Obstacles to True Consensus – Extrapolating From the Past

Following on from the second post in this mini-series, today I’ll describe another obstacle to True Consensus. Again, it’s about the behaviour of certain key people. And again, in line with our belief that “People are Good”, the behaviours we’re discussing are not dysfunctional behaviours, but the outstanding, positive behaviours that have brought the company to its present success.

Extrapolating from the past is not something negative, it’s something positive. If we don’t extrapolate from the past, if we start every time from a clean slate, what are the chances we’ll do anything sensible? Pretty close to zero. Experienced people are, by definition, people that extrapolate from the past. Otherwise we have no intuition, no insights into a subject.

Here, we’re going to look at two different aspects of this obstacle.

Obstacle: Extrapolating From the Past Into What We Might Do In the Future

This is the first aspect of extrapolating from the past. Extrapolating from the past works in our favour. So what’s the problem with it? When we come to build the change, to build the new strategy based on our new rules, to really embrace the power of the synergistic approach, our past contains what? Yup. The old rules. And if we extrapolate from the old rules, what do we get? We get the same strategy we already have – maybe in slightly different words only – and nothing happens.

Remediation: Exclude the old rules

So, how can we make sure we extrapolate from the past, building everything on past experience, except for the old rules. How can we exclude these old rules? By examining each conflict, by identifying our flawed assumptions- rooted in the old rules – and removing these flawed assumption. In this way, we make our past experience more homogeneous, and everything makes much more sense. We’re not abandoning the past. We’re not erasing our past experience. Exactly the opposite. We’ve removed the one thing that causes our experience to be inconsistent. And we’re reshaping our past experience. Making it much clearer and more palatable. Folks love this.

So what we have to do is take a number of key ideas in turn, and apply the same process:

• Do the analysis
• Discover the conflict via the flawed assumption
• Remove the conflict

By doing this, we reshape our past experience. And the minute we do this, we still extrapolate from our past experience, but based on the new rules, rather than the old rules.

And by the way, did you notice how, for this aspect of the obstacle, remediation is much the same approach as we take with the Dominant Impatient Visionary and the Smart Conservative obstacles?

Obstacle: Extrapolating From Past Experience of Each Other

This is the second aspect of extrapolating from the past. Given our experience of the folks we work with, will they collaborate now? Do they really mean yes when they say yes? Can we rely on them? In most companies, extrapolating from the past in this context leads to less than positive feelings, because what we extrapolate from the past is not exactly flattering.

Remediation: Explore, Reflect and Change as a Group

How to remediate? We have to ensure that we reflect on the past, on our past interactions, on our extrapolations of folks’ behaviours, as a group, rather than in one-to-one conversations. In this way, each person will see how everyone else is also going through the same kind of change. This means, by the way, that all the previous remediations we have mentioned in this series also have to be done in a group, not one-to-one.

Aside: This excludes people learning this stuff from books. People have lost the art of reading together in groups.

Next time: Solutioneering – the final obstacle to True Consensus, explored.

– Bob

Further Reading

Beyond the Goal ~ Eliyahu M. Goldratt (Audiobook only)