Suddenism - How do organizations change?
How do new species emerge?
How do organizations change?
There are essentially two views on how new species emerge. The first, older model states within a species, selective pressure gradually forces species to diverge. Each generation is slight different to the next. Little by little, things change. You only really notice it if you can look at creatures over geological time. This view is called, no surprises here, gradualism.
Another, newer view sees things differently. In this model, things stay pretty much the same for ages. One day much like the next. Each new generation much like the last. Until something major happens in the environment. Then all hell breaks loose. And by "hell", I mean species change. This view is called suddenism. Hang on, no. It's called "punctuated equilibrium". A major failure of branding there as far as I'm concerned but we work with what we've got.
But we're not concerned with evolutionary science here. Because dinosaurs are cool (ask any 4 year old) and we are certainly not interested in cool things here. Lets talk about something really boring but important instead: organizational change.
Someone on LinkedIn said that "change is the only constant". I asked them what about e, i, π, and √2. They responded by saying that the only people who would get that joke will die alone in a rat-infested basement and the conversation deteriorated from there.
It's true, organizations are going through a lot of change. And most of them manage it really, really badly. Modern organizations are not built or incentivized to change. Once they reach a certain size, they seek to manipulate the environment around them (suppliers, customers, regulators, competitors) to maintain a steady state with predictable returns. But environments are dynamic. And organizations seek to be more agile. They do this by sticking post-its on a board labelled with columns, or transcribing those post-its into Jira, or holding unsatisfactory morning meetings that are supposed to last for 15 minutes but drag on until morning tea. Quite how all this make one more agile is unclear to me but that's because I lack belief and have yet to receive the appropriate re-education.
We're getting distracted. Anyway, executives have noticed that not telling anyone about their intentions and not getting the input of those impacted and not doing anything after the change has happened to make it stick - they have noticed that all of that kinda sucks. So they hire change managers to do all that stuff. Most change management frameworks (e.g. ProSci's ADKAR) are OK. They are certainly better than nothing - and nothing is their main competition at present.
These change approaches view the world through a gradualist lens. Each wave of communications and training. Each round of stakeholder engagement. Little by little change occurs. This makes organizational change seem controllable and tractable. It makes it less scary. And it's not wrong.
It is however not the whole story. Change also occurs through crises. Crises are, by their very nature, hard to reliably predict. But they are also important catalysts for change. Very quickly, things that were inconceivable last week become inevitable today. We are seeing a crisis now around Coronavirus. Crises can also be triggered by activists. You cannot build crises into project plans. Unless you are a sociopath - but for the purposes of this article I am assuming you aren't.
So what can you do? Well, an analogy from finance is useful here. There is a thing called the barbell strategy, one version of which says that 90% of your investments should be in safe, low-yielding assets (e.g. government bonds) and 10% should be in risky assets with a high potential upside (e.g. tech stocks - did you get Facebook or WeWork?). So change programs should take a similar approach. 90% of your efforts should be rolling out the program as planned. The remaining 10% should be on "crisis leverage". Crisis leverage is the opposite of crisis management. Crisis leverage requires that you be 1. scanning the environment for potential crises and 2. developing and maintaining a capability with the capacity to scale up radically in response to said crises.
What do you think?
Comment
Interesting post. Agree that evolution is a good lens through which to understand / analyse organisational change - both gradual and crisis driven. It is important to keep in mind, though, that what we see around us are the results of the very few successful adaptations. Evolution tells us that the vast majority of adaptations end up the way of the dodo. Hedging and scanning the environment for harbingers of change are good strategies, but they do always not tell us what to do. What's needed IMO is organisational capability in making (commercially and ethically) sound decisions under conditions of uncertainty.
Reply
100% agree. We need to be aware of survivorship bias. I would add your “organizational decision-making under conditions of uncertainty” (or perhaps “cool in a crisis but not frozen”) as a capability between scanning and scaling. Scanning + Scheming + Scaling perhaps?