Thought for Friday, 14 October

 Romans 12:2 New Living Translation

Don’t copy the behaviour and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.

During my working life, there was a time when two colleagues and myself were involved in Change Management.  We had been trained by a consultancy who had studied the system of production used by Toyota and taken the thinking behind it and applied it to service delivery.  This led to a whole variety of interesting experiences, many involving unpredictable human behaviour.  Most of the people we dealt with at the front end of processes were happy to make changes because most of these changes would make their day to day lives easier.

The biggest problem we had was getting the managers and leaders to engage in the process and allow the changes to be implemented.  In general you could tell that they were asking the following questions and taking the following views even though a fully evidenced better way had been put to them.

How is this going to make me look?

Why did I not notice these problems myself?

We’ve always done it that way and that’s the way it’ll stay.

Thanks for pointing these things out, we’ll take it from here. (and either do nothing or make the changes at a later date meaning they could take the credit)

 

Our thinking when facilitating these exercises was to improve the service from the customer’s point of view and also to make the work of frontline staff better by reducing rework, complaint calls etc.  For this to happen, managers had to change their thinking by focussing on customer service rather than the arbitrary and meaningless targets filtered down from their managers or maybe even government.

 

The most challenging aspect of this approach was changing how people think.  Today’s passage from Romans 12 tells us we have to allow God into our hearts so he can change the way we think.  We may even find ourselves asking the same questions and taking the same views as outlined above but instead of posing the question of ‘how is the way I deal with people and situations going to make me look?’, we need to ask ‘would God approve of the ways I deal with people and situations?’  This can necessitate a radical change and it’ll not be easy but it’s a change we are all required to make. The more we do this, the more we will come to learn what God requires from us in this life.

 

Prayer

Heavenly Father, we pray asking for transformation. Transform our minds, show us your will, and change our ways so we can obey. We pray for a renewing of wisdom so we can make better choices. Help us to influence others so we can show them your love. In Jesus’ name we pray.    Amen