Bend Your Baseline: Why Diets, Budgets, and Big Initiatives Snap Back, and What Actually Holds | FREE for ISCPA Members

Overview

This event is only available to ISCPA members. Not an ISCPA member? Join today!

Highlights

Firms and finance teams launch changes they mean to keep. A service standard. A new workflow. A review routine. A process everyone supported. It worked while attention was on it. A few quarters later people were back to the old way, and nobody can point to the week it slipped. The session opens with the personal version of this pattern, the diet, the budget, or the exercise program that held until it didn’t, and makes a plain argument about why it happens. What we launch is a push. Pushes end. What people return to is the baseline. The rest of the session applies that to work. Initiatives often rely on four kinds of support: repeated information, motivation, a tool expected to carry adoption on its own, or one person championing it. Each is a reasonable thing to do, and in a regulated profession several of them are required. The trouble starts when an initiative rests on one of them alone, because each one waits for the person who is struggling to come to it. Attendees take an initiative currently underway at their own firm or organization, identify which of the four it is leaning on, and write down one design change worth making. The session does not lean on the familiar claim that seventy percent of change programs fail, which has no reliable primary source. Everything cited is named and attributed.

Designed For

All CPAs.
Firm leaders, managers, and finance teams responsible for making a new process or standard stick.