Building a Culture of Slowness: How to Resist Change and Slow Down Execution in Any Organization, for Personal Gain Without Personal Blame


I talk a lot about using the hidden and underestimated resources that businesses have already. By looking at them through the lens of your customer’s perspective, you can often find exciting insights promising dramatic growth.

Now exciting insights are nice. But they’re not enough: insights often don’t come to fruition. Why not?

As well as hidden resources, it’s also important to understand hidden or underestimated liabilities – because these are the things that stop great insights being exploited.

One of the most common under-estimated liabilities is a culture of slowness. In some organizations, this is like water to fish – it goes completely unnoticed (except to frustrated new CEOs in my experience).

Have you got a culture of slowness? I’ve written a tongue-in-cheek guide to the speed-sapping games people play in organizations:

Read this 12 point plan to ensure you place the blame for lack of progress on someone else!

And then more seriously, take the self-test that appears at the end of the article to diagnose the state of game-playing in your organization.

One of my clients said to me, “Love this article. A lot of people round here need to read it… But I was too scared to take the test!”

He got over it when we began discussing how to co-opt the game-players, redirect their energies and making use of the fact that it’s often the people who ‘resist’ most strongly who have the most energy for change.

 

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