I have found in my travels there are two types of change – forced and voluntary.

Change in any form is often painful, sometimes shocking but always a transition.  It is the reason for the change and how you manage it that makes it more effective and/or efficient.

An example of forced change could be, your freight bill has crept up and has now become prohibitive.  There are a number of steps you can take to correct the situation – review costs with suppliers, find new suppliers, change the profile of your shipments, etc.  But now action is required urgently, placing pressure on staff and possibly service providers – errors are inherent in rushed or urgent projects.

But what if you put into place a process of continual review of all your transport providers?  – to monitor performance, costs and mutual gains.  This is a change but it is controlled and under your terms, it is smoother, with minimal urgency with smaller increments as to identify costs.  This has the side-effect of generating mutual cooperation and team building across companies ie sort the problems out early and together.

What happens when someone leaves your organisation – for whatever reason?  Do you analyse their role, the impact of their role on others or the impact of their role on the organisation.  There is a chance nothing changes and you just hire a replacement, but this is a fantastic opportunity to see where that role fits in with the whole – this is your chance to make improvements, more efficiency and/or effectiveness.  But this is a voluntary change and may mitigate forced changes down the track, eg redundancy.

So the old adage “if it works, leave it alone” does not work. That is like saying “Although there are small leaks in the dam it still works, so don’t mess with it”   I don’t know about you but if I owned the dam, I would not wait for it to fail!