The Performance Improvement Blog

Organizational Culture: Ignore at Your Own Risk

The term “culture” is getting much use these days, but I’m afraid it has become a Rorschach for whatever people want to say about an organization. In an interview for the Wall Street Journal, Mark Pincus, CEO of the fast-growing, online social-gaming company Zynga Inc., was asked, “What is the company’s culture?” He answered by talking about employee attrition, competitiveness of teams, and number of promotions. All of these things might be indicators of culture, but they don’t tell us the nature of Zynga’s culture.

So, what is organizational culture and why is it so important? Edgar Schein, in his book, Organizational Culture and Leadership, says that culture consists of the values, basic assumptions, beliefs, expected behaviors, and norms of an organization. An organization’s culture affects what people think, how people feel, and what people do. If a leader focuses on mission, strategy, and finances to the exclusion of culture, that lack of alignment will get in the way of success.

Shawn Parr, a Fast Company blogger, writes this in his post titled, Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch:

Culture is a balanced blend of human psychology, attitudes, actions, and beliefs that combined create either pleasure or pain, serious momentum or miserable stagnation. A strong culture flourishes with a clear set of values and norms that actively guide the way a company operates. Employees are actively and passionately engaged in the business, operating from a sense of confidence and empowerment rather than navigating their days through miserably extensive procedures and mind-numbing bureaucracy. Performance-oriented cultures possess statistically better financial growth, with high employee involvement, strong internal communication, and an acceptance of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve new levels of innovation.

Parr argues the case for aligning culture with strategy. Strategy tells everyone what the company does and culture is how it does those things. If achieving the goals of the organization depends on cross-functional teamwork in the "white space" but management reinforces org-chart work silos, then the strategy cannot be implemented.  I found this lack of alignment to be the case in the pre-turnaround U.S. auto companies. Parr writes about this kind of cultural discrepancy in a follow-up post:

People matter. More than machinery, products, or real estate. People invent and build. People support and serve customers. Your people either create or undermine value, cultivate or kill relationships, drive or reduce success. A well-conceived strategy living in the hands of unhappy, misdirected, misinformed people is a sure way to a slow and painful death. There is no comparison to being in the hearts and hands of energized, informed, and motivated people.

Kevin Eikenberry takes a slightly different slant on organizational culture. He says that if you want to understand culture you have to pay attention to:

• How we do things around here. What are the policies and procedures that are written down, but, more importantly, what are the unwritten and unspoken ways of doing things that are learned by example?
• The stories we are told. What is the lore of the workplace, both truth and fiction? What is the narrative that gets repeated again and again over time?
• The behaviors that get you promoted. These are not necessarily the categories on the performance review form. What really is valued? Is it long hours, achieving production goals, cultivating the right relationships, not making waves, coaching others, or something else?
• The values the organization lives by. These aren’t the values posted on the conference room wall or laminated for wallets and purses. These are the values-in-action.

Every organization has values, beliefs, norms, and traditions that shape behavior. A leader’s challenge is to guide an organization in developing the kind of culture that will help it achieve its strategic goals. Without purpose and strategy an organization has no reason for being, but without a culture that is in line with that purpose and strategy, long-term success is highly unlikely. 

 

There They Go Again: Bashing Brainstorming

What did brainstorming ever do to receive such vitriol? Jonah Lehrer writes in the January 30 issue of The New Yorker:

Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. At such moments, brainstorming can seem like an ideal mental technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is one overwhelming problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.

Susan Cain writes in a January 13 opinion piece for the New York Times titled “The Rise of the New Group Think”:

…brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity. The brainchild of a charismatic advertising executive named Alex Osborn who believed that groups produced better ideas than individuals, workplace brainstorming sessions came into vogue in the 1950s. …But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases… People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

And now Cliff Kuang raises concerns with brainstorming again in an article for Fast Company titled, The Brainstorming Process Is B.S. But Can We Rework It? At least Kuang is asking how to make brainstorming more effective. Let’s brainstorm some possibilities (just kidding).

As I wrote in a previous blog post, “I believe the problem is in the implementation, not the method.” Indicting brainstorming is like saying that elearning is more effective than classroom-based learning. The truth is there is effective elearning and there is ineffective elearning. It all depends on the purpose, design, content, and delivery of the course.  

