This weekend, I reached a strange milestone: I bought my first pair of Birkenstock sandals. They're ugly. Really, very ugly. I checked, and they look bad in every color. But because of their anatomical design, I can walk in them without pain, unlike in normal sandals.
A long time ago, back in my old job, I had many female colleagues, and together we observed the first two milestones of the development of feminity. The first is buying your first leather bag. By this time, you've been working long enough, you have your own income, and you no longer aim to follow the latest fashion every year. A good bag will last about ten years. At first the young colleagues smiled at this, but sooner or later the courier delivered the first bags to everyone.
We identified the second milestone as buying anatomical sandals. At this point, you no longer want to be beautiful and stylish at all costs; sometimes, it's enough if something is comfortable. We estimated this happens around forty, and it looks like I fit the stereotype perfectly.
While reflecting on these milestones, an interesting parallel came to mind. A few weeks ago, during one of assignments, I suggested to the team leader that we needed a standard procedure for a particular task. In response, I heard a very familiar monologue with equally familiar arguments:
"If we discuss it, everyone knows what to do. It's a waste of time to write it down. If you think it's necessary, go ahead, it's pointless, but at least the QA will be happy."
I said these exact same things a few years ago, about the exact same task, only in English, to an American colleague. In fact, it was even the same task: creating new item numbers. My resistance broke then because I was fed up with chasing incomplete items between various departments that were supposed to work together to get everything properly registered in the system.
Maybe the point where resistance to standard procedures breaks is like the leather bag milestone in organizational development. From then on, you can rethink all the arising problems, reorganize all the firefighting and activities. It's a whole new world, full of new possibilities.
However, I haven't yet found the analogy for the second milestone. Is there another point in every organization that brings such a drastic change in possibilities?
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