How and why markets aren't rational. Navigational tips for successfully charting the Bermuda Triangle of human economic behavior. ™

 
Did the coiner of the phrase, "template for change" mean to imply that forms are the answer? Recently I spent the day at a corporate meeting, intended by its planners to be a pivotal event in an ambitious change initiative. The organization in question is fragmented, suffers from inconsistency in values and practices, and makes individual 'one-off' deals all over the place--which is not good for profitability. And so, you ask, what is the answer?

Forms!! Better yet, computerized forms!!!

Notably, executive management and its minions have designed more and more, longer and longer *computerized forms,* and are now holding front line staff hostage in multi-day meetings designed to impress upon them the virtues of form-dom. If this doesn't motivate compliance, they'll turn to the stick.

As the day wound on, we moved from flattery to threats to lengthy, detailed "demo's" of the forms.

Then the software salesmen came in.

Boy did these guys have some forms! A person could spend his or her entire life "populating" the forms--as filling them out is so elegantly described. Each form required layer upon layer of data entry; each had categories and sub-categories; worksheets; fields and functions. This "learning" process seemed to take documentation to a level of complexity--even grandeur--rarely achieved by some of the world's great religions.

Actually there was something kind of charming and whimsically delusional about the 'interaction effect' between corporate bureaucrats' belief that forms are the solution to life's knotty problems, and software engineers' faith in technology as the silver bullet.
permalink: posted by saraw1 at 6/25/2003 06:01:00 PM