Today’s Gremlin – It’ll never work here

Today’s Gremlin – It’ll never work here is the first one we’ll deal with. We’ve all run into him at one point or another. “It’ll never work here” is someone, or many, who has / have been around for a long time. This is one of the many gremlins we talked about when we introduced this series of articles.

Your past is haunting you

“It’ll never work here” has seen a whole lot of initiatives come and go. He’s seen most of them, maybe all, fail to live up to expectations. His demeanor can be very gruff and dismissive. Or, he can be very polite and  seemingly thoughtful. People in your organization respect his opinion, because he’s been there so long and seen so much.

Many change initiatives do fail. There’s a myriad of reasons but most boil down to poor change management and a lack of leadership. An ill-conceived project, lack of funding, ignoring all the stakeholders, attempts to ram an unpopular change through, lack of training, lack of a convincing business case at all levels, unfavorable internal politics, no support from other affected departments, a new manager who doesn’t believe in “it”, even a naysayer who’s seen your idea fail somewhere else, can all torpedo your well intended efforts.

Powerful Influencer

Today’s Gremlin – “It’ll never work here” is a powerful influencer who is almost always predisposed to oppose just about any initiative that comes along (unless it is his idea). This Gremlin’s logic is simple and well-founded. We’ve never been successful at any of this in the past, so we won’t succeed this time.

Henry Ford once said, “whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right”. This Gremlin thinks “you can’t” and based on past experience he’s right! However, if you think, “you can”, then you’ll need to deal with all the objections arising from the past that “It’ll never work here” comes up with. And, there may be more than one of them to contend with. Some of the objections are based on logic, some on emotion and some will be a combination. Technical people may have sound logical arguments both ways, fore and against, and most of them will be stumped by the emotional arguments where logic simply won’t work.

Yes you can!

Dealing with all of those requires an understanding of your organization’s change history, its willingness to deal with the known and perceived causes of past failures, its willingness to lead the change with sensitivity to the past and an eye to the future, and a sufficiently enthusiastic sponsor at a level that can truly authorize change in all the areas where it will be needed.

If you run into “It’ll never work here”, you can be confident that your organization has yet to figure out how to deal with it’s own mistakes of the past. You will need help making any substantial change happen. Ignoring this Gremlin will only lead to more self-fulling justification for his existence!