In the 1990s, surveys began reporting disappointing failures with organization change. CEOs reported that up to 75 percent of their organizational change efforts did not yield the promised results. These change efforts fail to produce what had been hoped for yet always produce a stream of unintended and unhelpful consequences. Leaders end up managing the impact of unwanted effects rather than the planned results that don’t materialize.
Instead of enjoying the fruits of a redesigned production unit, the leader must manage the hostility and broken relationships created by the redesign. Instead of glorying in the new efficiencies produced by restructuring, the leader faces a burned-out and demoralized group of survivors. Instead of basking in a soaring stock price after a merger, leaders scramble frantically to get people to work together peaceably, let alone effectively.
In the search to understand so much failure, a lot of blame gets assigned. One health care executive commented, “We’re under so much stress that all we do is look around the organization to find somebody we can shoot.” (And the executive quoted is a nun!) It’s become commonplace to say that people resist change, that the organization lacks the right people to move it into the future, that people no longer assume responsibility for their work, that people are too dependent, that all they do is whine.
Can we put a stop to all this slander and the ill will it’s creating in our organizations? Most organizational change failures are the result of some deep misunderstandings of who people are and what’s going on inside organizations. If we can clear up these misunderstandings, effectiveness and hope can return to our work. Successful organizational change is possible if we look at our organizational experience with new eyes.
There’s something ironic about our struggles to effect change in organizations. We participate in a world where change is all there is. We sit in the midst of continuous creation, in a universe whose creativity and adaptability are beyond comprehension. Nothing is ever the same twice, really. And in our personal lives, we adapt and change all the time, and we witness this adaptability in our children, friends, colleagues.
It’s become common these days to describe organizations as “organic” and “dynamic.” But do current practices in organizations resemble those used by life? Do recent organizational change processes feel more alive? Organic is a newer buzzword describing the same old organizational processes. These processes remain fundamentally mechanistic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in how we approach organizational change.
Several years ago, we asked a group of engineers and technicians to describe how they went about changing a machine. In neat sequential steps, here’s what they described:
1. Assign a manager.
2. Set a goal that is bigger and better.
3. Define the direct outcomes.
4. Determine the measures.
5. Dissect the problem.
6. Redesign the machine.
7. Implement the adaptation.
8. Test the results.
9. Assign blame.
Sound familiar? Doesn’t this describe most of the organizational change projects you’ve been involved in? The one real difference is that most organizations skip step 8. We seldom test the results of our change efforts. We catch a glimmer of the results that are emerging (the unintended consequences) and realize that they’re not what we had planned or what we sold to senior leadership. Instead of delving into what the results are—instead of learning from this experience—we do everything we can to get attention off the entire project. We spin off into a new project, announce another initiative, reassign managers and teams. Avoiding being the target of blame becomes the central activity rather than learning from what just happened. No wonder we keep failing!
Life changes its forms of organization using an entirely different process. This process can’t be described in neat increments or sequential steps. It occurs in the tangled webs of relationships—the networks—that characterize all living systems. There are no simple stages or easy-to-draw causal loops. Changes occur quickly but invisibly, concealed by the density of the network.
If organizations behave like living systems, the following description of change should sound familiar:
Some part of the system (the system can be any size—an organization, a community, a team, a nation) notices something. It might be in a memo, a chance comment, a news report. It chooses to be disturbed by this. Chooses is the important word here. No one ever tells a living system what should disturb it (even though we try all the time). If it chooses to be disturbed, it takes in the information and circulates it rapidly through its networks. As the disturbance circulates, others grab it and amplify it. The information grows, changes, becomes distorted from the original, but all the time it is accumulating more meaning. Finally, the information becomes so important that the system can’t deal with it. Then and only then will the system begin to change. It is forced, by the sheer meaningfulness of the information, to let go of present beliefs, structures, patterns, values. It cannot use its past to make sense of this new information. It truly must let go, plunging itself into a state of confusion and uncertainty that feels like chaos, a state that always feels terrible.
Having fallen apart, having let go of who it has been, the system is now and only now open to change. It will reorganize using new interpretations, new understandings of what’s real and what’s important. It becomes different because it understands the world differently. And, paradoxically, as is true with all living systems, it changed because it was the only way to preserve itself.
If you contemplate the great difference between these two descriptions of change in a machine and in a living system, you may catch a glimpse of what a large task awaits us. We need to better understand the processes by which a living system transforms itself. From that understanding, we will need to rethink how we approach organizational change. We’d like to describe in more detail these processes used by life and their implications for organizational change practices.
