From the Archives: Some Common Myths About Change (1990) Part I

A Paper Presented to the British Academy of Management Annual Conference, Glasgow, September 1990. In three parts.

Introduction from the Editor

Most people think that creating change takes time as well as an enormous amount of effort, and that we should expect to encounter resistance to change, and we have good reason for thinking so based on our experience.  But ultimately, the notions that change is inherently time-consuming, effortful, and resisted are not proven, established facts, but assumptions deriving from looking only at certain kinds of change.  If we assume that a change must take a long time, be hard to bring about, and meet resistance, we’ve already made sure that our solution will not be fast, simple, or accepted. 

The notions that change can be fast, simple, and easy, rather than slow, complex and hard, and that any change that is introduced has to be welcomed or not noticed at all in order to be permanent are central to our view of change.  And we think that just the simple act of considering that change can be this way already widens the range of possibilities for change-making. 

We think that some changes in the world are too important to be attempted using approaches that require time and effort, and which will meet resistance, just because it’s assumed that it has to be done that way.  That’s part of our reason for starting this Substack publication.

This is the first of a three-part series originally delivered as a single lecture, “Some Common Myths about Change.”  Together, these three installments give an overview of myths about change, our theory of change, and how to achieve rapid, across-the-board organizational change.

What we consider “myths” may sound to some of you like truths, and if you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to start a discussion in the Comments.

–Ellen

Some Common Myths About Change (1990) Part I

Our mythical conception of change and its origins

The trouble ain’t that people are ignorant, it’s that they know so much that ain’t so.
— Henry Wheeler Shaw 

1. Man the Manipulator 

From the beginning, man has been a manipulator. His opposable thumb and forefinger, making possible the deft manipulation of objects to a degree achieved by no other species on earth, has enabled man from earliest times to be a toolmaker and tool-user, and, as is well known, has long been accorded nearly as much credit as his unique faculty for speech in marking homo sapiens out from the other animals and in making possible the creation of civilization. Certainly, however intelligent or even, for aught we know, loquacious the dolphin or the whale may be, it is unimaginable that they should have been able to construct a civilization in the absence of man’s unique capacity to manipulate the physical environment and shape nature and, by extension, events, according to his will. 

For it was less a single leap than a long-wrought concatenation of small steps that led from the manipulation of the natural environment to the manipulation of the man-made, artifactual environment and thence of the social environment.  Man was of necessity a mechanical engineer, a chemical engineer, a civil engineer, and indeed a social engineer long before the dawn of history and before the conditions could be established even to house the affairs of what is nevertheless correctly referred to as the world’s oldest profession.  For these multifarious engineering skills and practices were not yet confined to restricted professions or guilds but were the common property of the race, the very things that marked man out and made him man. 

This profoundly human faculty for manipulation, the skillful handling or managing of things or affairs to suit one’s selected purpose, was the general faculty of which the ability to physically manipulate objects with the hands was but one sub-faculty, albeit, naturally, the first to appear. Early man could knock the spots off bits of flint, but he only did so in the first place because he wanted sharp arrowheads to knock the spots off his prey. This—ubiquitously human—intelligent bending of things and events in pursuit of conscious purpose, especially when such purpose was to a large degree collective (which is to say, shared) could, arguably, be taken as definitive of civilization itself.

2. False Impressions 

But civilization, need it be said, did not come easy. Man’s unique form of adaptation to the environment, based on adapting parts of the environment to himself, required a continual, bitter struggle to wrest comfort from nature. As bits of flint were shaped into arrowheads, and branches and arrowheads were shaped into artillery, as boulders were shaped into building stones and building stones into cathedrals, trees into sailing ships and ships into navies, earth into bricks and bricks into homes and homes into communities and communities into nations—all over tens of thousands of years, there were at every juncture countless thousands of gaps to be bridged, seemingly insuperable obstacles to be overcome, problems to be framed and solved, tools to be devised and made, scarce resources to be wrought from the elements, technologies to be invented, skills to be learned and passed on, crafts to be honed, enterprises to be managed, lessons to be learned, false assumptions to be identified and overturned, carping skeptics to be silenced, opponents to be routed, disasters to be written off to experience, and in human toil and blood there were often terrible prices to be paid. 

