Quick and painless interventions and solutions

Quick and Painless?

In our fast and busy lives we are often looking for that ‘quick fix’ the ‘painless solution’ – but are they? Does it work?

All too often on professional forums and networking groups I hear people asking for quick and painless solutions. Do they really exist in the worlds of business, Human Resources (HR) and Organizational Development (OD)?

Just because a solution is quick does not mean it will work in the medium or long term, nor does it necessarily mean it will support the culture and direction of the business.

Short term pain = long term gain?

What is pain in a professional context? Hassle? difficulty, effort? All of the above? Are many of us now so much under pressure that we ignore the real problem and are happy to stick on a sticking plaster to all problems we face? Do we care about the medium term consequences? – will we still be in the role in 12-24 months to care?

With the current economic climate I believe so – more and more of us will have to face the facts that the interventions we started just did not work – works in many situations they exasperated the problems. Time for us to start slowing down and doing an effective job.

Proof in the pudding

In the 2007 survey Develop the developers – the results highlighted that many in HR and OD are involved in evaluating activity and intervention, and that this trend was increasing, however less than 50% were actively involved in structured diagnosis before launching an intervention – and while there appeared to be intent to do more this will still mean that in 5 years time less people will be using diagnostic techniques than currently evaluate. And we and our clients often wonder why interventions do not add the value expected…

For us as professionals to help our clients we must start to employ a robust diagnostic process on all our activity before committing to an intervention.