It’s the same with brainstorming. It all depends on the quality of design and facilitation. The critics are right; if all the facilitator does is allow participants to free associate for an hour and then go home, the process is “B.S.”. When that happens we can predict little creativity and little impact on planning.

However, when it is done well, when it is done in context and with preparation of participants, and when there is follow-up after the initial generation of ideas, then brainstorming can be very effective. A good facilitator:

1. Is clear about the purpose and intended results of the exercise and discusses this with participants
2. Prepares (even trains) participants for doing brainstorming (e.g., gives an example)
3. Establishes norms for how participants are to behave in the session
4. Leads the conversation in such a way that gets everyone involved, gets all of the ideas displayed in front of the group, and does not allow criticism until all ideas are listed
5. Helps the group reach consensus on a subset of ideas on which to do further work
6. Begins action planning to do the follow-up work
7. Helps participants learn (and learn how to learn) from their involvement

There is an art and science to brainstorming. The facilitator must be able to follow the rules of brainstorming but also deviate from and expand on those rules depending on the situation.  

When done well, there are many uses of brainstorming. It could be used to evaluate a program, consider new strategies and methods, identify problems, create a vision for the future of an organization, or solve problems.  Often, brainstorming is used simply to warm up the group for a lengthy strategic-planning or prolbem-solving discussion. The technique creates an atmosphere of trust where everyone is heard and all ideas are respected. Now, what’s wrong with that? 

 

Investing in Training in Downturns and Upturns

The U.S. is emerging from a training drought that occurred during the worst economic period since the Great Depression. At least, that’s what’s indicated by organizations that do this kind of
research. ASTD reports an increase in spending on L&D in 2010 (latest year for which data is available); they estimate companies spent about $171.5 billion. Bersin & Associates reports that corporate spending on training increased 9.5% in 2011 – the largest gain in three years.  And Training magazine’s research found a 13% increase in spending on L&D in 2011. Each of these studies uses a different method for calculating spending. However, the trend is undeniable: spending on employee training is increasing.  

With this increase in spending comes a great opportunity to do things right. In our book, The 5As Framework, Sean Murray and I wrote that most training programs significantly impact only 10% to 20% of their participants. This represents a huge waste that no organization can afford any longer. As the worldwide recession comes to an end, organizations must use every dollar very wisely. Garry Marsh, director of the U.K. company THM Business Simulations, gives us some thoughts about best ways to use those dollars. Here are those seven ideas with my spin on each one:

• Get it right first time – Think in terms of what learners need, not the latest training fad (content or delivery). Only provide experiences that will help learners improve performance and contribute to achieving the strategic goals of the organization – no more and no less. Pay attention to the quality of content and quality of the learning intervention.
• Keep employee satisfaction high – Involving employees in opportunities to learn is an effective way to increase engagement. Many employees value learning more than a pay increase. To keep engagement high, make continuous learning part of the culture of the organization.
• Train your managers – Many managers did not reach that position because they were great managers of people. This is something that all managers need to keep learning. And if organizations want to prevent their top talent from leaving as the economy improves, they must give managers the opportunity to learn and grow.
• Focus on customer experience – All organizations should have the improvement of customer experience as one of their top strategic goals. To achieve this goal, they will have to train employees in how to create a better experience. Learning about the customer experience should be on every manager’s agenda.
• Spend less, get more – Organizations should not rely on the usual suspects and usual methods for delivery of training. It’s about learning; it’s not about glitzy programs. It doesn’t have to cost much to develop talent. Maybe a manager will become a more effective team leader with the help of a mentor. Maybe a manager will become more effective at giving performance feedback with the help of a coach. Maybe a manager will become better at financial management by attending the CEO’s “open-book” meetings.
• Be ready for the upturn – As the economy improves and companies start hiring again, the best talent will look elsewhere. They have stayed only because nobody else was growing and hiring. Unless managers continue to see opportunities in their current organizations and they feel respect from their leadership, they will be gone. Organizations should do something about these conditions now.
• Look after yourself – Many resources are available to help any organization be successful while keeping costs low. Look for help internally and externally. Use what the organization already owns when that makes sense and then go outside to peers, consultants, and training organizations when they can help you improve performance and achieve your business goals.

