From the Archives: Some Common Myths About Change (1990) Part II
An Alternative View of Change and Its Consequences for Management
Introduction from the Editor
Our pure and applied scientific work in bringing about rapid change has allowed us to observe these truths about the nature of change: change is an observer-dependent difference in description over time, persistence presupposes mechanism and requires explanation, the past is largely irrelevant to creating change, and change is unlocked and unleashed by using the patterns inherent in the existing situation to create something new.
As always, if you have any questions or thoughts, please drop us a note in the comments.
—Ellen
Some Common Myths About Change (1990) Part II
An Alternative View of Change and Its Consequences for Management
Any technology sufficiently advanced appears to be magic
— Arthur C. Clarke
People who believe in particular myths are of course the last to acknowledge that there are any such myths. Unicorns, the edge of the world, phlogiston, and ‘the ghost in the machine’ could only be regarded as mythical once we had got to a point in our knowledge of the world where we had a more satisfactory account of things. And so it is with the myths about change that we have surveyed.
Neither we nor anyone else ever set out to assemble the received opinions of mankind on the subject of change in order to cavalierly brand them all as myths and have done with it—say, just for sport, or in a mad frenzy of nihilism. Rather, once an alternative view of change had grown up on its own, one that was more conceptually and scientifically sound and that proved more effective in practice, it became apparent from this new vantage-point that many of the things we had all grown up believing about change were no less mythical than phlogiston or the ghost in the machine.
I have surveyed this alternative view in somewhat greater detail elsewhere (Wilk, 1986, 1987, 1989; [where I have referred to it as ‘E2’ and to the traditional view as ‘El’]), and I have elsewhere placed this alternative view of change in the context of cybernetics (Wilk, 1986), general management (Wilk, 1986), culture change in organizations (Wilk, 1987), minimalist methodologies for organizational change (Wilk, 1987), and corporate strategy (Wilk, 1989). A number of these will be appearing in forthcoming issues of Change.
In the remainder of the present article, I shall attempt only to sketch enough of the alternative view to indicate the nature of the vantage point from which the common myths surveyed indeed appear to be myths, and to reveal something of the other side of ‘the thaumatology of change’ we referred to earlier. Namely, I shall hope to reveal something of the way in which what would appear to be miraculous feats from the standpoint of the traditional view of change appear to be—at the very least—sober possibilities following logically from the alternative view put forward.
Please bear in mind that although this alternative view of change has been developed far more fully and rigorously and presented in enormous logical and practical detail in another context (Wilk and Rumgay, 1990), the following can offer no more than a cursory sketch of some salient points.
8.1 A Modest Radical Proposal
8.1.1 Difference over time.
‘Change’ can most clearly and simply be defined as “difference over time.” If an observer’s description holds at one point in time and no longer holds at some later point in time, the observer will say that something has changed and he will be able to specify what has changed and in what respect. For there to be change, or a difference over time, there must be two mutually incompatible descriptions, one of which holds at one point in time, and one of which holds at a later point in time.
8.1.2 Change is observer-dependent.
But this difference over time is not an objectively determinate matter, independent of the observer’s point of view and choice of descriptions. Someone may say to a colleague, “You’ve changed your hair,” and she may reply “No, I’ve just had it cut—I always have it cut in this style.” For there to be a describable difference, there must first be some describable invariance—some pattern. And whether or not we will be prepared to say that ‘it’ has changed will depend on what we have taken the ‘it’ to be, i.e. how we have defined the pattern or invariance that is our starting point.
A driver may say the lights have changed when they go from red and amber to green. The engineer from the local council may only say the lights have changed if (though previously working properly according to the normal UK sequence of red–red & amber–green–amber–red) they were observed to go, say, from red to green & amber. A foreign visitor who had been away from the UK since the early 1960s, may say they’ve changed if he noted a flashing amber. And, having first consulted with our oculist and alienist, we might agree they’ve changed if they started showing mauve and white, let alone dancing a fandango with passing pedestrians or propounding a syllogism in Barbara1.
Whether or not we are correct in saying a change has occurred is dependent upon the particular invariance or pattern in which we, as observers, are interested, and upon our choice of descriptions.
