Lose your colour and you lose your soul
A man stands on a sandy dune, hands casually in his pockets, his rust coloured tie draped over his right shoulder. Beneath his straw hat his bottle blue suit contrasts keenly with the deep blue sea that he is looking over, or is it the five brightly coloured balloons floating across the cloudless sky that have his attention? On the horizon pass some dark grey ships, and in the foreground a thin red flag flutters in the gentle breeze.
George H Smyth, a renowned local artist, has used very vivid colour in his Balloon Race, and it seems so integral, so matter of fact and so important.
Most things have some degree of colour in them, something that suggests that it is neither black nor white, but some colour in-between. This is life, it is the way we live, and it is the way businesses operate.
A mistake that I see all too often when management standards are implemented, be that Quality management standard or one for Health and Safety or the Environment, is to be too prescriptive. Interpreting words from the standards too literally does not provide the consistency, nor the improvements that standards can bring, instead this approach just dulls everything down.
Things just don’t work in black and white, it’s not how businesses work, and this approach is doomed to fail.
Where the businesses ‘colour’ is lost during the implementation of a management standard, it will become additional paperwork that does not add value. The business will keep doing what it has always done, the paperwork will be completed to pass assessments, however it will be added cost, not added value as it should be.
All management standards are now designed to fit around the needs of the businesses, what best suits the way they operate, and this is always based on risk: the risk of doing one thing over another; or the risk of not doing something and assessing the implications. There is seldom a black and white choice, it is always a decision based on the balance of probabilities.
Understand this, and you will understand how management standards are there to help, not hinder, your business. Lose your colour, the thing that got you to where you are, and you lose your soul.