 

Can Groups Be Creative?

It would be easy to become anti-teamwork after reading “The Rise of the New Groupthink”, a Sunday New York Times opinion piece written by Susan Cain, author of the forthcoming book, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” She writes a thought-provoking article that challenges the prevailing thinking about employee innovation and creativity. In effect, she makes the case for solo innovation. While I agree that organizations try to do too much in groups, I fear that an article like this might prompt managers to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Cain starts with this generalization about workplaces:

Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

This describes the image, not the reality. First of all, most of us are in work groups, not teams, at least not the kind of teams that Katzenbach and Smith (and others) define as being a team. And work group meetings tend to be poorly planned and badly run. I’ve posted about this previously. As for people skills, managers sure don’t act like these are prized abilities. A command-and-control management style still dominates the workplace. And regarding collaboration, too few managers and employees know how to collaborate effectively. To them, collaboration means ccing everyone on an email.

There is much rhetoric about teamwork and collaboration, but these behaviors are still very rare in organizations today. So to indict the current work environment as not being conducive to creativity and innovation because it is too collaborative misses what is actually happening in the typical workplace. In fact, employees are not collaborative enough.

Cain is also critical of group brainstorming.  She writes,

…brainstorming sessions are one of the worst possible ways to stimulate creativity…The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure.

I believe the problem is in the implementation, not the method. Any group that makes a list of ideas these days calls it “brainstorming”. This is not the kind of brainstorming which results in new and better ideas. When done right, brainstorming is free-flowing, non-judgmental, and relies on the dynamic interaction of everyone in the group, regardless of status. Unfortunately, every manager thinks that he or she can manage a brainstorming session. After all, how difficult can it be to ask a question and make a list of the answers? However, effective brainstorming requires highly skilled facilitation and not every manager has the skills and temperament needed to provide this to a group. An effective brainstorming leader ensures that everyone is engaged in the work, encourages everyone to contribute their own feelings and beliefs to the conversation, and doesn’t allow one or two people to dominate the conversation.  

Isolating everyone and putting up barriers to interaction is just as counterproductive as forcing everyone to interact with others all day long. Some people need some quiet and solitude to be at their productive best and some people need some social interaction. Even the research cited by Cain supports this notion. Not everyone in the research populations she cited seeks isolation. The last thing you want to do is label someone “introvert” based on an assessment tool and then make that person toil alone until they come up with the next big idea. While some people can’t tolerate frequent interruptions, becoming tense and irritable, others thrive on the chaos and perform best in that kind of high-energy, social environment. 

We need to do a better job of helping employees figure out in what kinds of environments and on what kinds of projects they work best and provide those conditions for them. We need managers who take responsibility for helping employees optimize performance. And we need leaders who can build teams that nurture creative and innovative thinking.

Thank you, Susan Cain, for stimulating this blog post.

 

What Do You Mean?

Dan Pallotta, president of Advertising for Humanity and HBR blogger, in a post titled “I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore”, writes about business jargon and how it affects communication in organizations. The blog post must have hit a nerve because it has broken the record for most comments to a single HBR Blog Network post.

One of these comments is a perfect way to begin 2012. That is, with humor that pokes fun at ourselves and the way we talk to each other. The commenter, BrainToniq (Scott Ohlgren), writes as if talking to his staff:

While in the run-up to transitioning in this phase of right-sizing and redeployment, we still need to—at the end of the day—drill down and make sure that our mission-critical, goal-oriented core competencies are in alignment and on the same page as the most current best-practices paradigm. While we as a customer-centric longtail company are still on the runway, we need to each firewall enough time to allow out-of-the-box thinking and strategize the low-hanging fruit in the marketplace. Envisioning the metrics here will require accountability management on each team member to come up with a value-added solution that doesn’t require putting out fires or a lot of bandwidth. Bottom line? The truth is we have to step up, work smarter, not harder, and create a Web 2.0 solution. This is an exciting model for limitless potential and mutually agreed synergies!

I’ve got an open door policy, so touch base and keep me in the loop. If we can move forward and proactively get on the same page about this, it’ll be a win-win-win. Remember: our people make the difference.

