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 proposition that already exists in the mind of an executive — and the sorts of executives who get to test existing propositions in their own minds are ones to be found at or near the summit of the organisation —we quickly start to see the paradoxical nature of “change from the top”.

It is this: the will to organisational change in a firm proceeds from the conviction that its current structure is, somehow, wrong — sub-optimal, dysfunctional, broken or just out of step with the times. That conviction, as we note, must live in the mind of someone near enough to the top of the organisation to command it to investigate.

Now an organisation’s formal structure is a system: an intricate network of stocks, flows and feedback loops. It consumes resources, generates artefacts and over time produces widgets, products, outputs — and people. In an odd way the organisation makes its own personnel: it selects them, moulds them, weeds out those not well-enough aligned with its values, nurtures those most suitable. The most successful of these — the most paradigmatically of the organisation; the most perfectly resemblent of its essence — they make it to top of the greasy pole: the executive suite.

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.