In our lives together, and in our organizations, we must honor the fact that everyone requires the freedom to author their own life. Every person, overtly or covertly, struggles to preserve this freedom to self-create. If you find yourself disagreeing with this statement, think about your experiences with managing others, be they workers, children, or partners. Have you ever had the experience of giving another human being a set of detailed instructions and succeeded in having them follow them exactly? We haven’t met anyone who’s had this desired experience of complete, robotlike obedience to their directives, so we’re assuming that your experience is closer to the following. You give someone clear instructions, written or verbal, and they change it in some way, just a little or a lot. They tweak it, reinterpret it, ignore parts of it, add their own coloration or emphasis. When we see these behaviors, if we’re the manager, we feel frustrated or outraged. Why can’t they follow directions? Why are they so resistant? Why are they sabotaging my good work?
But there’s another interpretation possible, actually inevitable, if we look at this through the lens of living systems. It’s not resistance or sabotage or stupidity we’re observing. It’s the fact that people need to be creatively involved in how their work gets done. We’re seeing people exercising their inalienable freedom to create for themselves. They take our work and recreate it as their work. And this process of re-creation can’t be stopped without deadening that person. The price we pay for obedience is that we forfeit vitality and creativity. We submit to another’s direction only by playing dead. We end up dispirited, disaffected, and lifeless. And then our superiors wonder why we turned out so badly.
You may think this is an outrageously optimistic view of what’s going on in organizations, because undoubtedly you can name those around you who display no creative desires and who only want to be told what to do. But look more closely at their behavior. Is it as robotlike as it first appears? Are they truly passive, or passive-aggressive (just another way some people assert their creativity)? And what are their lives like outside work? How complex is the private life they deal with daily?
Or look at human history. Over and over it testifies to the indomitable human spirit rising up against all forms of oppression. No matter how terrible the oppression, humans find ways to assert themselves. No system of laws or rules can hold us in constraint; no set of directions can tell us exactly how to proceed. We will always bring ourselves into the picture; we will always add our unique signature to the situation. Whether leaders call us innovative or rebellious depends on their comprehension of what’s going on.
The inalienable freedom to create one’s life shows up in other familiar organizational scenes. People, like the rest of life, maintain the freedom to decide what to notice. We choose what disturbs us. It’s not the volume or even the frequency of the message that gets our attention. If it’s meaningful to us, we notice it. Most of us have prepared a presentation, a report, a memo about a particular issue because we knew that this issue was critical. Failing to address this would have severe consequences for our group or organization. But when we presented the issue, we were greeted not with enthusiasm and gratitude but with politeness or disinterest. The issue went nowhere. Others dropped it and moved on to what they thought was important. Most often when we have this experience, we interpret their disinterest as our failure to communicate, so we go back and rewrite the report, develop better graphics, create a jazzier presentation style. But none of this matters. Our colleagues are failing to respond because they don’t share our sense that this is meaningful. This is a failure to find shared significance, not a failure to communicate. They have exercised their freedom and chosen not to be disturbed.
If we understand that this essential freedom to create one’s self is operating in organizations, we can reinterpret behaviors in a more positive light, and we can begin to think about how to work with this great force (rather than deal with the consequences of ignoring its existence.) Here are four very important principles for practice.
Participation Is Not a Choice
We have no choice but to invite people to rethink, redesign, restructure the organization. We ignore people’s need to participate at our own peril. If they’re involved, they will create a future that has them in it, that they’ll work to make happen. We won’t have to engage in the impossible and exhausting tasks of “selling” them the solution, getting them “to enroll,” or figuring out the incentives that might bribe them into compliant behaviors. For the past fifty years, a great bit of wisdom has circulated in the field of organizational behavior: People support what they create. In observing how life organizes, we would restate this maxim as, People only support what they create. Life insists on its freedom to participate and can never be coerced into accepting someone else’s plans.
After many years of struggling with participative processes, you may hear “participation is not a choice” as no solution at all. But we’d encourage you to think about where your time has gone in change projects. If they were not broadly participative—if they failed to engage all those who had a stake in the issue—how much of your time was spent on managing the unintended effects created by people feeling left out or ignored? How many of your efforts were directed at selling a solution that you knew no one really wanted? How much of your energy went into redesigning the redesign of the redesign after people pointed out its glaring omissions, omissions caused by their lack of involvement in the first redesign?