Come again? The truth is this is how we sound sometimes. And with email, text messaging, and all of the forms of social media, the use of buzzwords to replace plain speaking has gotten much worse. We are sacrificing clarity for brevity, which means there is greater risk of miscommunication.

Dan Pallotta’s solution is to “speak authentically” in communicating with employees and customers. He writes:

You will gain tremendous credibility, become much more productive, make those around you much more productive, and experience a great deal more joy in your working life if you look someone in the eye after hearing one of these verbal brain jammers and tell the person, "I don't have any idea what you just said to me."

Let's hope communication improves in all of our organizations in 2012. 

20 Signs of Employee Disengagement

Employee engagement seems to be the current hot topic of survey organizations. Gallup, Mercer, BlessingWhite, and others are regularly conducting national and international studies of engagement. It’s interesting to discover from these surveys that roughly 30% of employees indicate that they are engaged in their work.

However, the more important question for you is, “Do I have an employee engagement problem in my organization?" You don’t need an organization-wide survey to answer this question. Pay attention to what your employees are saying and doing. Look and listen for the clues. Jim Stilwell, of Arborquest Consulting, and I have identified twenty tell-tale signs of disengagement. They are:

1. High turnover – the rate of employees leaving the organization is greater than what you want in this type of business
2. Absenteeism – the amount of time workers are gone from their jobs is hurting performance
3. Disgruntled/complaining/whining employees – negative comments about the work and the organization have become common place and are poisoning the environment
4. Time off-task resolving employee problems – you and other managers are spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with individual problems and with conflicts among employees
5. Employees and managers blaming others – people bring complaints to you without accepting any responsibility for their contribution to the problems
6. Lack of teamwork – employees resist cooperation and collaboration on tasks that require teamwork to succeed
7. Lack of performance feedback – employees don’t know where they stand in terms of their performance; they don’t know from day to day if they are doing well or doing poorly and what they need to do to improve
8. Lack of learning – employees don’t ask for opportunities to learn different jobs, improve their skills in their current jobs, or prepare for future positions
9. Difficulty attracting and retaining talent – you can’t find the right people for the work that needs to get done; when you do have the right people, they tend to be attracted to opportunities elsewhere
10. Difficulty developing talent, especially leadership talent – few employees are aspiring to or stepping up to leadership roles on teams, on projects, and for open positions
11. Poor product and service quality – employees are not doing their best work, are not paying attention to customer needs, and are not showing a high level of concern for quality
12. Customer dissatisfaction – you are hearing customer complaints that could have been prevented if employees cared more about the work that they are doing
13. Vendor dissatisfaction – you are hearing complaints from vendors that could have been prevented if employees cared more about their relationships with external business suppliers and partners
14. Low compliance with rules, regulations, and processes – employees are not attending to the legal and normative expectations of the organization; they are putting the organization at risk by their complacency
15. Theft, shrinkage, and waste – these inventory and operational losses are happening at a higher rate than what can be tolerated in this kind of business
16. High injury rate and poor safety – employees are neglecting the standards that create a safe work environment
17. Lack of innovation and creativity – you are not hearing new product and service ideas and new problem-solving suggestions from employees
18. Lack of initiative – employees are not acting on their own to start new projects that contribute to the ongoing success of the organization
19. Lack of trust – employees don’t come to you with their concerns, suggestions, and new ideas; they don’t ask for help in handling challenging tasks and interpersonal situations
20. Lack of recognition and celebration – employees don’t take time to publicly acknowledge the success of individuals, the success of teams, and the success of the organization as a whole

If you see any of these behaviors in your organization, then you probably have an employee engagement problem.  You don’t need to do another survey. You need to start addressing the problem before you lose the hearts and minds of your most talented employees.  

 

Leadership and Health Care Reform

The Obama administration’s health care reform legislation will change incentives, which is badly needed, but it will not improve the quality of care unless an integrated, team-based approach also becomes the way health care professionals do business. This kind of approach is what the legislation refers to as ACO (accountable care organization). However, to be successful, such an approach will require health care professionals, especially doctors, to learn new competencies and form new attitudes regarding collaboration and cooperation.

