Kimberly Wiefling at ProjectConnections has written a new article about “catalytic events” that can lead to permanent behavior change and improvement. She encourages readers to work to find permanent solutions to recurring problems, using the following analogy:

Imagine a parking garage that installs timestamp machines at the entrance to spit out tickets than can be checked upon exit to verify the total time spent in the garage, but without the gates that force cars to stop until they take the ticket. Without the gates in place, some people would surely forget to take their ticket at the entrance. Maybe a pile of tickets would accumulate at the base of the machine—no big deal. But from time to time there would a line of cars backed up at the exit when an exiting driver finds themselves ticketless. The parking garage attendant is left to sort out the mess. Repeatedly. Yuk.

Simply installing a gate at the entrance that is raised only once the ticket is removed ensures the right behavior by the customer—each driver must take a ticket before entering the garage. As long as the gate is working properly, and ignoring the possibility of criminal activity, the problem of forgotten tickets is now permanently solved. Of course the driver could still manage to misplace or lose the ticket, perhaps by removing it from the car, or—in the case of extremely messy cars or disorganized drivers—the ticket could actually become lost inside of the car itself. (Maybe in the future parking garages will just slap a barcode on the outside of the car when you drive in, or just take a picture and use pattern recognition to match exiting cars with entering cars, who knows.)

The entrance gate is a permanent solution to a recurring problem. Having seen recurring problems on project teams decade upon decade, and growing weary of asking, urging, coaxing, begging, and pleading with people to change their ways, I dream of such remedies to errant behavior!

Can you think of ways to address recurring problems and change behaviors in your organization?