Why is change so hard?

Obviously I’ve been thinking a lot about change recently, and in particular why change is so hard, and I was reminded of a great book I read a while back by Paul Watzlawick et al entitled Change, Principles of Problem Formation and Problem Resolution. This work forms the intellectual basis of the very successful “Behavioural Therapy” movement and, despite the title, it is very readable. The gist of their argument is that, in human relations, very often the apparent solution is really the problem, so in treating depressives, telling them to snap out of it usually makes the problem worse; trying to discipline “problem children” only makes them rebel more, and so on.

This has always struck me as very true of organisations where very often people stick to strategies even when they are manifestly not working. It seems that the hardest thing is to put your hand up and say look we need to do things differently. There seems to me to be three main organisational pathologies:

1. Refusal to appreciate the real situation

This is the common situation where management would rather deal in fantasies than acknowledge what is really going on. For instance they refuse to tackle a particular division of the company that is letting the brand down badly because so-and-so would get offended, or the unions won’t like it.

Sometimes this can reach the level of doctrine. When I was at DDB in New York I worked on the Amtrak account, Amtrak is the passenger rail service in the US. Now it was perfectly obvious to us that, with the exception of one or two shorter East Coast routes, Amtrak could no longer compete as a transport option with the car and plane. When we looked into who was using the train we found it was people who liked trains, it was a leisure purchase for them. We recommended, therefore, that Amtrak gear most of its marketing and product development around making train travel a tourism play. The recommendation fell on completely deaf ears, in fact Amtrak management were offended, and one particular meeting ended up in a shouting match and was cut short. The point we had not taken into account was that management’s self image was bound up in Amtrak being a transport mode (and to be fair so was much of their Federal funding). What we were suggesting was, literally, heresy to these “rail-guys.”

2. Management by Utopia

The other side of the same coin is the all too common instance of a new CEO coming into a company and proclaiming a bold new vision for the company without really understanding where the company is now. This can lead to problems such as neglect of the existing business, paralysis because the staff doesn’t know what to do, and loss of customer trust.

In the worst case Management by Utopia can destroy a brand because Utopia is not actually achievable and therefore the company can totally lose its self-belief and raison d’etre. A good case of this is the famous Iceland story; you know the one about the new CEO who tried to make Iceland a Mecca of frozen organic food!

3. Hypocrisy and just plain lying

At least the people at Amtrak came by their dysfunction honestly, and the guy at Iceland believed in something. What is harder to take is the “professional manager” who believes only in CV-building. This is the type who makes big pronouncements, often jumping on the latest management fad, and then actually does nothing. Sometimes doing nothing is a good option, but the danger of accompanying it with big pronouncements is that staff can get disillusioned. You probably know the type of guy I’m talking about; the one who says there’s no “I” in team, but you better do what I want or you’re fired; the one who talks about flat structures but keeps the executive dining room!

Long live democracy!

The eminent MIT Economics Professor Michael Piore has an elegant description of the political history of mankind; according to him we start off in bands, progress to kingdoms and then end up in democracies. In other words power is first of all amassed by the state and then distributed again to the citizen, and this is all driven by technology, particularly communications technology.

He doesn’t suggest what comes after democracy, apathy maybe, but he does suggest that commerce may evolve along very similar lines. Commerce starts with guilds, groups of workers that band together to further business and protect their monopoly, then come “companies”, which in their most perfect manifestation can make and break national economies. Guilds are like bands, and companies are like kingdoms, but what, commercially, is like “democracy”?

I have two boys, twins, aged 13. One of their favourite games on X-Box Live is Call of Duty, a “first person” war game in which you are a member of a platoon fighting in the Second World War. Your comrades-in-arms could be boys from your class or 30 year old women from Hong Kong, it doesn’t matter. I hear the boys chattering away on their headphones, barking out orders, telling people to look out or get down. When they die, perhaps shot by the son of a Polish sheet metal worker or an Ecuadorian horse rancher, their on-screen avatar lies down for a beat and then jumps up and starts again.

Play is important, it helps to socialise children and it is demonstrably important to their cognitive development. Notoriously in Victorian England boy-children were taught by their games that dying for King and country was valorous and honourable. My boy-children are still playing war games, but what they are learning is that it’s possible to collaborate, in real time, with someone on the other side of the world as easily as your brother in the same room. Will they be as wedded to an office as I am, probably not?

Wireless beach-working has been a trope of IT advertising for a few years yet, but it’s not enough that technology makes things possible, the users of that technology have to want what’s possible and be comfortable with what’s possible. I suspect that true “democracy” will come to the agency world at least when people not only no longer have to gather together to do brain work, but don’t even see the point of doing so.