The assumptions behind the new legislation make the need for change abundantly clear:

• the cost of health care in the United States on a per capita basis is too high
• the health of the United States population is too low
• health care in the United States is not sufficiently accessible, particularly for the uninsured
• health care in the United States is not sufficiently coordinated
• the quality of health care services in the United States is too low
• the federal government, as the largest purchaser of health care services in the United States, has the right to demand high quality, reasonably priced, accessible, coordinated health care services
• the federal government should no longer purchase health care services on a fee-for-service (or a la carte) basis because it gives health care providers an incentive to order more tests and perform more procedures in order to make more money
• there needs to be a “sea change” in how health care is delivered and paid for in the United States

Shifting from a fee-for-service model to a high-quality, low-cost model will address part of the problem. Don’t get me wrong - this change is essential, though the challenge with incentives is to ensure that “low-cost” doesn’t become more important than “high quality”. The other part of the problem is managing health care organizations in a fundamentally new way. Rather than the command-and-control style of leadership that is prevalent among doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals, these leaders will need to facilitate teamwork. They will need to respect and listen to the input of other health care providing organizations and integrate diet and life-style experts into the team. They will need to manage these teams so that optimum results are achieved for patients. They will need to keep all of the stakeholders engaged. They will need to draw out the best from everyone. And they will need to do all of this in a cost efficient manner. This is a tall order for people who come to their profession because of their high need for control, for prestige, and, for many, the financial benefits.

Health care professionals can be retrained if motivated. The real transformation of health care in the U.S. will come over time as a different kind of person is admitted to the health care professions and as measures are put in place to evaluate this team-based approach to delivering health care.

 

Barriers to Learning in Organizations

Continuous acquisition and application of knowledge, skills, and beliefs by individuals, teams, and the  whole enterprise is an essential aspect of high performance organizations. However, barriers to this learning are common in organizations. These barriers must be overcome in order for organizations to have long term success. Twelve of these common barriers are:

1. Program focus – new programs and services are evaluated in isolation rather than as interdependent parts of the whole organization, e.g., a diversity workshop is evaluated by the participants at the end of the workshop, not by everyone in the organization weeks and months after the workshop
2. Limited resources – learning is not given adequate funding and support, e.g., staff are not given resources to experiment with new ideas before risking large scale implementation
3. Work-learning dichotomy – producing and selling things is valued whereas learning is merely tolerated, e.g., little involvement of supervisors in the training of their direct-reports
4. Passive leadership – leaders don’t ask themselves the hard questions and their boards and co-workers don’t question their actions, e.g., a hospital CEO continues to push for hospital expansion while nobody asks, “Is expansion in the best interests of patients, employees, doctors, and the community?”
5. Non-learning culture – organizational values, assumptions, beliefs, behaviors, and norms do not support learning, e.g., recognizing (praise, reward, promotion, etc.) individual success but not recognizing team success
6. Resistance to change – trying new ways of doing things is not encouraged, e.g., individuals are told to be creative and innovative but not allowed to implement their ideas
7. Not discussing the un-discussable – everyone has a shared but un-spoken understanding that certain issues are not to be confronted and resolved, e.g., one employee’s negative attitudes are bringing down morale of the organization but nobody will talk about this problem for fear of retribution
8. Need for control – managers intentionally and unintentionally use organization charts, policy manuals, rules and regulations, performance evaluation, compensation, budget and expense monitoring, security systems, and work-space arrangements to constrain and limit sharing and applying knowledge, e.g., lines of communication are enforced within an organization to the point that a manager in one department may not talk to a manager in another department
9. Focus on short-term, simple solutions – managers taking the most expedient course of action without solving the long term problems within their organizations, e.g., doing multi-person layoffs to reduce costs when the real problem is not offering products and services that customers want
10. Skilled incompetence – the tendency of managers to avoid embarrassing or threatening interactions, place blame on others, and not accept responsibility for problems, e.g., the leader of a team that failed to complete an assignment avoids asking himself, “What is it about what I am doing or saying that contributes to other people behaving in ineffective and destructive ways?”
11. Blame, not gain language – employees tend to use mostly language that is judgmental and punitive rather than language that facilitates learning, e.g., when something goes wrong, the first words out of a manager’s mouth are, “Who is responsible for this problem?”
12. Selective attention – not seeing (literally) and, therefore, not learning from unexpected events, e.g., two employees attend the same presentation by their CEO but understand the new organizational direction in very different ways

What additional barriers to learning have you observed in organizations?

