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 systems and subsystems spawn and mushroom, while others wither and dessicate. By its the fact of its operation, the firm self-generates.

One of the things 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 most on-message, and — where no home-growns are ready for a role — buying in best-fitting external candidates who are. The most successful of these — only the most paradigmatically of the organisation; the most perfectly resemblent of 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. The bigger, and greasier, the pole, the more spectacular the canyon.

You will already notice another paradox here: however singly directed from on high it seems, the very illusion of command-and-control emerges from the subconscious machinations of the beast.

These men and women 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.

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.