Change paradox: Difference between revisions

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.<ref>Cry bitter tears, my friends: almost certainly, you are not so destined. The sooner you realise this, the easier becomes your burden.</ref>

The selection process by which one ascends the greasy pole is relentless, unending, and brutal. It ''fashions'' people the way a river fashions stone.<ref>Now you may notice ''another'' [[paradox]] here: however singly directed from on high it seems, the very illusion of command-and-control ''[[emergence|emerges]] from the subconscious machinations of the beast''.</ref>

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]].

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?  

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.

 

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.