The team was sharing with me how they had modified their routines. They had decided to introduce a process allowing them to establish their meeting agenda and were happy that it had made their meeting much more productive. After a first pilot, they had decided to keep that approach.

It’s a typical change. When something isn’t working well, people start by changing the structure, a process, or anything else that is disturbing.

It reassures by allowing one to know that one has done something.

And it does create a change. It reduces the stress on the system in one place and thus creates more visibility on what else might be missing.

Where the change fails, however, is when the first change is seen as the solution. Then the team is in danger of allowing that first effort to flow away slowly, which will inevitably happen when the participants notice that it didn’t solve the problem they sensed but couldn’t express.

There is no clear-cut answer to what the problem is for the team. However, when a structure has been missing, it often is a result of a team that lacks orientation. This is most often the case when the team has only one priority, which is to react to every problem that pops up.