Why change processes fail so often
Effective organisations work on relationships instead of chopping and changing, writes Jim Bright.
OPINION:
I have no idea whether anybody shuffled deckchairs on the Titanic, but this simile is a popular way of describing a lot of organisational change.
Most of us who have had the dubious pleasure of being caught up in restructures, organisational change or rationalisations can probably, too readily, bring to mind images of a large ship slowly sinking into the icy drink despite – or entirely due to – the best efforts of the folding-chair attendants on the bridge.
We should not be surprised at the popularity of this jaundiced view. United States statistics indicate about 50 per cent of all new businesses last more than five years, and about 33 per cent make it beyond 10 years.
For those with half-empty glasses, it means the vast majority of businesses will fail in 10 years. It seems likely that a reasonable proportion of these failures occurred because the business was not nimble enough with change processes.
So why do change processes seem to fail so often? One reason is that most people shy away from the hard decisions when considering change.
In fact the law shies away from the hard decisions in change processes. Redundancy refers to positions and not people. Legally, a person is not made redundant, rather their job is.
This reflects a widespread but false assumption about the nature of effective change – that it depends upon making alterations to structures and not people.
It is so much easier for management to simply cut positions, close down units, or create new layers of bureaucracies, committees or project teams, than to actually address the relationships between entities and, by extension, the relationships between people within those entities.
In human systems like organisations, the effectiveness of their functioning is determined far more by the effectiveness of the relationships between the component parts, than it is by the form the structures take.
However, rarely do managers and the benighted, self-important and self-deluded consultants they employ have the wit to appreciate that complex systems are best influenced by alterations to relationships rather than crude restructures. Rarer still is the determination, patience or skill to effect changes to relationships.
This is often reflected in the quite sharp distinctions between considerations of structure on the one hand and, for want of a better term, ‘‘culture’’ on the other.
Typically culture boils down to some crude snap-shot survey of arbitrary variables selected more for their a la mode qualities than any meaningful consideration of the nature of the organisation.
It is generally measured as a reaction to structural changes. Culture is almost never considered as the driving force that is permitted to shape the emergent structure of organisations.
Instead of structure being imposed ‘‘top-down’’, generally after some ghastly ‘‘benchmarking’’ exercise to identify ‘‘best-practice’’, effective structure emerges out of effective relationships and interactions of the component elements of the organisation.
In this way the form emerges from function. Imposing a form on an organisation leads not to function but to dysfunction.
Functional organisations work hard and continually on relationships, and from that iterative process, form emerges, that is intimately tailored to the needs of the particular organisation, with their particular staff, and not some abstract, idealised, historic or borrowed examples.
Trying to impose a form is like buying a cheap suit for a cut-price cruise. It is quick, cheap and the results leave one with a sinking feeling. –Sydney Morning Herald
Jim Bright is a professor of career education and development at Australian Catholic University and owns Bright and Associates, a career management consultancy.