Change paradox

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If we take it that, like any other intellectual proposition, a management initiative must be driven by some theory or other — that is, it is designed to prove out a hypothesis that already exists in the mind of an executive — and the sorts of executives who get to test the hypotheses that live in their minds tend to be found at or near the summit of their organisations —we quickly start to see the paradoxical nature of mandated organisational change: the mandate must come from those who have lived their best lives within the status quo, and who have most to lose from any change.

The argument runs like this: the will to change derives from the conviction that one’s current configuration is, somehow, wrong: for its notional set of goals, sub-optimal, dysfunctional, elliptical or just broken: out of step with the times.

For change to come, that conviction must live in the mind of someone with the wherewithal to bring it.

Now, however much they might present to the outside world as embodiments of the free market, within their walls, most commercial organisations are dictatorships. Only those at the very top of have any kind of wherewithal, other than to do what they are told.

So, how do leaders get to lead? Well, an organisation is a system: a pulmonary lattice of stocks, flows and feedback loops, sending information, consuming resources, generating artefacts and, over time making things — not just widgets for sale, but itself: speed up the frame-rate and you will see whole new subsystems spawn and fiefdoms mushroom, while others wither and dessicate.

By the fact of its operation, an organisation self-generates.

One thing it self-generates is its own leaders. In an odd way, the organisation makes its own personnel: it selects them, fashions them, moulds them, weeds out the misaligned, nurtures and promotes the fittest, and — where no home-growns are yet match-ready — it buys in best-fitting external candidates who are.

Only the most successful of these personnel — the most paradigmatically of the organisation; who most perfectly resemble its essence — make it to the executive suite.

The selection process by which one ascends the greasy pole is relentless, unending, and brutal. It fashions people the way a river fashions stone.

All this is a baroque way of saying: these men and women who run the firm, and who have the means to change it, owe their very position to their utter synchronicity with how the firm is now. All its imperfections, cock-eyed, peg-legged, pie-bald, skewiff glory. They are the answer to the question: “if this organisation, as it is now, made its own leaders, what would they look like?”

The answer to the question, “if this organisation were changed, and then made its own leaders, what would they look like?” is: NOT LIKE THIS.

Hence the conceptual problem with change from the top.

No employee survey, no well-being outreach, no human resources questionnaire in history has been designed to prove out the point that the executive suite is populated by a bunch of glad-handing dilettantes, that the upper layers of senior mmanagementadd no value and stunt the organisation’s forward progress, much less that human resources is in itself a pernicious waste of space. I dare say it would be rather fun if someone were to try.

But this is the thing: change comes from fracture, disruption and when shafts of light are thrown unexpectedly by unintentionally broken windows to iilluminate old problems or new opportunities in wholly unexpected ways.

If you are a leader in your organisation, your thought leadership — to the extent it is directed toward organizational change, is bunk.