Lipstick on a Pig
Have you ever experienced ‘lipstick on a pig’ in the workplace? Something at work is broken. Everyone knows it. It is a topic in the office corridors (or the virtual equivalent.) It’s frustrating the hell out of employees, draining their energy and motivation. No one exactly knows what the answer is. People have lots of opinions. It has been on the improvement treadmill a few times in the past, but nothing has made much of a difference. It keeps popping up like that game of whack-a-mole that you play at the Royal Show.
The problem starts to create noise and captures the attention of a senior executive who wants the issue fixed immediately, mainly to take the heat off themselves. As this executive is bit of an expert, they come up their own plan to fix the problem. I call this a band-aid solution because it’s a quick fix. It’s like your leg is haemorrhaging and you slap a band-aid on it and say it’ll be right mate. The executive then brings in a few of direct reports, tells them what needs to be done and sends them on their way to deliver the project by next Tuesday. Nothing much happens from here on in, besides a lot of pantomime. The project finishes with high fives all round. I have even seen an executive get promoted off the back of one of these efforts and when nothing of value had seen the light of day.
My tendency to be positive disrupter in the workplace has not often fare well in situations like these. I am like the kid in the emperor has no clothes story, who points out the obvious, that it isn’t going to work. How could it? Little time has been spent understanding the problem. Little time listening to the people doing the work, day in and day out. Little more than another beige response to fixing problems in the workplace with the implementation of a new process, or policy change. This is a red herring when what is required is transforming the values, beliefs and behaviours of the workforce.
This is what I call “lipstick on a pig.” When a technical fix is pursued, when an adaptive solution is required. I draw on the wisdom of Linsky and Heifetz and their Adaptive Leadership Model. They define technical problems as having known solutions that can be implemented with current know how. They can be resolved by authoritative expertise and through an organisation’s current structures, procedures, and ways of doing things. Adaptive challenges can only be address through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits and loyalties. Making progress requires mobilising discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses and generating the capacity to thrive a new.
So how do we get started to genuinely solve problems in the workplace? Doing some discovery work is a good place start. I have had much success by bringing together a diverse group of humans who are impacted by the problem day-to-day and facilitate some structured open dialogue to make sense of things. It is powerful to create the space to step back and look at what is happening across the broader system, to have chance to see connections and generate insights together.
One of my favourite quotes on problem definition is attributed to Albert Einstein “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend fifty-five minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” Good luck solving finding the possibilities to the business problems that are lurking in your organisation. If you need help to guide this and to set your next project up for success, feel free to reach out.