In our experience, enormous struggles with implementation are created every time we deliver changes to the organization rather than figuring out how to involve people in their creation. These struggles are far more draining and prone to failure than what we wrestle with in trying to engage an entire organization. Time and again we’ve seen implementation move with dramatic speed among people who have been engaged in the design of those changes.
As people are engaged in the difficult and messy processes of participation, they are simultaneously creating the conditions—new relationships, new insights, greater levels of commitment—that facilitate more rapid and complete implementation. But because participative processes can overwhelm us with the complexity of human interactions, many leaders grasp instead for quickly derived solutions from small groups that are then pronounced to the whole organization. Leaders keep hoping this will work—it would make life so much easier! But life won’t let it work; people will always resist these impositions. Life, all of life, insists on participation. We can work with this insistence and use it to engage people’s creativity and commitment, or we can keep ignoring it and spend most of our time dealing with all the negative consequences.
Life Always Reacts to Directives; It Never Obeys Them
It never matters how clear or visionary or important the message is. It can only elicit reactions, not straightforward compliance. If we recognize that this principle is always at work, it changes expectations of what can be accomplished with any communication. We can expect reactions as varied as the individuals who hear it. If we can offer our work as an invitation to others to engage with us, rather than as a plan or solution, we will develop good, thinking relationships with colleagues. We’re inviting them to partner with us. And life accepts only partners, not bosses.
This principle seriously affects leader behaviors. Instead of hunting for the disloyal ones or repeating and repeating the directions, she or he realizes that there is a great deal to be learned from differing reactions. If that diversity is explored, the organization develops a richer, wiser understanding of what’s going on. The capacity for learning and growth expands as concerns about loyalty or compliance recede.
As leaders begin to explore the diversity resident in even a small group of people, life asks something else of them. No two reactions will be identical; no two people or events will look the same. Leaders have to forego any desire they have for repetition or sameness, whether it be of persons or processes. Even in industries that are heavily regulated or focused on finely detailed procedures (such as nuclear power plants, hospitals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals), if people only repeat the procedures mindlessly, those procedures eventually fail.
Mistakes and tragedies in these environments bear witness to the effects of lifeless behaviors and indifference bred from repetition.
This is by no means a suggestion to abandon procedures or standardization. But it is crucial to notice that there is no such thing as a humanproof procedure. We have to honor the fact that people always need to include themselves in how a procedure gets done. They accomplish this by understanding the reasoning behind the procedure or by knowing that they are sanctioned to adjust it if circumstances change. We all need to see that there is room for our input, for us, in how our work gets done.
Again, life doesn’t give us much choice here. Even if we insist on obedience, we will never gain it for long, and we only gain it at the cost of what we wanted most—loyalty, intelligence and responsiveness.
We Do Not See “Reality”; We Each Create Our Own Interpretation of What’s Real We see the world through who we are, or, as expressed by the poet Michael Chitwood: “What you notice becomes your life.” Since no two people are alike, no two people have exactly the same interpretation of what’s going on. Yet at work and at home we act as if others see what we see and assign the same meaning as we do to events. We sit in a meeting and watch something happen and just assume that most people in that room, or at least those we trust, saw the same thing. We might even engage them in some quick conversation that seems to confirm our sense of unanimity:
“Did you see what went on in there!?”
“I know, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
“Really!”
But if we stopped to compare further, we’d soon discover significant and useful differences in what we noticed and how we interpreted the situation.
It’s not about arguing about who’s right and who’s wrong. If we talk with colleagues to share perceptions, if we expect and even seek out the great diversity of interpretations that exist, we learn and change. Biologist Francisco Varela redefined organizational intelligence: It isn’t the ability to solve problems that makes an organization smart. It is the ability of its members to enter into a world whose significance they share. Everyone in the group has to feel that what is occurring is significant—even as they have different perspectives.
Entering into a world of shared significance is only achieved by engaging in conversations with colleagues. Not debates or oratories, but conversation that welcomes in the unique perspective of everyone there. If we remain curious about what someone else sees and refrain from convincing them of our interpretation, we develop a richer view of what might be going on. And we also create collegial relations that enable us to work together with greater speed and effectiveness. When any of us feel invited to share our perspective, we repay that respect and trust with commitment and friendship.
