Slow But Sure

I think all the makeover shows on TV have made us believe big change can happen overnight. Changing your hair or painting a wall is relatively easy to do – but even that can take some serious coaxing and time. How many of us know someone who is clinging to the hairstyle they had in the mid-70s and the avocado green and harvest gold wallpaper from the same time.

Culture change can be like that. It took 30 plus years for long-term care to become the institution it is. The transformation to home will take awhile. Action Pact consultant Megan Hannan knows only too well. In a special guest blog she talks about the role of “slow” in culture change and that speed is not as important as continuing to take the next step:

I was recently co-facilitating a session on listening and barriers to communication in a nursing home that has been working hard toward the Household Model for over a year. After the session, my co-facilitator, Kim a medical technologist at the Hillsboro Medical Center, said she was so surprised at how much people were willing to talk, share, and come up with solutions and ideas. I asked her, “Do you think things are changing?”
She said, “Well, yes. It is slow but sure.”
That phrase really stuck with me and I think it is such an important description of the way we feel change happens best – slow but sure. It is the sure part that we all want. We want people to “get it.” However, it is the slow part that many of us struggle with.

The staff member in this story is a member of the High Involvement team in her organization. Their team has been through some S...L...O...W.. times. There were times when they tried something that did not get good responses and when others in the organization were just not as excited as the members of the team. But eventually, they started to have more response, positive reactions, and spontaneous questions and suggestions.

It was painful to go through the slow times. In some organizations the philosophy might be get it or get out. However, this process of personal transformation, which is necessary for organizational transformation, takes time and lots of opportunities for people to see, here, feel and discuss what the change might be. This High Involvement team didn’t give up – painful as it could be – and found other ways, asked different questions, created new opportunities and kept at it. Their tenacity puts the “sure” in “slow but sure.”