Lynn Johnson

Background

About Lynn Johnson

Consulting for Innovation is focused on- freeing up clients' time to attend to business- providing proven processes to manage conflict- understanding technology and communicating it clearly, and - aligning technology strategy with business strategy to produce technology solutions that work for business. Given technology, it is likely there will be problems- technology is complicated and requires continual study and adjustment- conflict is complicated and requires specific skills that must be learned and practiced, and - managing either requires that precious time and resources are diverted from the other work of business. Almost every technology project includes at least one significant conflict and as a result consumes precious time and resources that might be better spent. After years of implementing technology and struggling to minimize the waste of time and resources resulting from the inherent conflicts, I learned that understanding conflicts that seem wasteful is necessary, if the technology solution is to be appropriate and durable. That is simply because conflicts surface when peoples’ interests and values are significantly challenged. Only when we examine the conflicts and identify the critical interests and values, can we understand the complete requirements for the solution. The good news is that there are effective (with a 75-80% success rate) tools for dealing with conflict and they can be used to understand what it is that technology projects have to do to be successful. But like technology, conflicts are not easy to understand - they are rarely what they appear to be. Developing solutions that do what is needed now, and that will work over time, requires understanding and skills in conflict management as well as in technology implementation.