Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Dawna Jones
Change Architect: Hacking Decision-making for Leadership Growth, author Decision Making for Dummies
Vancouver, Canada AreaManagement Consulting
Current InSight Out Consulting Inc.
Previous Canada Communications Group, IUCN World Parks Congress
Education University of Alberta

Dear Dawna

Your recent post on the B-Team discussion got me thinking ... again.

I believe I am on the right track ... but to be realistic, I still don't have much traction, and because of not much traction, not much (favorable) impact.

Others are much more 'in play' and talk a lot about various business issues that are important for an enviro-socio-economic system that would be less dysfunctional ... but in the end they don't have that much (favorable) impact either.

My dream is that all these people who 'get it' and are able to talk about it could also number it. Then I believe that there would be a lot of traction and favorable change, and more important, it would 'stick'. When I was doing corporate work in the dim and distant past we would talk about 'balloon' style management and 'ratchet wrench' style management. In the first case, an initiative works but is like squeezing a balloon ... stop the initiative (squeezing) and the balloon reverts to its previous state. With the wrench the bolt gets tightened ... and then tightened again, and there is continuous improvement.

Until we have quantification ... numbering ... for everything that matters then we will be in a 'balloon' world with lots of initiatives, but not much progress. With numbers we can start to do the 'ratchet wrench' process and have sustainable continuous improvement.

Better yet ... with quantification using a uniform standard system of value, we can sort out not only the bad actors, but also the good actors that are really not all that good. With numbering there will be surprises ... because, after all, this is a very complex system

How might I help you and vice versa?

Peter