Management
ORGANISATIONAL
BY DR BARRY CUMMINGS
Changing an organisation’s culture has never been easy. In history for example, it has often taken a revolution or war to make a significant change.
But in the world of work, revolution is not always desirable. So how do you get an organisation to make a lasting change?
It is easy to say that changing the storyline is the obvious choice, but it is much more difficult to achieve in practice. For example, how do you get your employees to really care about health and safety?
An example that I have worked on recently has involved taking them to court – quite literally. As a believer in experiential training this approach has proved extremely effective.
Take for example, your average skilled workforce, whether in manufacturing, maintenance or construction.
How do you get them to understand the reason for the seemingly (to them) senseless rules? “It won’t happen to me” is the constant thought behind the actions or lack of them.
Many organisations arrange regular safety briefings which are required on site before any work is carried out, but still there are accidents caused by people not following procedures put in place to avoid them.
And when something does go wrong, the fault is often placed at the door of the organisations managers as well as at the door of the individual.
And with the threat of prison or at least a fine, a real possibility for an organisation, getting behavioural change that makes a real difference can be key.
So how does the court case work? Using an organisation’s real documentation and a real incident, a scenario is put together and a court case created.
Each team member is briefed in advance on one of the “witness stories”. Trainees are then requested to attend court for the training, usually held in a real courtroom.
Once there, the witnesses are chosen at random to “play” the witness for real in the “witness box”. Other team members are then selected to play the judge and jury. A prosecuting lawyer and a defence lawyer are played by the trainers and the case plays out over a period of about 3-4 hours.
At the end of this time, the jury has to decide who is responsible. Is it the contractors who failed to follow safety procedures, or the engineer who was in a rush to get home and didn’t get the full sign off?
Or was it the company supervisor who was too busy to give full attention where needed, or the management who failed to ensure that the training and procedures were being followed?
The jury has to decide and as in real court cases, their decision is not usually unanimous, and can swing in different directions.
In many respects ,the final decision is not the most important aspect of the training. The process is. Role playing a witness, or watching one of your colleagues squirming in the witness box can have a very powerful effect on people and their understanding of what it would be like if this happened for real.
They quickly realise that they don’t want to be there, they really don’t want to be put in that situation!
20 | TRAINING MAGAZINE EUROPE MARCH 2015
BEHAVIOUR
BY BERRY WINTER