Change is hard to talk about because people feel personally attacked. If we're not careful, "let's make it better" sounds more like "You're doing it wrong and about to get fired."
When you think about the things that annoy you, it's easy to blame people. They're right there, with their annoying faces, being obstructive, unreasonable, or infuriating. If only they would change, everything would be better!
Except it wouldn't, would it? When you think about it, what they're doing makes perfect sense. When you ask a few questions, you'll probably realise that if you were in their shoes, you'd do the same.
Try asking questions like:
- Why are they doing this?
- What have they got to fear or lose?
The people who are pissing you off are probably making sensible choices that you, too, would make in their shoes. You need to put their shoes on.
The meta version of that question is something like: If everyone is great and doing their best, and it's still turning out like this, how is the environment to blame?
It's rarely people who are bad. The systems we exist within encourage behaviour from us that is bad. Bad systems, not bad people.
(Of course, you know who changes systems, don't you? Yeah. It's people. You're people. It's you.)
Til next week,
A
