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 organisational 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, such a conviction must live in the mind of a person with the wherewithal to bring the change.

However much they might present to the outside world as embodiments of the free market, within their walls most commercial organisations are dictatorships.

Thus only those at the top of the organisation have that wherewithal.

Now an organisation’s formal structure is a system: a Byzantine pulmonary system of stocks, flows and feedback loops that send information, consume resources, generate artefacts and, over time make things — not just widgets for sale, but whole new systems and subsystems of the organism itself. By its reflexive operation, the firm self-generates.

One of the things it self generates is its leaders. 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, and where none are suitable, it buys in ones who are. 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.

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.