Every company will have a time where new rules and procedures need to be introduced. And you might be the person to do that. But, probably very often you do this because your manager, consultant, senior colleague, or someone else tells you to. So how do you increase the chance the goal of the rules and changes is not met? Very likely even preventing it? Here are some tips.
Don’t communicate the changes well
Since it’s only your job to make them and not to make people follow them, it’s easy to write a document in some shared environment. Place it in a location where no one would look for it and give it a name no one would think of. For example, when it’s about how to use tool X, which is used to communicate with each other, call the document ‘Procedure for better communication’. Certainly do not mention the name of the tool in the title. Then place it in a location with general company procedures, not in the location with other info about tools.
When that is done, try not to communicate about these changes at all. If you have to communicate it, mention it max. once and try to mention it in a meeting where not everyone is present. Or share it in a way that it gets lost in a lot of other emails, messages, etc.
The nicest part of it is, it’s easy to blame others. Because the title is correct, the information can be found by someone else and you did communicate it. So, what did you do wrong?
Make the information contradictory
This works best when you don’t have to put the new rules or procedures in writing. But when you are pretty good at the first suggestion, this can still work perfectly.
There is almost always already some existing documentation. When you implement new rules and procedures always make sure that that documentation is not updated. The more you do this, the bigger the chance people will still follow the wrong rules or procedures.
This is a bit more friendly for your colleagues because they have now something to blame. But not to worry, most of the time you can always say that you forgot. Very often you can even say: ‘No one told me this documentation should also be updated.’ Because they will rarely ask you to do that.
Make people hate the changes so much, they will sabotage the goal themselves
This is the most effective one, but the most difficult one. What helps a lot is to use a lot of force. And don’t spend time trying to convince people the change is needed. It also helps if you create procedures and rules that make working harder or more time-consuming. Without, of course, any benefit for the people who do the work.
You will create a group of people that will do anything they can to make the situation for them as easy as possible. Which most of the time means: not achieving the goal. For example, if you demand that all critical issues get management approval and you make sure this approval takes at least a week, you can be certain that the critical issues will go down. And the number of tickets just below critical will go up. So, a lot of critical issues still will not be approved.
Tools are also perfect to misuse for this. Arrange them in a way people are forced to follow a certain order of steps. And you can be certain that those steps are not always followed. People will act in the tool like they did the action, but will not do the action. Who will find out?
Yes, this one might be difficult, but very helpful. You will have a whole army helping you. And it’s really difficult to detect because on the surface there is nothing to see.
Only give the rules and procedures
OK, this one needs a bit more explaining. So let me give an easy example: SMART. Everyone knows, can find, and can determine if goals are SMART. But a lot of people struggle with writing down SMART goals. So, if you create a rule that all goals must be SMART, you can be very certain that either the goals are not set or not very helpful. Because on difficult subjects it’s very difficult to write down a SMART goal. Since most of the time the goal is to see and measure improvement in some way, this helps because it prevents people from making really big improvements. Because most of the time they will not be able to formulate them in SMART goals.
So, make sure people understand what you want. Then don’t educate them on how they can achieve that. Or don’t give them the tools to help achieve the goal.
Make it impossible to achieve the goal
To give an example of this last one: when you have a meeting to get to a reliable planning, it helps when you don’t invite the people that can tell you how long something will take. Or you can also make an extra condition where you determine which amount of work should be done, and of course, make sure this is more than is possible. What also works is an average. When the average is three people working and you know there are going to be only two, still plan for three. What’s wrong with using an average?
This works best when you have at least two goals. Create rules and procedures that help achieve 1 goal, but make it far more difficult to achieve the other goal. Preferable even impossible. But you can also use every other option you have to create conditions that are not directly related to the goal.
I hope this helps
There are many ways to increase the chance that new rules and procedures don’t achieve the goals. In general, it’s about bad communication, making it more difficult for people to follow them, and demotivating people to follow them.
P.S. You are allowed to use this blog to achieve the opposite.