Change and politics don’t mix. They don’t mix in government and they don’t mix in business. We don’t like to talk about politics. It’s taboo. Oh well, here we go anyway.
You see sometimes politics like change. If it sees advantage in it. Sometime politics dislike change. If it sees it as threatening to the status quo. And of course politics are fickle. Change that was good may abruptly become bad. Or the other way around. Makes you skittish to deal with it. You lose trust. Losing trust is bad.
I talk about politics as some abstract concept, which it is, but on practical level it is about leaders and managers. And leaders and managers are people. People whose behavior can be changed.
Politics happen for all kinds of reasons. The ones I see as most destructive to change are leaders jumping ion the latest management craze or jumping on the band wagon of the latest and hottest manager. I don’t know that either of these is avoidable and necessarily all bad.
The problem is that existing improvement initiatives get the heave ho. Creating an environment of starts and stops. Attempts at improvements become out of joint, as Shakespeare might say.
I guess you might say we need to get used to it. This is after all a sort of ongoing change that we should know how to handle. But I’d rather not get used to it. To me these stops and starts caused by politics are juts chaos. It doesn’t have to be like this. We can change it.
I wrote about managing managers a bit ago in this blog: Change Managing the Management: It was about educating managers about how change works. This is piece of the puzzle.
It’s not the whole puzzle. The other piece in the puzzle is awareness. Awareness of the ramifications and repercussions of swaying with the political winds.
We sometimes think everyone is in tune with all the ramifications of choices. Unfortunately, they’re not. And the more they’re not in tune the more the term “unintended consequences” comes up. It’s not good when that term comes up.
Yes, there are certainly times in any situation that you can get bit by unintended consequences bug. But you’d much rather be bit by the unintended consequences complexity bug than by the unintended consequences clueless bug.
How do you teach someone to be more aware? That’s a tough one.
You could be blunt and say ” Hey, let’s not be that guy.” That might work. Make sure to know your audience on that one.
You can certainly start with education and communication like I mention in Change Managing the Management. This is always a good path to enlightenment.
But I like metaphors or analogies to spread complex ideas.
A good analogy for unintended consequences is Prohibition. Prohibition is a good metaphor because it was clearly political. It had good intentions. And it snapped into place in the snap of a finger.
Unintended consequence heaven. That’s what it was. And it’s a good example because some were good and many were bad.
Increases in alcohol poisoning, DUI arrests, prison inmates, organized crime and so. Lot’s of fascinating stories out there on this.
Here’s a nice infographgic: America’s Hangover: Prohibitions Unintended Consequences
Once More Unto the Change 