 

Checklist Culture

Surgeon, author, and medical crusader Atul Gawande, in his book, "The Checklist Manifesto", presents theory, research, and personal experience in support of using checklists in complex work situations, such as performing surgery, flying a plane, or building a skyskraper. He writes:

Here, then, is our situation at the start of the twenty-first century: We have accumulated stupendous know-how. We have put it in the hands of some of the most highly trained, higly skilled, and hardworking people in our society. And, with it, they have indeed accomplished extraordinary things. Nonetheless, that know-how is ofen unmanageable. Avoidable failures are common and persistent, not to mention demoralizing and frustrating, across many fields - from medicine to finance, business to government. And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.

That means we need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that builds on experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow also makes up for our inevitable human inadequacies. 

Gawande's solution is to use a checklist - the "minimum necessary steps" that must be taken to ensure safety, quality, and success. I would argue that it is not the list of critical steps that makes the difference, but the organizational culture that emerges as a result of using a checklist that makes the difference. In order to use a checklist effectively, employees must work together to identify the items to go on the checklist, requiring a careful and thorough assessment of work processes. Then they must hold each other accountable for completing each of the steps (e.g., nurses must have permission to remind surgeons to use sterile gloves). When something unpredicatble happens they must be able to react as a cohesive unit. Then they must collaborate on reviewing the process and making modifications to ensure safety, quality, and success in the future. 

Susan Kistler, Executive Director of the American Evaluation Association, writes this about Gawande checklists:

They provide a means for harnessing variability, lending structure and guidance amid what may be chaos, and controlling risk if not eliminating it. He explains the ways in which checklists can be empowering – providing line workers with the information needed to make decisions and the leeway to act rather than be stymied by a bureaucracy awaiting permissions from superiors. The most ‘a-ha’ moment I had while reading was Gawande’s indication of how checklists might detail not specifically what to do but rather, when the unexpected strikes, with whom to collaborate, connect, and communicate in order to leverage the collective knowledge of a group to respond and resolve.

In other words, checklists in complex work situations are instruments for creating a positive culture, contributing to breaking down the hierarchies and mistrust that are barriers to high performance teams. A checklist is the focus for a shared process for managing the complexity and risk that everyone feels. The tool will only be effective if it is used within a culure in which doctors listen to nurses, architects listen to structural engineers, and captains listen to their first officers.  

Communicating for Organizational Change

Every organization I know has said, at one time or another, that it had a communication problem. Lack of productivity, lack of efficiency, failure to meet budget requirements, failure to meet market demands, delivery of products to customers that are out-of-the-box failures, and a whole host of departmental, team and interpersonal issues are all attributed to a “communication problem.” No doubt there is some truth to this attribution, but what does it really mean when we say that we have a communication problem?

The following scenario is adapted from Chapter Four of Communication in High Performance
Organizations: Principles and Best Practices, a Kindle e-book. The book presents fictional situations that exemplify common communication problems in organizations and offers proven solutions to those problems.

The scenario in Chapter Four is about communication related to organizational change. Communicating a change that will affect everyone in an organization can be very challenging. Often decisions are made with too little information and from only a narrow, biased segment of the organization. More needs to be done to receive input from a range of voices before major changes are implemented. Often a broader understanding of who needs what and why, results in better decisions.

In the scenario, the IT department of a large diversified organization, BFG Automotive, is responsible for maintaining all computers in the company. The department had started receiving complaints from employees because BFG had not adopted the most recent Windows operating system and some of the files they received from vendors were difficult to open. In response to these complaints, the department decided to explore updating the operating system sooner than they had originally planned. 

Jane Washington, the new Manager of IT in BFG, circulated a memo in her department explaining that user complaints had raised the possibility that the transition to the new operating system may need to be moved up in the schedule. 

What should Jane do next? How could she communicate with the organization in a way that would facilitate a successful transition to an updated operating system? In what ways is this scenario similar to your organization?