A very important paradox becomes evident. We don’t have to agree on an interpretation or hold identical values in order to agree on what needs to be done. We don’t have to settle for the lowest common denominator, or waste hours and hours politicking for our own, decided-on-ahead-of-time solution. As we sit together and listen to so many differing perspectives, we get off our soapboxes and open to new ways of thinking. We have allowed these new perspectives to disturb us, and we’ve changed. And surprisingly, this enables us to agree on a concerted course of action and to support it wholeheartedly. This paradox flies in the face of how we’ve tried to reach group consensus, but it makes good sense from a living system’s perspective. We all need to participate, and when we’re offered that opportunity, we then want to work with others. We’ve entered into a world whose significance is shared by all of us, and because of that process we’ve developed a lot of energy for deciding together what to do next.
To Create Better Health in a Living System, Connect It to More of Itself
When a system is failing, or performing poorly, the solution will be discovered within the system if more and better connections are created. The solution is always to bring the system together so that it can learn more about itself from itself. A troubled system needs to start talking to itself, especially to those it didn’t know were even part of itself. The value of this practice was quite evident at the beginning of the customer service revolution, when talking to customers and dealing with the information they offered became a potent method for stimulating the organization to new levels of quality. Without customer feedback, workers couldn’t know what or how to change. Quality standards rose dramatically once customers were connected to the system.
This principle embodies a profound respect for systems. It says that they are capable of changing themselves, once they are provided with new and richer information. It says that they have a natural tendency to move toward better functioning or health. It assumes that the system already has within it most of the expertise that it needs. This principle also implies that the critical task for a leader is to increase the number, variety and strength of connections within the system. Bringing in remote or ignored members, providing access across the system, and through those connections stimulating the creation of new information—all of these become primary tasks for fostering organizational change. These four principles provide very clear indicators of how, within our organizations, we can work with life’s natural tendency to learn and change. As we all were taught by an advertisement many years ago, we can’t fool Mother Nature. If we insist on developing organizational change processes suited for machines and ignore life’s need to participate in things that concern it, then we can only anticipate more frequent and costly failures.
The organization found in living systems is always highly complex. But this complexity is obtained by an organizing process that is simple and that honors the individual’s need to participate. The complexity is the result of individuals interpreting, in the moment, a few simple principles. These simple principles are not negotiable and cannot be ignored. But how they get interpreted depends on the immediate circumstance and the individuals involved at that time. Everyone is accountable to the principles, yet everyone is free to figure out how to apply them. This process of organizing honors individual freedom, engages creativity and individuality, yet simultaneously achieves an orderly and coherent organization.
From such simple agreements complex organizations arise. Structures, norms, networks of communication develop from the constant interactions among system members as they interpret the principles in different circumstances. Sophisticated organizational forms appear, but always these materialize from the inside out. They are never imposed from the outside in.
We humans have spent so many years determining the details of the organization—its structures, values, communication channels, vision, standards, measures. Living systems have all these features and details, but they originate differently. As we think of organizations as living systems, we don’t discard our concern for such things as standards, measures, values, organizational structures, plans. We don’t give up any of these. But we do need to change our beliefs about where these things come from. In a living system, they are generated as people figure out what will work well in the current situation. In a machine these features are designed outside and then engineered in.
We can easily discern whether we are approaching organizations as a living system or as a machine by asking, Who created any aspect of the organization? We know we need structure, plans, measures, but who gets to create them? The source of authorship makes all the difference.
The junior high school principal who created a complex and orderly system from a few simple principles is worth looking at again. Most school administrators fear adolescents and the typical junior high school has unending rules and procedures to police the hormone-crazed tendencies of early teens. But this junior high school of eight hundred students successfully operated from three rules. Everyone—students, teachers, staff—knew the rules and used them to deal with all situations. While disarmingly simple, these three were all that were needed: (1) Take care of yourself; (2) take care of each other; (3) take care of this place. Few of us would believe that you could create an orderly group of adolescents, let alone a good learning environment, from such simple rules.
Simple rules define what we have decided is significant to us as a community or organization. They contain our agreements about what we will pay attention to, what we will let disturb us. In the case of these students, when they returned to the school after being evacuated for a fire, wet shoes and muddy floors were something they quickly noticed, because they had already agreed to “take care of this place.” When they returned and took their shoes off in the lobby, they were creating a specific response to that general rule.
