What I didn’t say about goat skins, and why they fit with human nature and change, including adopting new technology, is that apparently goat skins, stetch to accomodate the initial fermeting of the wine. But one they stretch they get a set and then when you put new wine in them, their previous set doesn’t allow them to adapt to the next round of fermenting with the new wine. Mind sets go along way to predicting adoptions of lots of new things, including technology. Let me know if that made more sense, or further clouded the subject.

Rodney Brim

If we are into parables like the Jesus parable about wine, then a people changing wine habit parable should go something like this:

Shoppers have been buying their bottles of wine and stuffing them into brown paper bags sense Margaret Knight invented the brown bag machine. Over a hundred years later supermarket chains are attempting to change shoppers habits from stuffing their wine in brown wine bags like Margaret’s and into green wine bags which you find at companies like winebags.com.

If we want to attempt to group how people respond to change, a parable more relevant to our daily lives might be more appropriate. Just another perspective at how people can be grouped. I am sure we can find parallel group habits of people changing from Knight’s brown bag and to winebags.com green bag as can be found in software acceptance.

I think it’s a far better parable and one clearly relevant to our times and wines.

I think your comment points out that ultimately both have to be in place for the change to become the “go-forward” habit of performance. However I think on some level it is more direct to operate with the target of changing the mind first, then the behavior; otherwise, you are correct the change of behavior takes a very long time for the mind to catch up.

Maybe an effective change process always has to involve both in roughly a parrallel process or it gets out of sync. Your thoughts?

1. A change of behaviour can get enforced by a a leader through tight and crystal clear feedback loops. The system then seemingly has changed – but is still in an unstable state. That means will return to the former state once the feedback loops get loosened.

2. Change of minds happens once the individuals in the organization have learned, that this new behaviour is actually better for them as an individual – even without the feedback loop. Once that stage has been reached the leader can loosen up the feedback loop. In my experience it will take 1+ years of tight feedback loops to reach that stage.

Note that in the US engineering culture tight personal feedback loops are often percieved as non acceptable. It takes “the freedom away”. Plus its counter to the theme of “opposing authority”.

Thus the rich discussion about topics like accountability, performance orientation in many companies & books should interpreted more as lip service. Or even worse – we talk so much about it because we know its a true problem. And talking about it relieves us from the pressure to do anything about it. Like the kid in school with the book under his pillow at night instead of reading it and learning..

Thus if you are a leader embarking in change – pls never forget to understand what are the true values of your organization. And which are those only being talked about. And then building a game plan how to overcome that obstacle. Managepro helps you to clarify the obstacles and build a succesful game plan