Sep 30, 2014 | Posted by Ben Thompson
Hey there blog fans I have a neat little update that shows there is light at the end of that seemingly endless tunnel. Have you ever worked hard at getting your point across to someone over and over again to the point that you think you’d have better luck getting through to a rock? Well have I got good news for you I have found both through research, and as of last week through experience, that all your vigilance in repetitively promoting a change in a company’s culture and thinking literally doesn’t go unnoticed.
You see the way our brains work is that they are always both actively and passively receiving and processing stimuli to extract information about our environment. So when you repetitively state an idea to a person over time their brain is forced to process that idea whether they want to or not. This process is psychologically defined as priming or more precisely direct or repetition priming is an implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus over and over again influences a response to that stimulus. Now I bet your curious what my experience with this was, and how I saw it happen first hand.
Well, since I started working with Durabody over 2 months ago I have encountered someone who has been a “hard sell” on our true north goal. But this is to be expected when changing the culture of a company, I am learning that more and more as I develop as a student of TPS. No one ever said change was easy but they also neglected to tell us that perseverance is prerequisite. In this case perseverance was key, to my pleasant surprise after many conversations about a change for the better of the company and the employees to set our team up for success our biggest nay-sayer finally got excited and started engaging us in a conversation about restructuring and reorganizing the work stations he leads. He started suggesting a multitude of great changes we could do together to organize our main line and some of the sub processes that feed it. So, now we can actively strategize together as a team to reach our goals. I don’t know whether it was a case of priming or divine intervention, all I know is that this person has made the choice to put forth a positive attitude towards change so we can work together to make Durabody a shining example of what Canadian industry can be.
Its those magical moments of breaking through all the frustration pent up from working in an inefficient environment for so many years to get to those great ideas hidden beneath that makes it worth while to,
Keep
Calm
and
Kaizen
On!
