Change paradox
If we take it that, like any other intellectual proposition,[1] 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.
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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.[2] 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.
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.[3]
The selection process by which one ascends the greasy pole is relentless, unending, and brutal. It fashions people the way a river fashions stone.[4]
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.
References
- ↑ I speak of none other than the Duhem-Quine thesis as to the theory-dependence of observation: that it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because any test presupposes one or more background assumptions and auxiliary hypotheses.
- ↑ We are not being provocative here. The analogy is eerily precise: there is a tight command-and-control structure, no meaningful democracy; the centralised dissemination of information that is filtered, framed and sometimes rewritten to make the administration look good, and all is ably supported by a clandestine internal agency with unlimited power whose job is to keep the ranks in a state of fear and mistrust of each other and the authorities.
- ↑ Cry bitter tears, my friends: almost certainly, you are not so destined. The sooner you realise this, the easier becomes your burden.
- ↑ Now you may 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.