Does Your Organization Have a Learning Disability - Disability # 3 - "The Illusion of Taking Charge"

How often have you told someone or have you beenof cases that were actually won in court. Instead of
told to be proactive - to take problems into your ownconcentrating on what they were good at the
hands, take charge and stop being reactive? Thiscompany had almost become a law firm.
sounds like good advice and often we hear people inBy identifying an enemy out there without gaining a
job interviews tell us that they are proactive.true understanding of the whole system we can land
Consider the case of a company that thought it hadup doing more harm than good. Too often we forget
been sued once too often. The proactive managerto see our company as a large integrated system
decided he was going to fight these law suites andinstead we see our department and the role we play
stop settling out of court. They were going to stopin that. We therefore believe my being proactive and
being pushed around. To this end they increased theirfixing the problems within our silo we are doing a good
internal legal team so that they could take casesthing. The opposite is often the case, by pushing on this
through to trial. Now besides the added costs of aside of the balloon the problem just pops up
larger legal department they also needed to spend asomewhere else.
great deal of time and money researching theseBeing proactive does not come from throwing
claims so that they could take them through to trial.resources at a problem we perceive, that is often just
Now when you look at this situation systemically, at thebeing reactive in disguise. Instead being truly proactive
effect the decision had on the whole company asrequires us to understand how we contribute to our
opposed to how many cases were settled out ofown problems and finding a solution that takes into
court, the vision was very different. The cost ofaccount the entire system and not only our silo.
fighting these cases far outweighed the small number