A client came to me for help changing his company’s culture regarding information governance. “I’m trying to make it as easy as I can for people to start doing things better, but I’m not really getting anywhere.”
After a brief conversation, I told him that he has to do more than simply ask nicely. “You’re working hard to be the Good Cop in your scenario,” I explained, “but this only works if you have a Bad Cop as well, or at least the real possibility that there IS a Bad Cop who may need to be reckoned with at some point.”
“Huh,” he said. “I keep explaining the benefits to the company. I gave them huge lead times before canceling people’s ability to store stuff in certain places. And I make sure to publicly praise anyone who has taken even the smallest first steps. You mean this isn’t enough?”
“Nope,” I replied. “This is all good, but you’re only working one side of the equation. You’re assuming that that your people want to do the right thing because it is the right thing to do. But sadly, this only goes so far, and usually not far enough.
Because without at least the spectre of having a Bad Cop in the picture, there’s no meaningful PERSONAL incentive for them to do anything meaningful. It’s kind of like when a mother of a certain era would say to their non-compliant kids, “Just wait ’til your father gets home!” That very often is what it takes to do the trick.
Walk the Line
The goal is to trigger a controlled reaction of self-preservation without sending people into a full-blown spiral of self-defensiveness. This is a fine line to walk and is why you need both Cops: the Good because because people generally DO want to do the right thing, and the Bad because it takes a little bit of a pinch to prompt them to action. Like when the doctor says you’re heading for trouble if you don’t start taking better care of yourself NOW.
As far as I can tell, I first wrote about this the better part of 10 years ago. I’ve included the link to it in this piece in case you want to go read it and see how far we haven’t come in all that time. But I’m actually not surprised by this, as human nature is human nature, and this is a challenge that simply never will go away.
I’ve got a laundry list of approaches you can take to pull this off that ranges from prize-based friendly competitions to making better information governance a required, measurable part of people’s compensation packages. My client did a great job of creatively mixing-and-matching several of these, and in the end he was able to energize what had been a slow-to-roll project.
Changing the corporate culture is a big part of Doing Information Right™ – if you agree and want to know more, then reach me TODAY and let’s get you going right now.
(Want to see how far we haven’t come in a decade? Read this piece from 2015 and weep!)