“I suffer simultaneously from amnesia and déjà vu. I have the feeling that I keep forgetting the same thing over and over again.”
—Steven Wright (surreal comedian)

It all seems so logical, doesn’t it? Focus on processes, improve your organizational decision making through utilizing quality improvement tools, give people good technical and administrative information, and the organization “should” get better. It’s so tempting, interesting, and dramatic to lead in the vein of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” with Capt. Jean Luc Picard’s: “Make it so.”

However, in more than 25 years of facilitating quality improvement, I have learned two things:
1. Change would be so easy if it weren’t for all the people.
2. Logic + Humans = Change? Think again!

The learning organization is here to stay. Yet adult learners are a particularly ornery breed, and it is delusional to expect that intensive in-house seminars will somehow allow participants to attain anything even close to mastery when comfortable old habits are threatened. Not only that, but there is a naïve assumption that they will subsequently choose to act on the knowledge—when going back to jobs that they perceive to take more than 100 percent of their time. So, we need to keep in mind some timeless classic wisdom from more than 70 years ago that is just as applicable today:

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