“If at first you don’t succeed, find out why.” Stephen Covey
There is a propensity within the police service to reinvent the wheel with unerring regularity. While not wishing to diminish the importance of the field, a good example is the Domestic Violence Unit. Certainly, in my own force it wasn’t dealt with by specialists at all. They decided it was a priority in the mid-1990s and appointed a single officer in each sub-division to deal with DV. Later, under a new Chief, they went to the other extreme and had a 50-person department, castrating general CID in the process. The Chief moved on, and DV went back to be dealt with by the appropriate level of attention based on the injuries involved. Then along came the divisional High Priority DV department, who were accepting low priority DV cases within a week as they didn’t have much on.
I’m not exaggerating to make a point, and I emphasise that I am not belittling the importance of that role, but that is pretty much how it went.
What they were doing is what organisations commonly do. They don’t like the results they are getting in a certain sector, and so they change what they do and expect it to work.
What they seemed to spend little or no time doing, is finding out why what they were doing wasn’t working as they hoped.
In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Covey proposed a new approach. He called it the ‘See-Do-Get’ Paradigm. He suggested that successful change came about not when they changed WHAT they were doing, but when they changed the way they saw the problem.
(IMHO, part of the problem is/was the criminal justice system, which is a legal paradigm that has no truck with the policing system, which is about trying to stop crime. For example, charging prisoners with DV offences ‘on policy’ made no difference to the CPS, who want evidence. Usually a confession. Or the Courts, who have their own admissibility rules. You can have an arrest policy all you like, but if the other two teams ain’t playing, you’ll rarely win the game.)
No, I don’t have the solution to the DV problem, because it really was not my forte. But looking at the purpose rather than the practice of DV investigations may have changed it from a prevention by prosecution paradigm to a prevention by other means paradigm.
But the point is that if we want to create meaningful improvements in our results (of any kind, personal, professional, whatever) then we should all stop just looking at what we did that made things go wrong, but also at what we were thinking and why we were thinking it.
No, that is not easy.
Think about a problem you have encountered in the past. Analyse what you did wrong, but then ask yourself why you did that. How did you see the problem that caused you to make the error? Was there an alternative perspective that would make you act differently, even change the whole process for dealing with a similar matter?
How else do you think policing improves? Well, the same concepts apply to you, too.
How you see the problem, can all to often be the problem.
Look at it another way. You may just find the answer.
Police Time Management 