whether you should change it.”
Grant, Adam. Think Again (p. 3). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.