Change paradox: Difference between revisions

}}{{smallcaps|If we take it}} that, like any other intellectual proposition,<ref>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.</ref> 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 [[paradox]]ical 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.

To ''bring'' change, someone with the wherewithal to ''bring'' it must hold that belief.  

Those with the wherewithal to bring change are usually thriving as they are.

Those who are presently thriving tend not to feel things are enormously out of whack.

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 ''building'' — not just widgets for sale, but ''itself'': speed up the frame-rate and you will see the organisation grow: whole new subsystems spawn and fiefdoms mushroom, while others wither and dessicate. The firm is alive; an organism: ''it makes itself''. In a [[I am a Strange Loop|strangely loopy]] way, the firm [[emerges]] from its own recursive [[systemantics|systems]].  

So the idea of current management changing the very machine that has contrived to put them where they have the power to change presents a variation of the [[time traveller’s paradox]]: By changing something, do I kick away the very ladder I climbed to reach the cockpit? If I throw off the rope, do I leave myself [[Hinterstoisser Traverse|stranded should the weather change]]? 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, for example, the executive are a bunch of useless glad-handing dilettantes; or that the echelons of upper management, though in place for decades, have never yielded apparent value; that the problem with our stars is not the cost of front-line staff but of the sediment of management pressing down upon them, hindering their reactions to the changing needs and desires of their local markets. I dare say it would be rather fun if someone were to try, but that would be a work of science fiction indeed.

''Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas.'' Only the staff does that, and no-one listens to them.