Rob Fisher on Changing the Paradigm of Leadership

Rob Fisher started his career at the frontline of one of the highest stakes operations in the world – in nuclear power. He quickly grew to appreciate the importance of establishing standard practices to help individuals, as well as creating an organization that can operate safely at scale. He took that experience into a variety of other industries, maintaining a focus on building organizations that provide a safe and effective environment.

This often requires managing change and according to Rob providing these leaders something more powerful to believe in than their current processes. “We had to establish processes for changing leaders’ paradigms. Author Sidney Decker said, if you want people to change their paradigms, you have to give them a paradigm more powerful than the one they’re used to and that you’re asking them to leave.”

When we talked about managing the uncertainty of today’s business environment, Rob explained that in his experience it is often the organizational learning ability of a company that will make the difference between success and failure. “They should be using their lessons, learned processes to learn everything they can about all the stuff we really did learn during this pandemic, and I think that the organizations that are progressive and proactive are going to do that. They will become learning organizations.”

Part of being a learning organization in crossing the chasm of ‘empowering’ and ‘enabling’. As an example Rob mentioned how providing technology is not enough. The technology has to be used by the teams. “So empowering would be let’s make sure that they get the technology. But enabling would be. Let’s make sure that they use it.”

In short, be an organization that is able to learn and progress. Being a learning organization is a key to success, especially in uncertain times.

About Rob Fisher:

Rob Fisher is currently the President and Director of Operations for Fisher Improvement Technologies (FIT), a Native-American (Cherokee) owned business that was recently awarded a Top-100 Native-American Owned Business in the US and a Top-50 Emerging Business in North Carolina by DiversityBusines.com. Rob has extensive experience in performing incident analyses, designing performance improvement systems, designing and improving corrective action programs, designing and running procedure programs, and educating staff from the senior leaders to the field. 

FIT has most recently been recognized internationally as instrumental in reducing fatalities and serious / life-altering injuries in high hazard industries using human & organizational performance and procedure concepts. FIT provides education and consulting services in Human & Organizational Performance Improvement, Incident Analysis and Corrective Actions, and Improving Procedures / Programs / Processes for multiple industries. FIT methodology has been deployed and integrated in over 100 companies in 20 countries and 10 different languages.