Once in class, we watched Who Moved My Cheese. I enjoyed it and acquired an important insight from it.
Who Moved My Cheese? is the story of how four characters living in a "Maze" found, lost, and resolved to find again the cheese they aspired for. Their story was an allegory of organizational change. Just like the characters, we live in a maze or an organization and look for cheese or good things there is in our organization- happiness with the family, productivity, growth, and sustainability within corporations we work in. Once we find these things, we feel assured of the future but of course good things come to an end. The lesson is change is inevitable, and when there is change there is a need to cope. Dwelling in the past would not lead us to new cheese, or new happiness in life.
We must not fixate ourselves into one belief of change (that it is detrimental to our organizations), so that we would not be at lost when we have to get used to a lot of new things.
Corollary to my idea on Who Moved My Cheese, I realized that in case problems arise because of change, we must not be stuck with a single perspective of the problems so that we would not be frustrated when seemingly we cannot solve them. We must avoid conceptual blocks.
In a reading entitled “Solving problems analytically and creatively”, conceptual block is defined as mental obstacles that constrain problem definition and limit alternatives that could probably solve the problem. The reading furthers the discussion by covering the four types of conceptual blocks. Here are what I learned and realized from it.
The four types of conceptual blocks are constancy, commitment, compression, and complacency. Constancy is being fixated on one way of defining a problem. This is shutting one’s eyes to the possibility that the problem one has pinpointed is not the actual problem to be solved. This is following a path without deviation. In other words, constancy is about giving one definition of a concept in a problem. I think I experienced this as an editor in PCS Gazette.
Even when Gazette writers are good, they usually miss out deadlines. We editors thought that writer laziness is the problem. Because we think that our writers our lazy, we lambaste them time to time even without confirming whether they are really lazy to do the articles or they just cannot get enough information to finish assignments. We defined the failure to pass articles as laziness, when as said, failure to pass articles may mean lack of information. I realized just now that if we looked into the lack of information as our problem, we could have sent our writers as correspondents to school events so they could get enough information and complete their articles. We did not; we just let our writers find their way to do the job.
Commitment. This is the mistake of being wedded to a specific solution for a problem. This is the pitfall of defining present problems as variations of a past problem, thereby leading to the mistake of applying the solution to past problem as a solution to the new problems.
If I go back to Gazette, the problem is lack of articles for writers do not pass news write ups on time. To solve this, we editors usually go to our connections and ask them to supply us information. We go to school organizations officers, ask for programmes of activities, request a list of winners from academic week contests and copy some event pictures. From our data, we do the news so they become predictable in pattern, tone, and content. I realized that we could have done things differently. We could have asked teachers to send their students (who happen to be our writers) to events related to the teachers’ subject and allow the students to write up news about the events. We could then ask the teachers to consider the students’ write ups as make up activities so teachers can have a basis of grading the Gazetteers who miss regular in-class activities.
In a way, my fellow editors and I compressed our problem – we looked at it too narrowly and thought we could do nothing about it except what we did.
Complacency. This is idleness or the state of being stuck. This is the distaste for learning about what we have to do and how we do it well. This is stagnation, satisfaction in the status quo.
Using Gazette as an example for this last concept, I can say that we editors have been complacent. We have been contented that we publish the school paper on time even without help from our writers. We have gone with the flow, not evaluating what could have been improved in terms of layout and content. We could have had writing seminars! We missed out on that.
I am thankful I learned of these conceptual blocks. Having learned of them, I can now avoid them in my individual and group problem solving efforts. Having learned that conceptual blocks build on each other, (if you believe you have just one problem, you would have just one solution and you would not think further), I will be wary of catching even just one of the blocks. If in a group problem solving effort, I will encourage group mates to pitch in as much ideas as they can to pinpoint the real problem and pinpoint the real solution.
Sources:
Who moved my cheese [Motion Picture]
Prentice Hall. (2004). Solving problems analytically and creatively. (Chapter 3). Retrieved from: http://cte.rockhurst.edu/s/945/images/editor_documents/content/All%20documents%20in%20PDF%20require%20Adobe%20Acrobat174;%20Reader.Whette/Whetten_CH03.pdf.
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