All aboard, Experts

The plan is always better than the reality.  In my last post, I promised to tell you how we’d convert the tentative and investigate their resistance.  But you have to start with a plan.  Here’s ours.

First, we’re going to ask experienced, senior people from the target audience to attend working meetings with me and their partners in other departments.  “Partners” isn’t a term in common currency here, but I mean people who are part of the chain of events in any transaction or process – the people who are most likely to be effected by each other’s work.

Before the meetings, me and my stakeholders will do our best to identify critical topics.  We’ll know we’ve got them when we have a set of concrete examples of situations which, if not recognized and passed on without recognizing how to make key decisions, can turn into administrative messes and create risk.

We’ll propose small groups and array these experts across topics.  From everyone, we want to hear situations in which the complex and challenging became an individual learning experience or small disaster.  Both of them tend to be memorable.  In some cases, we want to tap their front-line experience and capture what hasn’t been recorded before.  Others will help us recognize inconsistencies and exceptions in policy and procedure, which we’ll note and try to address quickly.

I’ve only asked for a commitment of two one hour meetings.  Three quarters of the time should be about the work at hand.  We need exercise situations that will be challenging to the experienced learners.  The balance of time serves our other purpose, sharing expert problem solving skills and tactics.  It shows that we’re tapping the people who know the work to discuss it as it is really done.

One of the prime sources of skepticism across departments in every organization is a failure to appreciate the conditions others work under.  It leads to insisting that they should just follow our guidelines; They went through that great training, after all!  It’s a constant of human nature that if I have a daily goal, it eclipses the big goal that I’m trying to achieve with others, especially when they are out of sight, and all the moreso if they continue to deliver Stuff That Isn’t Right for me to resolve.

Here’s the planned output from these meetings:  exercise scenarios, key issues in context and how people make decisions about them, questions to pursue, and small groups that have gained a little bit of experience working together and that might be tapped in the future, especially if they see this as a process that leads to solving problems or identifying real issues.

One thing I’ll offer to is to spread a little sunlight on the work by creating an email list so that everyone can learn about what people in other groups is doing and recommending.  Others can pile on with points of view and follow-on recommendations.

What ground-rules would you propose for these groups so that we can hope to achieve the two main goal – getting exercise situations and promoting constructive discussion across departments?  Remember these subject matter experts are new to the SME role (why, they might not even know that that’s the role they’re playing.).