Ch ch ch Changes

Yesterday at work I sat through a four hour seminar on how to deal with change.  It began with us all sitting in groups of people that we typically don't work with from 5 regions of our company.  Our company owner has 5 stores and over 1700 employees.  There are about 100 leaders in our company and we all gathered to learn some new methods to deal with change and how to relate and relay changes to our teams to be successful.

From there we had an interactive activity to problem solve a situation.  As we attempted to solve the problem, our director would provide us with new changes that we would have to work through.

We were given budgets and time constraints to achieve the goal of building a bridge with certain dimensions using only a few pieces of paper, 5 paper clips, and a roll of 12 inches of tape.  For every piece of material there was a cost to it and we had to stay under the budget to meet the project guidelines and acheive a profit of 23%.

For every minute that went by prior to the build we got penalized with a cost.

For every minute saved by end result we were rewarded with extra profit.

As more and more things were thrown at our team we were able to adapt to the change thrown at us because we left so much profit margin on our design.  Some of these changes included new dimensions being modified, storage fees for unused materials, etc.

To disrupt things again we were forced to only have 2 team members physically touch the materials.  Then in the middle of construct our "builders" were replaced with other builders from other groups and we had to quickly get them caught up to speed on what we were building and how we were building it.  You see as we were tasked with building a bridge, other teams were tasked with building other things.  The new builders came to us with the "what the heck are you building mindset" because our design for building a bridge was much different then the team they left where they were building paper buildings or towers.

The short life lesson of the events were that change can be daunting and stressful, but a little extra planning for the end goal in beginning can help lead to more success and some fresh perspectives can lead to more success.

Obviously the lessons learned today were designed for our industry, but it also put things into life experiences as our CEO explained "We aren't in the retail food business.  We are in the people business that just happens to sell food."

I wonder if other companies have similar seminars or outlooks.

It seems like since Rob Manfred took over as MLB Commissioner he is trying to make some changes to a sport that for the most part has remained unchanged for over a century and half.  Since baseball is my favorite sport, I think this is great.

To help continie to make baseball players become model citizens, it was revealed yesterday in a Forbes article that in the next CBA agreement the MLB may start testing athletes for the use of Opiods without a written prescription from a doctor.  With the country's epidemic (and without getting too deep into politics) I think this is a great move by MLB to get ahead and make their product stand by a set of standards that many other sports don't monitor.

We learned about Tyler Skaggs death a few months ago.  Then we learned about what caused it.  Had this change been in effect, maybe Tyler would still be alive today.

This is my only Cutch card that references Tyler Skaggs