8.1.3 Change cannot be clocked.
To reiterate Ryle’s phrase and bring it up to date, a change can be time-and-date-stamped but not clocked. A change is not a process or performance but an achievement (Ryle, 1949, Smart, 1949).
We must compare ‘to change’ … with ‘to arrive’ and ‘to win’, rather than with ‘to journey’ and ‘to fight’. Changes, becomings, beginnings, endings, teachings, hittings, touchings, and coincidences are like victories, arrivals, and scorings of goals, in being things to which we can give a date but not a running commentary, not even an infinitesimally short running commentary. (Smart, 1949)
Again following Ryle’s delightful discussion (Ryle, 1949, pp. 149-153), Smart writes:
When you have won a race you have not gone through two processes (1) running the race and (2) winning it. You have gone through one process, namely running, with the result that when you got to the end of the course no one was in front of you. You might have gone through exactly the same motions and lost it. So we must not say that ‘winning’ is the name of a process in the way that ‘running’ is; nor must we say either that winning is something that takes some time to perform or that it is instantaneous. The difference between winning and running is not that between a flash of lightning and a roll of thunder. . . . In the Metaphysics, 1048 b, 30-4, Aristotle makes this very point; he contrasts ‘to see’ and ‘to understand’ with ‘to walk’ and ‘to build’. We can say that we are in the middle of a walk or of a building operation, but what should we think if someone said that he was half-way through seeing that the ink pot had fallen over or that he would soon have finished understanding a certain argument? (Smart, 1949)
If DE is the description of the existing state of affairs at some time Tl, and DD is the incompatible description of the desired state of affairs (such that no state of affairs can be truly described by both DE and DD), then the desired change occurs at some later time T2 if and only if DD holds from T2 but not before. But although some time may lapse from Tl to T2 (and so we may have to wait some time before the change does in fact occur), the change does not take time to occur.
8.1.4 Persistence presupposes mechanism.
To bring about change is to intervene in the ‘free fall’ of the various relevant phenomena (Stewart, 1981-2) in such a way as to replace the existing state of affairs DE with the desired state of affairs DD. Our descriptions (DE and DD) will specify the invariance (pattern) we are interested in changing and the new invariance (pattern) with which we are seeking to replace it.
You cannot tinker with a pattern. The moment it is different in any respect it is no longer the same pattern. It may not yet be the desired pattern, but it is no longer the original—patterns are either there or they are not; it’s an all-or-none business. To speak of persistence at all is to presuppose an it that we define as persisting, an invariance. Persistence is persistence of patterns, persistence of a particular defined order.
What we ought to have learned from the dissemination of Bacon’s (still-not-yet-fully- exploited) principles of scientific method in the seventeenth century (Bacon, 1620), and as should have been plainly obvious from Boltzmann’s discovery of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the last century, has still not penetrated popular consciousness even after the revolutionary work of Shannon (Shannon and Weaver, 1949) and the rise of modern information theory.
To put the matter as simply as possible: All things being equal, at least in this particular universe of ours, we can expect continuous, random flux, change; the persistence of any particular order or pattern in any region of this universe is relatively low-probability, and needs accounting for. If we observe the persistence of pattern—if some of our observation-descriptions continue to hold over time—these states of affairs are said, in the jargon, to ‘exhibit constraint’. The scientific approach (Bacon, 1620; Ashby, 1956) will seek to account for the existence of constraint. In a nutshell: flux is to be expected, all things being equal; and so persistence presupposes mechanism (Ashby, 1956).
The above account of a few modest (and logically and scientifically rigorous) principles—that change is a difference over time, is observer-dependent, and cannot be clocked, and that persistence (not change) presupposes mechanism—together constitute a radical basis for an approach to bringing about change.
8.2 The Search for Constraints
On this basis, bringing about change involves only the following: carefully specifying DE and DD, searching for the critical mechanisms that are keeping things as they are, identifying those constraints with precision, and removing the smallest number of old constraints upon first placing, at the ready, the smallest number of new constraints, that together will permit the pre-existing, undesired pattern to flip, in all-or-none fashion, to the desired pattern.