In deciding on what to emphasize in this essay, we knew that you required even more freedom than these students to design organizational change processes that would work best in your unique situation. Therefore, we chose to give you principles to work with, principles that evoke life’s capacity for change. As with all principles, once they are agreed upon, they need to be taken very seriously. They are the standards to which we hold ourselves accountable. But clear principles provide only standards; they never describe the details of how to do something. They do not restrict our creativity; they simply guide our designs and create coherence among our many diverse efforts. Their clarity serves as an invitation to be creative. Think about how many different approaches and techniques you could create that would be congruent with the four principles stated here. How many different forms of practice could materialize as people in your organization invented change processes that honored these principles?
No two change processes need look the same. In fact this is an impossibility—no technique ever materializes in the same way twice. Nothing transfers unchanged. (If it did, no one would be struggling with the issue of organizational change. We’d have found what worked somewhere else and successfully imported it.) But if we hold ourselves accountable to these principles, we can create our own unique change processes, confident that we are working with life rather than denying it. We will have been guided by these principles to create processes that take advantage of the creativity and desire to contribute that reside in the vast majority of the people in our organizations.
We’d like to invite you to experiment with this approach and these four principles. As with all good experiments, this means that you try something new, and then you watch what happens and learn from the results. Good experimentation is a process, making little adjustments as the results come in, trying to discover what’s responsible for the effects that show up. So for whatever you start in motion, it’s essential to watch it carefully as it unfolds, involving many eyes in the observing.
You might experiment with these four principles in a project design team, either one that’s just starting or one that’s trying to rescue a change process that’s not working well. See what actions and strategies can be created as you hold yourselves accountable to these principles. Think through the implications of these principles with others in the organization. Experiment with a design that feels congruent with the principles, and once that design is operating, observe carefully where it needs to be modified or changed. Stay with it as an experiment rather than as the solution.
A second experiment can occur in every meeting, task force, or event in your organization. This experiment requires the discipline to ask questions. Each question opens up an inquiry. The questions keep people focused on critical issues. Here are four possible questions to consider asking:
1. Who else needs to be here?
2. What just happened?
3. Can we talk?
4. Who have we become?
The simplicity of these questions may lead you to believe they’re not sufficient or important, but think about the types of inquiry they invite. Every time we ask, “Who else needs to be here?” we’re called to notice the system of relationships that is pertinent to the issue at hand. We’re willing to be alert to who’s missing, and the earlier we notice who’s missing, the sooner we can include them. This question helps us move to broader participation gradually and thoughtfully, as the result of what we’re learning about the issue and the organization. It’s an extremely simple but powerful method for becoming good systems thinkers and organizers.
Similarly, “What just happened?” is a question that leads to learning from our experience. Since living systems always react but never obey, this question focuses us on what we might learn if we look at the reactions that just surfaced. The question moves us away from blame and instead opens us to learning a great deal about who this system is and what grabs its attention.
When we ask, “Can we talk?” we’re acknowledging that others perceive the world differently from us. Imagine leaving a typical meeting where ego battles predominated. Instead of posturing, grumbling, or politicking, what if we went up to those we disagreed with and asked to talk with them. What if we were sincerely interested in trying to see the world from their perspective? Would this enable us to work together more effectively?
“Who have we become?” is a query that keeps us noticing how we are creating ourselves—not through words and position papers, but through our actions and reactions from moment to moment. All living systems spin themselves into existence because of what they choose to notice and how they choose to respond. This is also true of human organizations, so we need to acknowledge that we are constantly creating the organization through our responses. To monitor our own evolution, we need to ask this question regularly. Without such monitoring, we may be shocked to realize who we’ve become while we weren’t watching. And for organizations that put in place a few essential rules, like that junior high school, everyone periodically needs to review how they’re doing. Are the core principles discernible in our actions? Are they creating the organization that people envisioned?
Questions require discipline in asking them, a discipline we seldom practice. No matter how simple the questions, we most often rush past them. We feel compelled to act rather than to inquire. But by now, many of us in organizations want to turn away from this history of act! act! act! that leads to no learning and so much wasted energy. All other forms of life stay constantly alert and responsive—they learn continuously, as science writer James Gleick notes: “Life learned itself into existence.” Physicist and author Fritjof Capra often states that there is no distinction between living and learning, “A living system is a learning system.” If we don’t begin to seriously focus on learning in our organizations, there is no way we can bring them to life.
Throughout this essay, we’ve stressed the freedom to create that all life requires. We hope that you will feel inspired to exercise your freedom and creativity to experiment with some of the ideas, principles, and questions we’ve noted. We need each other’s best thinking and most courageous experiments if we are to create a future worth wanting.