The people side beats the perfect solution
From business improvement to technology rollouts, guests argue that listening, buy-in and people's own purposes decide whether anything sticks. Petro backs this with her own experience of thousands of conversations on a fatality task force. Much of it comes from early episodes about managing organisational change.
How it developed: It starts as tactics from practitioners, becomes Petro's own first-hand evidence in #015, and resurfaces briefly in 2024 on mining innovation. It is then absent from the recent episodes.
The thread's title and description are AI-written, drawn from the episodes below. The quotations are verbatim from the episode audio, each linked to the moment it was said.
What was said
“Also, listening shows that you care, and often that is really what people are looking for during, times of, of change.”
“the best tactic, to apply to anybody who's resisting change is just first to sit down and listen to that person. And why are they resisting it?”
“better to have the solution that everyone's bought into than the perfect solution, because it's the one that will probably stick”
“The toughest part about what the mind of the future looks like is actually the people challenges. The technology and the technology implementation and the digital is actually the easy part.”
“And having spoken to so many people, I think over 2000 conversations, you know, you sort of realize that if you want to change anything or put any sort of corporate strategy into place, you have to think like you're speaking to those guys.”
“you need people who are currently In the process to be part of that deployment team, as well as the people who've developed it, and to work together to make it actually work.”
Episodes in this thread
- #001 Tom Marsicano | Change in a production environment 18 November 2017
- #003 Dr. Barbara Trautlein | Change Intelligence (CQ) 25 March 2018
- #004 George Lee Sye | Intersection between change management and business improvement 30 March 2018
- #006 Harry Sinko and Gary Lane | Disruption in the mining industry 16 July 2018
- #015 Tracey Swanepoel, Lisa Shippey and Bernard Swanepoel | The power of storytelling to inspire change 7 January 2020
- #016 Kosheek Sewchurran | Creating worlds through conversation 13 July 2020
- #026 Thoughts on Innovation in the Mining Industry | Elaine Hattingh & Sandiso Sibisi 14 January 2024