All this was bound to have made some impression on the race that had endured it, and that was still here both because and in spite of it. Nature was seen as a reluctant and stubborn mistress, whose favours had to be extorted from her by every form of persuasion, always by cunning, and often by brute force. Stability was always the order of the day, the status quo ante. Progress consisted in replacing an existing state of affairs with a more desirable state of affairs; but whilst such change was often desirable, and frequently possible even where it had not at first appeared to be, change was nevertheless invariably time-consuming and labour-intensive, and, inevitably, very, very difficult and won only against the most stubborn resistance confronting man from every quarter. His fellow men, like nature itself, could be made to conform to his will, but only by using force and cunning to overcome their natural resistance to any change whatsoever, which they shared with everything else in nature. Whether as mechanical engineer or as social engineer, man’s cunning consisted in the development of a million and one highly specialized techniques and skills for overcoming the particular resistances of particular objects of his intended purposes. 

In sum, there were a number of basic features of the universe that had impressed men in general, as a natural consequence of long aeons of hard-won success. Now these things that people were impressed by were, by their nature, so general and so universally conceded that they would not normally have been consciously held or explicitly formulated. These were tacit assumptions or presuppositions that formed part of the conceptual air men breathed, merely taken for granted, and yet informing and inspiring all of their enterprises, large and small. 

First of all, men were impressed by the natural, inherent stability of all things and all states of affairs, a kind of universal, natural inertia or resistance-to-change that called for neither surprise nor explanation, either in general or on specific occasions of its manifestation. Second, they were impressed by how difficult change was to bring about, how it required an enormous amount of human (and at times seemingly superhuman) effort and consumed large quantities of energy, and how it took a great deal of time, patience, and persistence, with more longstanding problems or situations requiring correspondingly longer periods of time to put them to rights. Third, when, as expected, resistance was encountered, men were impressed by the way in which breaking through that resistance required the devising of new and ever more sophisticated and specialist tools and techniques, or the application of the same tools and techniques but with greater force or persistence, or both. Fourth, men were impressed by the way in which change, however revolutionary, always comes about gradually, step by logical step. 

Now these impressions, however self-evident and irresistible they may have seemed to be for millennia, were false impressions. They were false in three senses. They were false first in the sense that they were unwarranted, inadequate, misleading, and limiting assumptions, which, whilst not falsifiable in any strict empirical sense (being of the nature of first principles or postulates), led nonetheless to a host of false conclusions to which the alternative available assumptions did not likewise give rise. In other words, these were fallacious impressions. They were false in a second sense, in being of the nature of false gods, to whom obeisance was unwittingly paid and to whom unnecessary sacrifices were made. In the more recent history of civilization, that is from the Greeks onwards, few have questioned their divinity or authority until our own time. There were exceptional heretics of course, most notably, perhaps, the melancholy Heraclitus, but no real notice was taken of him. Indeed, the veracity and vivacity of these impressions have so far persisted, relatively undiminished, right up to the Twenty-First Century. They purported to offer the natural light of many millennia’s experience, but these conclusions were premature, and hardly touched by the insufficiently appreciated breakthroughs of the Seventeenth Century and mid-Twentieth Century, which should have provided a clearer, truer, and more natural fight. And so these impressions were false in a third sense, that of a false dawn.

3. The Mythological Matters 

Such, in brief, was the background against which grew up the commonplace myths about change which still hamstring our every action. Those of us who make our living advising corporate top management on bringing about change find ourselves running up against these myths at every turn. 

In what follows, I shall briefly survey the most common myths about change that are part and parcel of the traditional view sketched above. If, as agents of change, we can free ourselves of these myths, and challenge some of our most deeply held and therefore tacit assumptions about change, we can open up whole new worlds of unsuspected possibilities for effective action. For it is these unquestioned myths above all which blind us to the options before us, and bind us to the limited options our limiting presuppositions permit us to perceive. 

I shall survey these myths under four headings: the ubiquitousness of stability, the technological provenance of change, the occurrence of change in time, and the relevance of the past. I shall then offer a brief sketch of an alternative view which makes it possible to reliably bring about major transformations by means of small, precisely targeted interventions.

