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Strategies for Change
If we think of organizations as living systems capable of self-organizing, then how do we think about change in these systems? The strategy for change becomes simpler and more localized. We need to encourage the creativity that lives throughout the organization, but keep local solutions localized. Most change efforts fail when leaders take an innovation that has worked well in one area of the organization and attempt to roll it out to the entire organization. This desire to replicate success actually destroys local initiative. It denies the creativity to anyone but a small group. All living systems change all the time, in new and surprising ways, discovering great effectiveness, better solutions. They are not acting from some master plan. They are tinkering in their local environments, based on their intimate experience with conditions there-and their tinkering shows Up as effective innovation. But only for them. Information about what has worked elsewhere can be very helpful. However, these solutions cannot be imposed; they have to remain local.
This highly localized change activity does not mean that the organization spins off wildly in all directions. If people are clear about the purpose and true values of their organization-if they understand what their organization stands for and who it shows itself to be through its actions-their individual tinkering will result in systemwide coherence. In organizations that know who they are and mean what they announce, people are free to create and contribute. A plurality of effective solutions emerges, each expressing a deeper coherence, an understanding of what this organization is trying to become.
Mort Meyerson, chairman of Perot Systems, said that the primary task of being a leader is to make sure that the organization knows itself. That is, we must realize that our task is to call people together often, so that everyone gains clarity about who we are, who we've just become, who we still want to be. This includes the interpretations available from our customers, our markets, our history, our mistakes. If the organization can stay in a continuous conversation about who it is and who it is becoming, then leaders don't have to undertake the impossible task of trying to hold it all together. Organizations that are clear at their core hold themselves together because of their deep congruence. People are then free to explore new avenues of activity, new ventures and customers, in ways that make sense for the organization. It is a strange and promising paradox of living systems: clarity about who we are as a group creates freedom for individual contributions. People exercise that freedom in the service of the organization, and their capacity to respond and change becomes a capability of the whole organization.
If we as leaders can ensure that our organization knows itself, that it's clear at its core, we must also tolerate unprecedented levels of "messiness" at the edges. This constant tinkering, this localized hunt for solutions does not look neat. There is no conformity possible unless we want to kill local initiative. Freedom and creativity create diverse responses. We have to be prepared to support such diversity, to welcome the surprises people will invent, and to stop wasting time trying to impose solutions developed elsewhere.
People always want to talk about what they do, what they see, how they can improve things, what they know about their customers. Supporting these conversations is an essential task of leaders. It's not about you, "the leader," developing the mission statement or employing experts to do a detailed analysis of your market strategy. These exercises, because they exclude more people than they include, never work as planned. Only when everyone in our organization understands who we are, and has contributed to this deep understanding, do we gain the levels of commitment and capacity we so desperately need. As a leader supports the processes that help the organization know itself, the organization flourishes.
It's also notable that when we engage in meaningful conversations as an organization, and when we engage our customers, suppliers, community, and regulators in these conversations, everything changes. People develop new levels of trust for one another that show up as more cooperation and more forgiveness. People stop being so arbitrarily demanding when they are part of the process, when they no longer are looking in from the outside trying to get someone's attention.
Moving to Action
Leaders put a premium on action. Organizations that have learned how to think together and that know themselves are filled with action. People are constantly taking initiative and making changes, often without asking or telling. Their individual freedom and creativity become critical resources to the organization. Their local responsiveness translates into a much faster and more adaptable organization overall.
But leaders need to know how to support these self-organizing responses. People do not need the intricate directions, time lines, plans, and organization charts that we thought we had to give them. These are not how people accomplish good work; they are what impede contributions. But people do need a lot from their leaders. They need information, access, resources, trust, and follow-through. Leaders are necessary to foster experimentation, to help create connections across the organization, to feed the system with rich information from multiple sources-all while helping everyone stay clear on what we agreed we wanted to accomplish and who we wanted to be.
Most of us were raised in a culture that told us that the way to manage for excellence was to tell people exactly what they had to do and then make sure they did it. We learned to play master designer, assuming we could engineer people into perfect performance. But you can't direct people into perfection; you can only engage them enough so that they want to do perfect work. For example, a few chemical plants that operate with near-perfect safety records for years at a time achieve these results because their workers are committed to safety. It becomes a personal mission. The regulations, the EPA, and OSHA are all necessary parts of their system, but they can never spell out the route to perfect safety. That comes from hundreds and thousands of workers who understand their role in safety, who understand the whys of safety, who understand that it's up to them.
For all the unscripted events-an irate customer, a leak, a winter storm-we depend on individual initiative. Ultimately we have to rely not on the procedure manuals but on people's brains and their commitment to doing the right thing. If they are acting by rote or regimen, they actually have lost the capacity for excellence.
