Change and Challenge 191past, does nothing to ensure the future and usually makes in-
dividuals feel even less resourceful. It looks at events, not the
patterns behind them.
A leader’s questions would be:
How did we make ourselves vulnerable to this situation?
How can we change what we do so it does not happen
again?
Any disaster can be valuable, if you learn from it. People
make mistakes, to err is human, but is to forgive company
policy?
Mistakes are feedback that can improve the whole organi-
zation. Also, how the leader deals with them gives a good
measure of their skills.
Of course it may be true that some people are not up to
the job, in which case the team leader should ask themselves
whether they have an adequate recruitment procedure, or
whether the job has been made too difficult.
To go back to my example, there are many other ques-
tions that would uncover how the system did not deliver the
results it was designed for:
Have there been other instances like this in the recent
past?
What do they have in common?
Do recruitment procedures need to be changed?
Is customer service training adequate?
How well supported are customer service people?
Are they given sufficient responsibility to deal with
problems without having to call in the supervisor?
Is the supervisor overworked because he is always being
called to deal with petty matters?
Should we overhaul the warehouse procedure for receiving
faulty parts?
These question procedures, but every business procedure is
based on an idea, a belief or a mental model of how things