4. The Ubiquitousness of Stability 

The traditional view, as we have seen, takes it for granted that stability is the normal, natural order of things, everywhere present, in which change occurs locally as an anomalous or aberrant phenomenon, a disruption of the pre-existing stable order, requiring explanation. Change was always the figure, stability the ground. 

Of course it was not properly understood until relatively recent times that change and stability were not simply contraries. With the advent of thermodynamics in the last century and of modern, organismic physiology in the early part of the Twentieth Century, it gradually became apparent that stability at one level of description was dependent upon continuous changes at another, lower level. For example, the maintenance of a stable body temperature required a host of changes in the dilation of blood vessels, in perspiration, shivering, and so on. More recently still, the notions of metastability and ultrastability and, above all, the parallel development of the disciplines of cybernetics and of control engineering helped to clarify further the relationship between stability and the changes on which it depended. The most theoretically fertile contrary that can be found for ‘change’ turns out to be ‘persistence’ not ‘stability’; but in any case, the latter pair of notions, on the traditional view, were more often than not conflated. Persistence/stability was general and all-pervasive; change was specific and exceptional. 

The mythical ubiquitousness of persistence/stability has had a number of more specific mythical manifestations.

4.1 The Noteworthiness of Change 

Change, by definition, is generally regarded as noteworthy. Newspaper headlines loudly proclaim news of the latest changes. For a time, in 1989, every day brought fresh headlines of still further startling changes in Eastern Europe. Somehow, there were no newspaper headlines appearing day-in, day-out over the previous half a century proclaiming, “Stalinism in Eastern Europe Persists Another Day,” or “Still No Change in the Soviet Communist Party.” 

Human beings, like all animals, are specifically constructed to respond to and take note of changes in the environment. Indeed, whatever persists unchanged in our sensory field soon drops out of awareness. An unchanging image projected onto the retina in such a way that it is unaffected by head or eye movements becomes invisible within seconds. All of our sensory apparatus, on which our survival depends, is geared up for the registering of changes and only changes. It is perhaps only natural for us, therefore, being the kind of organisms we are, to regard change as noteworthy. We may speculate that this may even be the biological basis of our wider predisposition to believe in the myth of the ubiquitousness of persistence/stability.

4.2 Change Must be Explained 

If change is noteworthy, it is worthy of attempts at explanation. When 1989 saw dramatic changes in the complexion of Eastern Europe, the newspapers were as one in crying out “Why?” and were quick to supply their own answers, however specious. Under the influence of the myth of the ubiquitousness of stability, people, confronted with a change, and even more so when that change is for the worse, are quick to seek ‘causes’ and find explanations for this latest putative anomaly.

4.3 Persistence Does Not Cry Out for Explanation 

The other side of the same coin is the failure to regard persistence as crying out for explanation. To take the same example again, how is it that, amidst the extraordinary changes of the Twentieth Century in every area of life, the antiquated, basically Stalinist Soviet system managed to persist in Eastern Europe, virtually unchanged and unchallenged, right up until the late 1980s? Such persistence was quite a remarkable achievement. And the point is that persistence is always a remarkable achievement—which is precisely what the prevailing myth clouds from our view.

4.4 Change is Difficult, Resistance-to-change Universal 

If the natural tendency of all things, as this myth holds, is persistence/stability, it is only to be expected that change, which must require one to go against that natural tendency, will be difficult. If things tend to persist as they are, resistance-to-change will be more-or-less universal, and will need to be overcome by brute force or by cunning manipulation. 

5. The Technological Provenance of Change 

Most pernicious of all the myths of change in its direct and sweeping effects, the myth of the technological provenance of change has in our own time achieved its apotheosis. In its baldest form, the myth is simple to state: Whilst nature inherently tends towards persistence, change is the product of technology. 

Change of any kind, according to this myth, has its origin in, and derives its specific properties from, the nature of the technology—the tools or techniques—brought to bear in achieving it. Change is caused by, shaped by, steered by, determined by the change efforts applied. Whether those efforts take the form of brute force or manipulative cunning, or of a combination of the two, it is those efforts—our tools and their skillful and assiduous application to the matter at hand—that determine our success or failure in bringing change about. We shape nature according to our will, and if we are forceful enough, or clever enough, we can overcome every specific form of resistance we may encounter. 

