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ManagementSpeak: We’re putting together an offer to see what it should look like.

Translation: We’re waiting to see if another candidate accepts a smaller offer.

This week’s contributor, having taken the offer, has wisely decided to remain anonymous.

ManagementSpeak: We’re putting together an offer to see what it should look like.

Translation: We’re waiting to see if another candidate accepts a smaller offer.

This week’s contributor, having taken the offer, has wisely decided to remain anonymous.

If you believe people automatically resist change, offer them a new car of their choosing, no strings attached.

That’s a gedankenexperiment – a thought experiment, that is, which I proposed two weeks ago to demonstrate that the hard-wired-resistance-to-change theory of human behavior is simply wrong. If employees don’t object to a free car, then clearly they don’t instinctively resist change.

Analyze why nearly everyone would embrace this change enthusiastically while resisting, say, an ERP implementation, and you’ll understand how to lead organizational change.

First, notice employees get to choose their car. Offer a free Lumina and the acceptance rate would plummet. Why? You made the decision, not them, that’s why. And also because it’s a Lumina.

For the most part, people embrace changes they control, and dislike being controlled. Which is why, when you lead a change, you need an involvement plan. Project teams must figure out which decisions end-users will make or be consulted on.

What’s another reason employees would happily take the car while resisting other changes? It benefits them, of course. People embrace change that’s good for them and resist change that’s bad for them. (Most leadership training is built on sophisticated psychological concepts like this, by the way.)

So the second component of any change management plan is establishing this universal design principle: To the extent possible, project teams will design all changes to benefit those affected by the change.

These elements aren’t hard to build into a project. To illustrate: Early in my career I designed a bar-code-based raw materials tracking system. As part of the process I attended a union safety meeting to present what we had in mind. Our process design called for attaching three-part perforated tracking cards to the items to be tracked. Warehouse staff were to wear scanners – two piece affairs, connected by a cable – on belt holsters, removing one part of a card at each tracking location, scanning it, and dropping it in a box.

The union representative was outraged – the cables, he hold me, created a workplace hazard. Instead of arguing, I asked what would work better. Within fifteen minutes the warehouse staff had designed a simple table to hold the bar code scanners and drop boxes for items as they passed by in the work queue.

I was quite proud of that table. And all I had to do to design it was ask a question.

As a college freshman I enrolled in an English class. A biology major, I chose the class to meet freshwomen who didn’t consider formaldehyde perfume. I did, too. Sadly, they didn’t consider it a suitable men’s cologne either.

The class put us in grammar school classrooms, giving children techniques for writing poetry. Taught to expect frequent outbursts of poetic genius, because the sensibilities of the miniature humans we taught hadn’t yet been deadened by decades of oppressive teacherhood, I found the opposite: Unoriginal, mechanically constructed, second-hand ideas and third-hand imagery.

Children aren’t what our myths tell us they are. They aren’t born as geniuses, to be made stupid by our schools and their parents. If we’re utterly candid about it, they don’t notice very much or think very hard. Children’s art is primitive, less because they lack an artist’s mechanical skills than because they lack eyes trained to see details, such as, for example, arms.

The magic in children isn’t in their genius. It’s that the world hasn’t yet happened to them. They experience it without preconception, seeing, hearing, and smelling everything fresh. We see details because we know to look for them. Children sometimes see things we miss, specifically because we know what to look for.

Children lack proportion. When they’re happy they radiate pure joy; when they’re unhappy their hearts shatter; when they’re afraid they experience utter terror.

I had the privilege of seeing pure joy in each of my daughters when they were young. But Kimberly now has her driver’s license. I don’t see pure, unalloyed joy in her eyes anymore, although I do see utter terror in those of nearby drivers.

Erin was a Doowop Girl in her high school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors (the world has definitely changed!). I don’t see pure, unalloyed joy in her eyes either, but she’s a helluva singer and dancer, even if the plant did get top billing.

The world has happened to them. At least it’s started to. Experience has given them a sense of proportion, as it does to us all. It’s adulthood: It’s our experience that fits each new situation into a larger context. Minor fears don’t drive us to panic, small annoyances don’t drive us to rage. The price we pay is that small pleasures are just that — small.

A long straight drive off the eighteenth tee is, of course, another matter entirely.

Experience is a tricky thing. Ignore it and every day you’d make the same mistakes and misjudgments. Pay it too much attention and you limit your vision to your personal past. The future, not having happened yet, has more potential than that; so does the world beyond your horizons.

All progress comes from our ability, as human beings, to learn from experience. As Sir Isaac Newton described it, we stand on the shoulders of giants. All progress also depends on our knowing what of our experience (and that of others) to ignore — from, as Sir Thomas Huxley explained, the absolute rejection of authority.

As technologists this matters to us every day. Knowing when to apply our experience and when to accept the possibilities that lie beyond it requires both wisdom and luck.

Nor is ours unimportant work: We each play a small but real role in helping the world progress. It’s easy but fallacious to trivialize technology, giving preference to spirituality and ethics. People are, after all, far more likely to be spiritual and ethical if they’re first well-fed, sheltered, and secure. Technology has made the world both a more convenient place, and one in which it’s more convenient to be spiritual and ethical — a meaningful achievement.

For children, pleasure and fun are enough. For adults, meaning matters. Many of us achieve meaning through our careers — it’s our way of accomplishing something with our lives. Nobody ever dies wishing they’d spent another day in the office, but many die wishing their lives had meant more.

Meanwhile, last night we had our niece and nephews for a sleep-over. The youngest, Jacob, was sure monsters lurked, and was terrified. In the end there was nothing else for it: I slept on the sofa; he in the adjoining chair — for a fellow his size, easily big enough to serve as a bed. We assured him my snoring would be more than loud enough to scare any monsters away.

Both satisfied — me at having a useful role to play, Jacob with his protection from all the threats of the nighttime world — we slept.

Enjoy the holidays …with small children if you can.

Unalloyed joy rubs off on the spectators.

I’m taking a week off—see you in 2005.