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| Drops of wisdom |
People live in the world of illusion-change believing it as an improvement. They also create a "false sense of urgency" that leads to stress. Following could be a scenario of expressing artificial stress created in deploying a very important change management initiative across the functions, hospitals, organizations and companies. Restructuring and reorganization are being leveraged by companies as a weapon for improvement.
In organizations issues are at the grass root level and we are even acutely aware of the real root issues, however we start the change process at a top management level, thus complicating things and creating artificial stress scenario and give birth to ‘Fountain of Wisdom Drops’. In the organizations, a committee oversees the progress of the change initiative and we ensure that business is as usual with issues under the carpet, though there is no link between issues and the changes are being proposed for execution. People receive beautiful mailers and everyone is busy talking about the initiatives, the terminologies, futuristic changes, impacts and more so about positive body languages and motivation levels whereas the actual issues continue to remain unattended and unresolved. People are also asked to conduct brain storming sessions on how to improve the situation, by end of the day long sessions, there are list of actions drafted which are needed to be done, company-wide communications deployed, within a month or so reports are being generated and the execution program is progressing full swing without considering its effectiveness and efficiency, a false sense of urgency creates a lot of stress. People who are not part of this execution also learn to speak and discuss on those so called ‘Intellectual wisdom’ initiatives tirelessly during lunch breaks and coffee breaks while phantom stress continues to creep up slowly to levels that are unimaginable. Unfortunately, whenever someone from the ground level and/or from the field wants to discuss the real issues, ground/field level people are pushed back by managers with statements such as ‘We are busy and there is lot work to be done and there are many high level things to be done. I do not have the time to focus on these grass root issues’.
I call them ‘The fountain of wisdom drops,’ spread across the whole company and its branch offices. The end result is customer service group facing the customer directly, do not see any changes in the quality of services neither there are any signs of improvement. This is the after effect of portraying stress, an intelligent and witty type of escapism from the real issues and problems. Artificially, we believe that we are stressed and we agree not to face the problems and rather choose to shun the problems away. But we continue to sell efficiently and spread the ‘Fountain of wisdom drops’. In the case of people, we deal with the things which are outside our purview. An old wise story goes that a man was searching for a gold coin on the ground. His wife came by and asked him ‘Why are you searching for it here if it was lost near the tree.’ Man replied, ‘There is lot of illumination here so I was searching for it here.’ An act of being dumb and foolish is what we would call it, but rather it is a form of creating artificial sense of work and stress with the ‘Fountain of wisdom drops’.
In case of personnel goals we change businesses, bosses, jobs, roles; superficially we take pride in our own artificial growth.
