Barging About: Lessons in Change

Steering a barge ain’t easy! To start with you push the tiller (the steery thing) left to go right and vice versa. Then weighing about 20 tons and proceeding at a stately 3mph it takes an age to respond to any directions. The rudder (the bit in the water) is also relatively small and makes that tougher still.

Assuming you are on a straight bit, you don’t just hold the tiller still, you are constantly moving it just to try to keep the boat going straight and sometimes (quite often in fact) you move it and nothing responds.

All of these things can happen in a change project. You give instructions and nothing happens; you try again, harder this time and they do too much! You are constantly having to correct course just to get to where you thought you were headed.

From the outside it may look effortless but you are working all the time to achieve even simple progress.

Tags: barge, wales

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2012 at 19:31 and is filed under Business Change, Personal Blog, Personal Change, Travelogue. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.