Change is something we bring about. We cause it to happen. We manage it. Resistance is naturally encountered but is overcome by force and perseverance. Whether we succeed or fail, the result is all down to our own efforts—our determination, our skill, and the sharpness of the specialist tools in our toolkit for overcoming the specific resistances of people and things.  So runs the myth.

5.1 Change-in-general Considered a Non-Subject 

It was only to be expected, against the background that we have sketched so far, that until our own time few people bothered to seek a general understanding of change as a means of achieving practical ends. It was persistence/stability that was believed to be general, as we have discussed, and that required no special explanation and so no special understanding, or so it was believed.

As for change, it was always so specific, and, if anything, there needed to be a specific theory of change to cover each specific kind of change that was being attempted. Change in general was simply an abstraction of little interest, and, it was thought, of little consequence. Change-in-general was not recognized as a phenomenon to which attention could fruitfully be given or of which any general understanding of practical value could be gained. It was, in a word, a non-subject. Black ravens could be a proper object of study, but non-black non-ravens could not, and the subject of change-in-general would no doubt have been similarly regarded until very recently had anyone ventured to propose it. 

5.2 The Thaumatology of Change 

As a consequence, a very large number of interesting phenomena in all fields of human endeavour simply went unnoticed, for there was no frame within which the connections between them could be revealed, and they appeared instead as so many unrelated, random flukes, signifying nothing. I like to use ‘the thaumatology of change’ as a shorthand expression to refer to the way in which whole classes of phenomena appear to be miraculous to the uninitiated, but become readily explicable once an appropriate explanatory framework for change is available. 

To take an example or two, no one particularly noticed, or thought much of it if they did, that oftentimes widespread changes of an across-the-board nature tended to occur by all-or-none leaps rather than by a series of logical, incremental steps. Or that longstanding problems oftentimes resolved themselves rapidly and spontaneously, without any dramatic human intervention. In the latter instances, pre-Enlightenment man at least had the decency to dismiss such instances as miracles and to remain temporarily agog, in contrast to the more disrespectful kind of dismissal with which such phenomena were greeted in more recent centuries, by more ‘enlightened’ men who considered them hardly even worth ignoring. 

Instances in which change occurred easily, rapidly, and effortlessly were not noticed, as attention was drawn to the allegedly more interesting (and doubtless—to this day—more potentially profitably exploitable) situations in which change was proving difficult and problems intractable. And only in rare and celebrated moments in the history of human progress were solutions and developments from one sphere of human experience applied to bring about improvements in areas that were perceived as being virtually completely unrelated, and on most occasions the bemused discoverer found himself branded a creative genius on account of his revelation of the blatantly obvious. On other occasions, of course, the obviousness of the connection as it appeared with hindsight was a matter of such embarrassment to his fellows that the discoverer’s findings were dismissed as having been obvious all along and therefore of no particular credit to him. 

5.3 Change is Always Sui Generis 

According to the common view we have been considering, indeed, each specific variety of resistance encountered in each specific kind of situation called for the specific ‘expert’ understanding required to devise a specific new tool or technique or application to bring about the specific change sought. Change was always something sui generis. 

The reason every form of change to be achieved was assumed to be—self-evidently!—in a class of its own, is that each such class has itself always been demarcated by the sets of tools at our disposal. Each class of problems is the class of problems amenable to a given class of known solutions. This change to be brought about is essentially a change of type X, that is, the type that is achieved by using X-tools. This is a succession planning problem. That is an industrial relations problem. The other one is an OR problem. They are different kinds of problems and so we find, lo and behold, that they succumb to different kinds of solutions requiring different kinds of experts. Tell me what you are trying to achieve so that I can tell you the name of the kind of change you are trying to bring about, and therefore the sort of experts you will need and the kinds of techniques required for achieving such change. So the traditional story goes. 

Maslow said once that if the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail; what he failed to bring out was that the more tools you have, the more this kind of problem tends to proliferate. Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that, in the absence of the requisite specialist experts, have-a-go managers (lacking, along with most of the rest of mankind, a scientific understanding of change-in-general) tend to jump in, feet-first, in the time-honoured traditions of managerial amateurism, and dangerously underestimate the difficulties of the technical substrate (Stewart, 1988) of what they are attempting.

