Conundrum 8
Knowing when change is possible

‘Oh no, another £40 down the drain’, Jane was furious at the sight of her third parking ticket this month’. As a community midwife she needed to drive to her clients and find somewhere to park. Without a residents’ or business parking permit she had to find one of the scarce public spaces, when she knew her clients were waiting urgently to see her. She HATED the pressure this put her under. Today whe had needed to stay longer with a new mother than she had expected to, and this was the result. Much more of this and she would have to move out of London to a base where she didn’t have to waste hours every week looking for a parking place. All so stupid, there were loads of empty residents bays and if the local council would only allow it, she could easily use those.

Can Jane do anything to reduce the pressure she is under?

Commentary 8

One of the observations made, from change projects that go wrong, is that change does not take place unless it is possible to find one person or one team who:

1. Cares about making the change
2. Has the authority needed to effect the change
3. And the skills to make the change
4. And is held accountable for delivering the change.

If Jane is to be able to pursue her day in a professional manner, not worrying about parking tickets, something has to change, a system of some sort has to change. Either her caseload needs to be reorganised so that she can make her visits on foot or public transport, or the parking policy needs to be amended so that she can be issued a relevant permit.

Can Jane use the four categories listed above to increase the likelihood of the change she wants?

Let’s look at the two possible changes in turn.

Change 1: Reviewing case loads to eliminate the need to drive.

1. The person who cares about this is Jane (and, probably, the other commuity midwives, and, perhaps, other community staff).
2. The authority to review and re-allocate case loads across the team probably lies with Jane’s manager.
3. The people with the skills to do so are Jane, her team colleagues and their manager.
4. No-one is being held accountable because the need for such a change has not been agreed.

To bring these four aspects together Jane can try to persuade her manager of the scale of the problem, so that she cares enough about it to want to make the change, and Jane can then (with her team colleagues) hold the manager to account for doing so. Or Jane could persuade her manager to give Jane and her colleagues the authority to review the caseloads, suporting them with her expertise if it is needed. Jane’s team can then account to their manager for devising and implementing proposals.

Change 2: Reviewing the parking policy to allow community health staff to park in residents’ or business spaces.

1. The person who cares about this is Jane (and, probably, the other commuity midwives, and, perhaps, other community staff).
2. The authority to review the policy is the parking control officer within the local council.
3. This officer is accountable to the council, in practice to one member of the cabinet.
4. No specific skills are needed.

Jane can try to sell her problem to Parking Control (however these are often people recruited for their ability to resist such appeals), or to the cabinet member (who is also likely to be inundated with such requests). She would have to be very good at selling her problem to get them to genuinely care about helping her. Or she can try to find a way of this issue becoming a different problem that the cabinet member does care about (perhaps by getting the local paper to campaign about it and threaten votes). If she cannot do any of these then Jane can be sure that no such change will take place.

Jane has the usual three options in relation to any situation which is distasteful to us:

1. She can work to change it (using the thinking described above).
2. She can leave it, by moving out of London or into a different career.
3. Or she can accept it.

Getting upset and paying fines is not doing Jane any good at all. So, if she is unsuccessful in securing any change, and she decides not to leave London just yet, she must decide to accept her parking difficulties. She could, for example, mentally allocate 30% of her time to finding parking spaces, so that if it takes her less she is pleasantly surprised. Perhaps she could profitably use this time by listening to cassettes that develop a new skill or introduce her to new literature.

Sure, it will still be a scandalous waste of scarce resources, but that will be someone else’s problem and not Jane’s.

Please send any comments and suggestions to
conundrum@reallylearning.com