Epilogue: The Science of Effective Action
So much to do, so little that needs to be done
How little can you get away with doing?
That’s the question every decision maker should continually be asking, provided it means, “how little can we get away with doing to achieve the same result or better as quickly and sustainably as possible, with the least risk, resistance, disruption and drain on corporate time and resources?” That has been the theme of the series of seven short articles on culture change in large organizations that finished last week. This week we provide an Epilogue to the series.
—The Editors of Change
Epilogue: The Science of Effective Action
How Change Has Changed
There are countless ways, along a large number of dimensions, in which the radically new approaches to culture change we have been reviewing—all based on our new epistemology we have called “E2”—differ from the more traditional, still almost universally deployed approaches to culture change, all grounded in the centuries-old epistemology, “E1.”
The new approaches to change we briefly surveyed are not a variation on the theme of the old approaches. They have nothing in common with them, and they never truly overlap.
It would take many volumes to sketch out the differences between these new approaches to culture change, on the one hand, and the still almost universal, traditional approaches. My aim in the series of seven short articles that finished last week and to which today’s post is an Epilogue, has, however, been far less ambitious.
I have been concerned only to say a little about how I understand organizational culture (there is much more to say), and to give a broad overview of the rather different kinds of approaches to culture change in large organizations that follow from this fresh new way of looking at things.
Most obviously, the hallmark of these new approaches to changing the corporate culture is minimalism: achieving the maximum desired cultural transformation across the board—sustainably, all at once, and as quickly, easily and cheaply as possible, with the minimum possible risk and without disruption to ongoing work—by means of the smallest possible actions that can be taken immediately, and with the outcome being ready to be assessed within days or weeks instead of months or years.
The Science of Effective Action
When cybernetics, “the science of justified intervention” is correctly applied by decision makers to the effective organization of enterprise, that applied science, embodied in practical approaches to managing complexity and catalytically releasing change, might be described as “the science of effective action.”
The point is to identify the very least that the CEO, or his leadership team, or senior management can do that would be sufficient to bring about the desired result.
The pioneering cybernetician Ross Ashby, famously remarked in an aside in his classic Introduction to Cybernetics (a foundational theoretical treatise cunningly disguised as a textbook), “If the reader feels that these studies are somewhat abstract and devoid of applications, he should reflect on the fact that [they] are simply the foundations of the theory of How to get your Own Way. Few subjects can be richer in applications than that!”1
This view of change also suggests that change is implicit and inevitable, that it does not require any particular process for it to occur, and, above all, that it does not occur in time and does not take time to occur. True second-order change or “transformation,” when it occurs (and unlike the everyday “more-of-the-same” type of change), takes place in an all-or-none fashion, in the blink of an eye.
“Change Management” is an Oxymoron, and so is “Bringing About Change”
“Bringing about change” is, from this point of view, a totally misleading and inappropriate expression. Change is not something we can ever bring about. Deliberate change, from our E2 perspective, is a matter of only triggering and releasing and steering. The potential for change is assumed to be already there, implicitly, immanently, and releasable imminently. Nothing needs to be added. Everyone and everything is already fine the way it is, the way they are; no one needs fixing or developing or reforming.
Change cannot be managed, because properly speaking, and properly achieved, it happens all at once, in one fell swoop, and should happen overnight, and therefore occurs far too quickly for it to be noticed, let alone managed.
What is called for in transforming organizational culture, as in all forms of change in organizations, is nothing very dramatic, even if the result is so dramatic and so fast that no one really can quite remember afterwards how dramatically different everything was before. If all goes well, it should be like waking from a dream when you can’t even remember the dream that, while you were in the midst of it, had you so perplexed, distressed or terrified. But once you’re awake, you find yourself relieved and wondering what all the fuss had been about.
Patterns need to shift, but that only means that we need to do something different instead of more-of-the-same. To release people to do something different may mean only lifting some one or two or three of those holographic, across-the-board constraints that operate in the form of organizational contexts.
To shift those contexts never—and I use the word advisedly—requires anything more than to delicately manipulate the key context-markers on which the undesirable patterns depend for their continued existence.
And that is only a matter of selectively, judiciously introducing typically inconspicuous little pieces of communication. Sometimes all that is necessary is to gently undermine a single limiting presupposition, so that something different can now, clearly, be done.
What is called for, in short, is not some organizational equivalent of a total personality change, nor a full-scale revolution, trumpets blaring, guns blazing. What is called for is only the right little moves, at the right time, and in the right place.
Not a wholesale change in the attitudes and behaviour of everyone in the organization but, here and there, small, selective shifts in managerial action. Not so much “Change” with a capital C, but, here and there, a redirection of our endeavours—a redirection which swiftly changes everything for the better, once and for all.
In an earlier article in this series, we posed the question, “why bother transforming organizational culture?” Our answer, which I hope by now makes a little more sense, was, “because it's your quickest, easiest, laziest option.” Almost invariably in our experience, it is.
This post has been adapted from “How Change has Changed: Organizational Culture and Justified Intervention,” by James Wilk
© Copyright 1987, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics, London: Methuen (1964), p. 243
Hope you will not hold to this minimalist approach in writing the newletter.
more please!