Change paradox

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If we take it that, like any other intellectual proposition, every management initiative must be driven by some theory or other — that is, it must be designed to prove out a hypothesis that already exists in someone’s mind. Seeing as that the minds whose hypotheses get tested tend to belong to those at or near the summit of their organisations — we see the paradoxical nature of mandated organisational change: the mandate for change must come from those who have lived their best lives within, because of, and thanks to, the status quo: things as they are before change. Those, that is to say, who have most to lose from change.

The argument runs like this: a “will to change” derives from a conviction that one’s current configuration is, somehow, wrong: that the organisation is sub-optimal, dysfunctional, elliptical or just broken.

To want change is to believe that things are currently out of whack.

To bring change, that belief must be held by someone with the wherewithal to bring it.

A digression on the paradoxical nature of firms in a free market

Now, however much they might present to the outside world as embodiments of all that is laissez-faire, within their walls, most commercial organisations are dictatorships. Only those at the very top of have any kind of wherewithal, other than to keep quiet, get on with your work and do what you are told.

The making of leaders

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. The firm is an organism: it makes itself. It emerges out if its own reflexive systemantics.

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.

Leaders as a mirror of nature

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.

On the difficulty of changing from the top

So the idea of current management changing the very machine that has contrived to put them in the place where they can do that presents a variation of the time traveller’s paradox: If I change this, do I kick away the very ladder I climbed to reach the cockpit? If I fiddle in this way with the geometry of corporate space time, might I not disprove my very being?

Thus, management has derived some kind of prime directive: “I must change. For it is what leaders do. But whatever change I make, I must make it, without —” well, er — it is difficult to put this any way other than bluntly, readers — “... whatever change I make, I must make it without changing anything”.

And so it comes to pass: no out-sourcing program, no employee survey, no cost challenge, no well-being outreach, no human resources initiative in history has been designed to prove out that the executive are a bunch of useless glad-handing dilettantes; that the upper echelons of senior management, though in place for decades, have in that time yielded no apparent value; that the problem is not the cost of front-line staff but of the sediment of management above them getting in the way of them nimble reaction to the needs and desires of the markets they operate. I dare say it would be rather fun if someone were to try, but with would be a work of science fiction indeed.

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Only the staff does that, and no-one listens to them

But here 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.