This is in fact but one more consequence of the myth of the technological provenance of change: if the right tool isn’t to hand, maybe a crowbar and a bit of elbow grease will do the job. The true technical substrate of any attempted change has nothing inherently to do with the favoured tools of the specialists, but with the nature of the phenomena themselves, which alone, in reality, will determine the path of the change to be achieved, and which are no respecters of the conventional boundaries between technical or academic disciplines. 

5.4 Nature is Divided into Fields 

Indeed, part of this myth of technological provenance is the notion that nature (that is, reality—i.e. anything at all) comes ready divided-up into fields, corresponding to the well- worn classifications used in dividing up university departments or, for that matter, corporate headquarters. There are alleged to be found, in nature, various biological phenomena, and the phenomena of (phenomena ‘belonging to’) geophysics or quantum mechanics or what have you. According to this ‘museum theory’ of nature, everything bears or could bear a label stating what sort of thing it is, what class of phenomena it belongs to, what department it belongs in, and which specialism and set of expert tools is required to deal adequately with it. 

5.5 Solutions Must be Relevant to the Problems they Solve 

It tends to follow then, on this view of the technological provenance of change, that solutions must be relevant to the problems they solve. IR¹ problems require IR solutions and OR² problems require OR solutions and certainly not the other way around. There’s no room for mix and match. 

Suppose we’re trying to solve a particular problem. Now that problem may be a marketing problem, a drinking problem, a political problem, a problem to do with my car’s performance, a medical problem, an engineering problem, a marital problem, a financial problem, or what have you. In trying to arrive at a solution, one used to suppose that it mattered what kind of problem it was—for example, whether it was a problem of increasing brand share or a problem of my car stalling at low revs or a problem of negotiating an arms reduction between East and West.  A solution to a problem relating to a brand strategy called for marketing expertise, and a problem relating to the arms race called for political expertise and so on. One did not expect to call in an engineer to sort out a shaky marriage or an accountant to sort out the management of lower back pain. There was the idea around, in other words, that the substance, the subject matter, mattered more than the form of the problem; what a thing was made of mattered more than its particular shape. Even the most broad­-minded biologist naturally assumed that the rather different material constitution of starfish and redwood forests and snow leopards and chromosomes and termite colonies and bile ducts meant that starfish matters and bile-duct matters and termite matters and so on were all rather different, and one would not look at one of these areas in order to understand another. (Wilk, 1986) 

We would argue that the myth of the necessary relevance of solutions to the problems they solve is just that—a myth, and a self-perpetuating one. Later, in Part II, we shall propose an alternative view. Meanwhile, it may be worth noting in passing that this myth is the source of a good deal of current nonsense in education policy, in which it is assumed that we can improve our technological and industrial performance, as a nation, by producing more technologists and engineers and MBAs, and increasing the size of our applied science departments at the expense of our departments of pure science. 

6. The Occurrence of Change in Time 

Another myth that forms part of the traditional view of change is that change occurs in time. If I were to ask you how much physical space it requires for a seventeen-minute delay to occur, you would think that either you had misunderstood what I was asking or that I had misunderstood something rather fundamental. Every schoolchild knows that it doesn’t take any particular amount of space for a particular length of delay to occur, because delays do not, as such, occur in space, but rather in time. In a similar way, it is mistaken, but a very common mistake, to regard change, or particular changes, as occurring in time, strictly speaking. 

6.1 Change Takes Time to Occur 

Suppose we are running a race. How much time does it take to win? Well, it might take so many minutes to run the race, and no one can win until the race has been run, but the winning itself, although it can be said to occur at a point in time, does not itself take time. If we are trying to unlock a door, the trying may take time, but the eventual unlocking, although it can be said to have occurred at 1.07 a.m., did not itself take time to occur. The winning and the unlocking are occurrences that, in Ryle’s (1949) felicitous phrase, ‘can be dated but not clocked’. Of course a runner “may be described as winning his race from the start, despite the fact that he may not win it in the end,” and we may be described as unlocking the door even at a point at which we had no idea whether we would succeed or not; but this is merely due to a linguistic convention permitting us, when the hopes are good, to use the description of the intended outcome as the description for the corresponding activity of trying to attain it. (Ryle, 1949, p. 149) 