Imposed control breeds passivity. But people do have to know what right means. They have to know what safety really means. If they know what's right, then we have engaged their intelligence and heart on behalf of the organization.
No More Quick Fixes
Self-organization is a long-term exploration requiring enormous selfawareness and support. This is true partially because it represents such a fundamentally different way of thinking about organization and partially because all changes in organization take much longer than we want to acknowledge. If we've learned anything in the past twenty years it's that there are no quick fixes. For most organizations, meaningful change is at least a three-to-five-year process-although this seems impossibly long for many managers. Yet multiyear strategic change efforts are the hard reality we must face. These things take time. How long, for instance, has your organization been struggling with total quality? At Motorola, it's been more than a decade. How many years have you been working with the concept of teams? (Jack Welch, for one, understood that it would take at least ten years to develop the capacities of GE's people. In the crazed world of the late 1980s, that was a radical insight and a shocking commitment.)
Most CEOs aren't trying simply to squeeze their organizations for short-term profitability or shortsighted outcomes that don't endure. Most leaders would never say, "I just want this organization to perform well for a few quarters." More and more, leaders talk about their legacy. They talk about a deep desire for their work to have meant something. This has been a difficult time in which to be a leader, Leaders are not immune to the terrible destruction we ve visited on many organizations. A senior executive of a major industrial firm, speaking for many, said in a meeting: "I've just destroyed what I spent twenty years creating." Who among us wants to end a career with that realization?
But if we are to develop organizations of greater and enduring capacity, we have to turn to the people of our organization. We have to learn how to encourage the creativity and commitment that they wanted to express when they first joined the organization. We have to learn how to get past the distress and cynicism that's been created in the past several years and use our best talents to figure out how to reengage people in the important work of organizing.
The Leader's Journey
Whenever we're trying to change a deeply structured belief system, everything in life is called into question-our relationships with loved ones, children, and colleagues; our relationships with authority and major institutions. One group of senior leaders, reflecting on the changes they've gone through, commented that the higher you are in the organization, the more change is required of you personally. Those who have led their organizations into new ways of organizing often say that the most important change was what occurred in themselves. Nothing would have changed in their organizations if they hadn't changed.
All this seems true to me, but I think the story is more complex. Leaders managing difficult personal transitions are usually simultaneously opening new avenues for people in the organization. They are moving toward true team structures, opening to more and more participative processes, introducing new ways of thinking. They are setting a great many things in motion inside the organization. These ripple through the system; some work, some don't, but the climate for experimentation is evident. A change here elicits a response there, which calls for a new idea, which elicits yet another response. It's an intricate exchange and co-evolution, and it's nearly impossible to look back and name any one change as the cause of all the others. Organizational change is a dance, not a forced march.
Leaders experience their own personal change most intensely, so I think they report on this as the key process. But what I observe is far more complex. In the end, you can't define a list of activities that were responsible for the organization shifting, and you certainly can't replicate anyone else's exact process for success. But you can encourage the experimentation and tinkering, the constant feedback and learning, and the wonderful sense of camaraderie that emerges as everyone gets engaged in making the organization work better than ever before, even in the most difficult of circumstances.
Sustainability, Not Employability
I believe there is one principle that should be embraced by all organizations as they move into the future, and that is sustainability. How can we endure over time? What about us is worth sustaining long term? This focus flies in the face of current fashion. Our infatuation with fleeting "virtual" organizations misses an important truth: we cannot create an organization that means something to its people if that organization has no life beyond the next project or contract. We cannot promise people, for instance, only three years of employment-with vague assurances of their future employ-ability-and expect the kind of energy and commitment that I've described.
Employability in lieu of mutual commitment is a cop-out. We seem to focus on it as a response to the grave uncertainty we feel about the future. Because we can't predict markets, products, customers, governments, or anything, we decide not to promise anything to anyone. Too many leaders are saying, in effect, "We don't know what the future will be or how to manage this uncertainty, so let's think of our employees as negotiable commodities." What they've really said is, "Let's buy flexibility by giving up loyalty."
Commitment and loyalty are essential in human relationships. So how can we pretend we don't need them at work? The real issue is that we don't know yet how to engage people's loyalty while maintaining the flexibility we require. But leaders should be searching for creative answers to this dilemma, not ignoring it by settling on the non-solution of s-called employability. Employability is a far more destructive practice than we have imagined. The organizations that people love to be in are the ones that have a sense of history and identity and purpose. These are things that people want to work for. The belief that an organization has stood for something in the past is a reason to want to move it into the future.
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• © 1999-2002 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on January 3, 2003
