There's a joke about process management (really!), which goes...

...like this...

Over the couple of weeks since being made redundant, the formerly high-flying executive was searching for things to do to occupy his time whilst job-hunting. He took time to observe his wife unloading the dishwasher over several days, making notes and constantly looking at his watch. Finally, she snapped and asked what he thought he was up to.

"Easy" he replied "did you know that on average it takes you seventeen minutes to empty that machine. A couple of simple improvements can cut down your time to eleven minutes, saving you twelve minutes a day - or one dishwasher load"

He now empties the machine in ten.

The point of the story is...

...that there's a lower probability of real sustainable change where people have not been involved in the process. It is, as we will see in a moment, a fundamental tenet of change that when those whose efforts count towards the quantity and quality of work produced are not consulted, their motivation is reduced at best.

That risk is more pronounced when those involved see colleagues go as a result of some process 'improvement' - for then the lack of motivation is compounded, and potentially ruinous or guerrilla warfare breaks out.

So why do people (by which I mean management) continue to believe that when they change things.

There's a great illustrative story from 2005, when Jamie Oliver had the ears of government and the press, following a TV campaign about school dinners. He found that schools were serving poor food with little nutritional value, and the consequences on kid's concentration and behaviour was immense. He showed that for 37p a day, schools could served tasty, nutritional food - and where the pilot had been introduced, teachers were reporting fantastically improved levels from the kids.

Fired by this, the government of the day invested £280M in improving school dinners. Why not - it seemed incredibly easy to grab headlines, and perhaps even improve the lot of the kids involved.

What, after all, could be easier than having people change their diets and habits when the future and health of their kids was at stake.

Except...

...that parents resorted to passing their kids chips and fizzy drinks through school railings. School cooks were sabotaging the changed process because of a fear for jobs, and sometimes for no reason other than reacting badly to these new demands from government, their local education bigwigs, the of course, the local the media. Things were looking grim, according to The Guardian, with kids and their parents, as well as the cooks, rebelling against some TV chef celebrity telling them what to do.

It was only when Oliver hired a cook he'd gotten involved with in the first series, and sought her advice on how to make things right, that views began to change. In collaboration with Nora Sands, a Head Dinner lady in Kidbrooke, Greenwich Oliver began listening to her problems in trying to get things right - Nora eventually becoming his biggest fan. When the project faced a student boycott in Greenwich, Oliver produced an education pack to show how people could change their diets, and why it would be good for them.

Suddenly, people and students began to feel in control of their own destiny - rather than feeling they were pawns subject to the whims of government and the media.

By involving those who were most affected, change became more integrated with the way people did things. Even the 'chips and greasy food' parents were eventually convinced - because they were involved , and felt more in control.

Perhaps the Executive and his wife should have discussed things between themselves.

It's why Oakview offer process and project and change management. None of them really stand alone.

Not if you want sustained and successful change...