6.2 Change is a Process 

The reason change does not take time to occur (although it may be some time before a specific change in fact does occur), but is rather, if you will, instantaneous (still the wrong concept for reasons which will emerge later), is that change is not a process, or anything like a process. It is part of the myth we are considering to regard change as if it were a kind of process, with particular (‘technologically’ classified) kinds of changes often regarded as having typical or recommended stages or steps or phases. [If (counterfactually) change were a process, I would not find the expression ‘change management’ so deeply offensive; change is not the sort of thing that can ever be “managed,” and I regard “change management” as oxymoronic.] Change is not a process, nor is it ever a task, operation, performance, or activity. We shall return to this pivotal matter when we turn to giving our positive account of change. Let us simply note for the time being that the mythical view of change as taking time to occur can give us part of the traditional picture in which change, however revolutionary and even dizzyingly swift, is seen as actually happening gradually, step by logical step, rather than occurring by means of an all-or-none leap. 

6.3 Longstanding Problems Take Longer to Solve 

One of the most paralyzing myths about change, as far as change agents are concerned, is a curious myth indeed. It is the myth that the more longstanding the problem, the longer it will take to solve. The more intractable, longstanding situation is regarded as more difficult to change than an equally undesirable situation which may have arisen comparatively recently. Somehow, the fact that the situation has resisted our own and others’ change efforts for so long is taken as evidence for its greater degree of resistance, or stubbornness. And somehow, the length of time the undesirable situation has persisted is supposed to be an indication of the degree of difficulty that will be involved in putting it to rights. What is more, the solution to a really major, expensive, longstanding problem is itself often assumed to have to be big, expensive, and requiring a good deal of time before it can be expected to bear fruit. 

This is superstitiousness of a high order. A longstanding problem is simply one which no one has so far managed to solve. The solution-candidates so far proposed and put to the test did not, as it turned out, do the trick, and perhaps lots of people have tried lots of things for a long time. But no one tried the right thing. Whether a clock has been left unplugged for ten minutes or for ten years, and irrespective of the expensive repair efforts that may have been mounted over the course of those ten years, the solution in both cases may be the same—to plug it in. 

This particular curious version of the myth of change as a process occurring in time seems to be connected with so many of the traditional myths we have been discussing: the ubiquitousness of stability, resistance-to-change as universal, the technological provenance of change, and so on. All of these myths share a common assumption that it is the change-agent—and not the situation in which he is intervening—that selects the design of a successful solution. 

7. The Relevance of the Past 

No one would wish to deny that, at least on occasion, knowledge of what has happened in the past may be relevant to bringing about a future change. What is in dispute is just what it is about past events that can be useful to a would-be change-agent. 

7.1 “Why” Matters 

A common myth is that understanding how an undesirable situation has come about is somehow important when one seeks to put it to rights. This myth is phrased in many, many ways, but it is sometimes expressed by saying, rather more ambitiously, that “you cannot properly deal with the effect unless you first address the cause.” And yet, indubitably, if a tree falls across the road, it is not necessary to call in a tree surgeon to get to the root of the matter of “why” it fell, before you can “just deal with the effect”" and get the tree out of the way so that the traffic can flow freely again. 

7.2 “Where have you come from?” 

Many years ago, a colleague of mine, Dr D. J. Stewart, was driving in North Wales with the eminent Cambridge psychologist, Richard L. Gregory, on their way to a meeting with Rupert Crawshay-Williams, one of the truly original great thinkers in the field of our present inquiry (Crawshay-Williams 1957). They stopped their car to ask a local man the way to Portmeirion. The local man replied by asking, “Where have you come from?” Gregory began giving him a run-down of their route-so-far, only to stop himself in mid-sentence, and turn to Stewart to ask, bemused, “Why am I telling him this?” (Stewart, 1987) The local man’s question may sound silly, on the face of it at least, and we may laugh and feel rather superior upon hearing this anecdote, but the equivalent error takes up a disproportionate amount of time in much traditional management consultancy. 

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Next: An alternative view of change and its consequences for management

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© Copyright 1990, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted

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1. Industrial Relations

2. Operational Research