Top 10 Myths

About Organizational Transformation

By Doug Wesley

10. People resist change. Humans may be the most adaptable creatures on earth. Our adaptability keeps us off the endangered species list. It's human nature to change. In fact, our strong willingness and ability to adapt may even create problems for us. To add stability and structure to our lives, we look outside ourselves. We form secure relationships with organizations that offer us enduring roles and rules. We form or join companies and churches and families and clubs, then we adapt to the expectations of those organizations. From time to time, people come into our organizations and say, "Everybody should change their behavior. Change is good!" Of course, we continue doing what the organization requires of us to maintain our membership in good standing. (Because only rarely do these "change leaders" bother to operate on the company structures and processes that have taught us how to succeed.) Then, those change agents shake their heads and say, "See, people resist change." Phooey!

9. Change is constant. Certainly, everything in the universe is in motion and constantly changing. But people who live by this motto have never experienced a full-bore organizational transformation. There's so much chaos and pain in transformation that no enterprise (or individual) can endure such major change for long. In the midst of a transformation, when all hell is breaking loose, the last thing people need to hear is a naive opinion that this experience will never end.

8. There's nothing new about these changes. Many folks believe that all life is cyclical; that which appears to be new is just an old idea coming around the bend again. This Information Age we're entering is new. Nothing like it has happened in the last three hundred years. The world's technical, social, economic and political systems are changing dramatically. Playing by old rules is a formula for disaster.

7. Mixed messages from the top are a problem. One of the best indicators of a healthy, on-going change is the presence of mixed messages from leaders. New, experimental systems must co-exist with familiar, proven methods. The people at the top of changing companies must support new ways while running the operation according to old rules. Besides, most of them are products of the old system and are struggling with personal change, as well. This all generates mixed messages. When messages from the top are stable and consistent, you can bet there's no real change going on.

6. Training creates organizational change: if people learn new skills, they will apply them to their old jobs in the context of organizational systems that have not changed. Bullfeathers! When organizational systems change, people adapt. If systems don't change, people don't have to adapt. While training works to speed adaptation, it is best used in support of process changes. Investments in training almost never create transformation in a company.

5. The greater the transformation, the more carefully it must be controlled. Transformation is not the domain of traditional managers: the planners and controllers in organizations. Attempts to plan and control a transformation merely limit and impede major change. The craft of management was invented to create stability, not change. Management is in the business of predicting the future and making those predictions come true. It's an inherently defensive activity: preventing bad things from happening. Purposeful transformation is an act of offense: it's designed to make good things happen. People who would transform an organization play by rules far different from the rules of those who need to control it. It turns out that an organization has only a finite capacity to change in a given period of time; under pressure, it will change as much as it can and no more. During a real transformation, personal control is a delusion.

4. Major change requires visionary leadership. It's true that somebody has to change first. If others follow later, perhaps that's leadership. But those who make speeches about the importance of leadership are rarely the first to change themselves. Unless an enterprise has been failing, the people looked to for visionary leadership typically earn their salaries by meeting objectives, staying within budget, and producing a string of successes. These folks typically got their jobs by mastering the old system. George Bush is in the company of many top executives who privately wonder, "What's this vision thing?"

3. Change is a good way to get rid of bad people and dead wood. One of the early signs of real transformation is that people whom the organization has valued begin to leave. Value is always perceived in the context of the organization. People are seen as valuable because they're able to get things done in the organization. Conversely, people who try -- but fail -- to get results in this organization, people who feel frustrated and blocked (then complain about it), are rarely seen as valuable. Smart people who have choices about where they work often see that the company is changing in a way that will make their skills less valuable. A good number of them move to other companies that still value their skills. Who doesn't leave the company? Some people who look forward to the challenge of reinvention. And a lot of others who have no choice, those who can't find a decent job elsewhere. Most of these people end up with the strongest motivations to adapt to the new ways.

2. You can make big changes by changing little things one at a time. Major organizational transformations tend to result from changing everything at once, in a leap rather than in lots of small steps. Unless there's a leap at some point, the organization doesn't transform, it evolves. Most companies that realize they need a transformation don't have time to evolve. The outside world has lurched ahead while they have been planning each year in the context of the last (not of the next.) Companies that need transformation, are often a decade or more behind the changes of their customers and their competitors. You can't leap a chasm in two jumps.

1. The heroes of transformation are the strong, adaptable risk-takers who are willing to give up today's security for tomorrow's promise. No way! When it's all said and done, those who made the transformation a success are ordinary employees. Not those who were stars in the old system. People who make major changes work are typically more worried than courageous, more cautious than daring. They are the people who inhabit the great hump of the bell curve. The magic in a company's transformation is in the personal metamorphosis of individuals who surprise themselves at how much they can learn, of people who push themselves -- and each other -- farther than they thought was possible. Increasingly, we find that such metamorphosis takes place within high-performance teams in which members challenge and support each other as they figure out how to play a brand new game.

Doug Wesley is a professional change agent who works with ChangeCraft™ teams to help business organizations reinvent their work processes, regenerate their structures, and revitalize their corporate cultures so they can thrive. They do this by changing relationships between employees, by creating extraordinary teams that redesign the company's work and by coaching people who are willing to set an example through personal transformation.

Last Updated: 7/6/96 00:49