Four Groups

Archive for January, 2012

Keith McGregor from Personnel Psychology NZ calls out some of the myths and mysteries around training and development and the prospect of realising change, or not…

Over the years we have run many management training courses and get wonderful feedback (causes a problem trying to get one’s head out of the door). We go back 6 months later and ask the manager how its going and they say “Great”. We ask the staff how its going and they say “How is what going?”. When we ask about the management training they say “Oh, so that where he was for a couple of days”. There may have been a brief flurry of activity and then normality prevailed. How many us can honestly say we have seen a permanent, positive change in managerial behaviour as a result of a management course? This is incredibly ego-deflating and a seeming waste of everybody’s time and money and yet the need is as strong as ever – in virtually every organisation there are people screaming out for ideas on how to manage difficult staff and deal with complex personnel issues.

Via the IONET Google Group

This is a cross post from 3ruce.com

Over at Boing Boing (here), Maggie Koerth-Baker points us in the direction of an interesting question posted on Quora (here), where someone asks “What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?” In response, someone posted this enlightening response;

You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

For many of us, our natural inclination is to pull in the opposite direction and actively seek certainty and operate within a world of known parameters and possibilities. Arguably, forcing oneself to become more comfortable and willing to embrace uncertainty and the question the limits of ones understanding reprensents a major step in being able to look beyond the obvious. By acknowledging the complexity and deep interrelatedness of many issues facing organisations, new insight and dare I say it, greater innovation may be achievable. However, I suspect that for many managers who have spent a career trumpeting their experience and achievements, this is a step too far.