Change is Hard: Putting the PRO in Process

When I was a kid, I spent the summers with my grandmother at her cabin. She had a swimming pool, fishing poles, even a Nintendo, and we were not allowed to say, “I’m bored.”

“Because we've always done it this way.” How often have you heard or said that? It is a phrase that is inherently opposing innovation and change and like my grandmother, it is a phrase I don’t allow in conversations about change. If you are okay with what the current process is, then that’s okay, but I would challenge you to think harder about why what you’re doing works. My guess is that if you are satisfied with the current state, then you wouldn't say, “because weave always done it this way” in the first place.

If the current process doesn't work, “because we've always done it this way” is a complacent answer that doesn't get to the bottom of why things are done that way and why that doesn't work for you anymore.  At some point, what you did probably did work, but because of changes in staffing, process, program offerings, or whatever the case might be, something changed and now the current process needs to be modified.

Changing a process (including everything you do when you make the switch to Altru Museum Management Software) requires rethinking and relearning.  This can be really exciting, but it can be exhausting too!  Unlearning what you already know is a challenge that takes time and patience.   Neuroscientists have even found that as we learn new ways of doing things and new skills, our brains are rewiring and changing too!

Implementing Altru is a perfect opportunity to change the process, but staying on top of your organization’s processes shouldn't end there.  It is easy to fall into a pattern of collecting every piece of data about constituents imaginable, just for the sake of it.  Consider: if you take the time and effort to gather the name of your constituent’s birthdays, but don’t do anything with the information, it falls into that category of “true, but useless.”  Yes, the information is true, but ultimately pretty useless and time consuming on your part.  Every now and then, it is worth reviewing your process to see if the data you collect and how you do things still meets the needs of your constituents.  If not, its time to change!

Remember that change itself is a process.  Keeping an open mind and failing up (learning from what doesn't work) means that you can continue to modify your processes even once you've completed your Altru implementation.

For more help with change management, check out these blogs or the Altru community.