Communicating the motivations for change

Today KC Lemson has an interesting story about the changes they are making to meeting rooms at Microsoft Campus.

In these new conference rooms we got fancy new projectors (no more screwing around with the darned output to some random TV![1]), new tables, and they changed the wall covering. Where many individual conf rooms used to have 3 walls of whiteboards on it (soooooo handy), now they have one whiteboard, one blank wall (for projection) and one brown fabric-covered wall.

When the rooms were finished and I attended various meetings in the new rooms, the conversation would invariably start out with some wonderment about what was the point of the brown fabric wall. The best scenario anyone came up with was that it was to be used for pinning up notes, hardly a common use case. So we thought about occam’s razor and realized that ah-ha, the problem is just that the facilities people are dumb and they didn’t realize we liked having so many white boards! Satisfied with the knowledge that we were on the top of the evolutionary heap, we went about our way.

Then, an enterprising coworker decided to actually investigate instead of assume, and eventually made his way to the right person in facilities who informed him that actually the reason for removing the multiple whiteboards was for acoustics – we are an increasingly global workforce and many meeting attendees aren’t located in Redmond, so LiveMeeting conferences are becoming increasingly common.

I have spent much of my working life on the flip side of this situation – being the person making the change. I am sure that myself and my team have been regarded as “dumb” on more than one occasion .

The problem with making changes to things that have multiple purposes like meeting rooms and PC’s is that the solution is always a compromise. It is normal to have two requirements that conflict; whether that’s the need for good acoustics and lots of whiteboard space or the need to control the configuration of a PC and the need to make it as flexible as possible.

The greatest challenge is communicating the motivation behind the compromise that’s been made to the people who have to work with it. Because it’s difficult to communicate it’s much easier to not bother trying. I’ve been on the receiving end of that situation too.

If you don’t communicate, though, people will surely find a way of working around your compromise. Remember User Innovation is a very powerful force. If you are going to make it work for you, you need to decide how you are going to harness it rather than try and work against it. I’m sure there must be a way of having good acoustics and lots of whiteboard space, perhaps they should have harnessed User Innovation to come up with an answer to that problem.