betasam's Journal: Behavioral Inertia

From my last entry, I am starting a series of journal entries on my views of Organisational behaviour based on the observations at my workplace. Over the past month we have had repeated meetings on how we have to avoid ad hoc work methods and start doing things with better planning and predictability. This move was taken after having experienced a tumult of anomalies (inclined to the negative) that affected our work. After having taken assertive decisions (definitely from my side), we set on a course of systematic working. We shed our human skins as much as we could, to act as cogs in clockwork. It worked really well, while we were at it. Everything was more predictable (one does not snare chaos in ignorance) and went on fine.

Just yesterday, we had one more development milestone reached. Immediately, having been accompanied by a few more problems; the team we are interacting with returned to their human vagaries. It showed me a clear picture of how a small set of variables influencing a situation, either when it turns positive of overtly negative can set back a group to an old unorganised behavioral mode. They have gone back on assertions decided a month back on how uncertainty should be avoided as to the procurement of some software tools related to our work. They are just happy with what they have. I call this the ever-present scotoma of the human race.

I have a friend of mine, who used to keep telling me that, "People may change the way they appear to behave, but they can never change the way they actually behave." I have just seen that happen again . The only consolation I have is that, I also fall within a similar category of suffering from behavioral inertia. I act with fiery assertion (labeled by some as anger with veracity; dubbed a self-destructive trait.) I shall have to ensure that history doesn't repeat itself. The very statement that "history repeats itself", is based on human behavioral inertia that gravitates towards certain practices that are deep-rooted in our psyche. The only way for positive growth is to learn to unlearn . The lack of growth seen in many countries, tribes, groups and communities is a simple example of the lack of this ability. The lack of not being able to solve problems without violence (strictly an instinctive primate trait) is ever prevalent with mankind today.

So, my future with my present organisation is closely linked to my ability to change behaviour and add more predictability in actions and their outcomes. To do this, I need to be most assertive to avoid being trampled by the behavioral inertia that looms over like a shadow without no bounds. At least today, I believe this is possible; and shall work.

It might not work.

[Bright Apollo]

I'm not seeing your project plan for yourself, to change this behavior.

I'm willing to participate in the experiment, though.

Outline a 30- or 45-day project plan for changing a single behavior. List all of the milestone, deliverables, and dependencies. Put meeting notices for review on it as well (you and I will meet, unless you can enlist others in the experiment). We'll promise to work the project plan, and attend a post-project review (post-mortem) of our project to disseminate lesson learned and so fo

Re:

[betasam]

I do believe it would work, at least definitely in the case of the individual. The organization, though becomes a complex system with variables making it behave in ways that cannot be modeled. Predictive planning, I agree is a control-oriented approach. My approach to behavioral change is to start with being the scribe, recording what happens. On that basis, decide activities that will in fact help define goals that can be realized.

Of course, one more person trying it would probably validate whether beha