Читать книгу The Financial Controller and CFO's Toolkit - Parmenter David - Страница 15

Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan have written a compelling book, The Three Laws of Performance,10 that explains why so many change initiatives have failed. The first law is “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.” The writers point out that the organization's “default future,” which, we as individuals just know in our bones, will happen – will be made to happen. Thus, in an organization with a systemic problem, the organization's staff will be driven to make initiatives fail so that the default future prevails.

They went on to say that is why the more you change the more you stay the same. The key to change is to recreate, in the organization's staff minds, a new vision of the future – let's call it an invented future.

Zaffron and Logan signal the importance of language (the second law), without language we would not have a past or a future. It is the ability to use language that enables us to categorize thoughts as either the past or the future. Without language we would be like the cat on the mat, sunning itself for yet another afternoon, thinking about the next meal but without the ability to process complex thought.

They then say in order to make change, we need to use a future-based language (the third law). It is interesting; if you listen to the outstanding orators of the past such as Sir Winston Churchill, you will hear future-based language at work. These great speakers knew, intuitively, about the power of future-based language.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.