8.3 The Restricted Relevance of the Past
The pattern is timeless. We need no information about how it came about in order to effectively intervene in it to bring about a transformation to the desired state of affairs. The past is only relevant, in this approach, in two ways: First, in identifying what has already been tried and has not worked, as a means of identifying further constraints that might not be visible without further experiment—and information from past ‘experiments’ can certainly save us a lot of time. And second, as a source of information about exceptions to the problematic pattern, as an often fertile source of information about what difference is likely to make a difference in dissolving the particular pattern in which we are interested.
8.4 The Inevitability of Change
On this approach, it is assumed (what other assumption could possibly be valid?) that change is inevitable. No matter how intractable the problem, it carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. Or to make the point in less belletristic fashion, the details of the stubbornly persistent pattern encode and thereby dictate the form of the intervention required to transform it in the desired direction.
8.5 Unlocking and Unleashing
On this view of change, it is not the change agent but the situation in which he is seeking to intervene that determines what form of intervention will be successful. The traditional view of change is that keys open locks; our alternative view is that locks open themselves once you supply the key that fits (Wilk, 1986). Solutions need not be relevant to the problems they solve; they simply must fit.
8.6 The General Science of Change
The general science that deals with the laws and principles of change-in-general is the science of cybernetics (that much misused term). Cybernetics is the branch of science that constructs rigorous scientific explanatory frameworks concerning the activities of managing and governing—indeed, purposive activity of any kind, wherever it occurs in nature or in human enterprise. As a formal scientific discipline, for reasons which should by now be unsurprising, cybernetics has been described by Bateson (1972) as ‘the study of form and pattern’.
If you have a goal that you wish to achieve and you are trying to steer a course to that goal, cybernetics lays down the principles for getting there most effectively, with minimum expenditure of time and effort. Modern cybernetics can perhaps best be defined as ‘the science of justified intervention’ (Stewart, 1981-2).2
For all its esoteric methodologies, complex conceptual innovations and technical sophistication, the application of cybernetics really boils down to the analysis of how to intervene most judiciously in the ‘free fall’ of any phenomenon, to get it to go the way you want it to go (Stewart, 1981-2; Ashby, 1956).
This kind of modern management cybernetics applies to management problems the kind of scientific principles and knowledge which, even within our lifetimes, has transformed other aspects of our lives. The problem is analyzed on a series of levels from the highly concrete to the purely abstract—an abstraction ladder. At the top end are the general transdisciplinary principles of cybernetics, and, at the bottom, the specific issues facing the organization described in the absolute minutiae of concrete, operational detail.
Highly abstract concepts, principles and universal laws are applied to the problem. At this level, these concepts are not recognizably concerned with management or organizations, and are not in a form that managers, management consultants, or “common sense” would normally be familiar with. This process allows the application of a rigorously scientific, cybernetically-grounded model to the unfamiliar thing, the problem, enabling recognition of the problem as being a case of something—in exactly the same way that a physicist, confronted with a bobbing object, might recognize a case of simple harmonic motion and be confident that he therefore already knows a great deal about how it will behave and the laws governing its behaviour.
The recognition at an abstract level that a given problem is a case of something does not in any way imply that the solution to the problem will lie with a ready-made series of actions that have proved successful elsewhere. On the contrary, going to a high enough level of scientific abstraction ensures the widest possible choice of options for implementing the abstract solution through using the unique features of the situation.
8.7 The Utilization Approach
On the alternative view of change we have been describing, the only viable approach is indeed a utilization approach (Wilk, 1986, 1987, 1989), i.e. one that seeks to utilize the idiosyncratic patterns in any situation as a critical part of the solution.
The first step is to unpack the (relatively low-level) abstractions in which the problem or proposed change has been described. We must climb down the client’s own particular abstraction ladder to get down to the uninterpreted, concrete physical realities of the situation. The low-level abstractions that are useful in day-to-day management for characterizing one’s organization and its work, the kinds of common-sense abstractions managers and management consultants are familiar and comfortable with, are, on this view of change, irrelevant, or only coincidentally relevant, to bringing about the desired organizational transformation. There are no scientific laws referring per se to strategic business units, trade unions, MIS, markets, missions, customer service, or what have you.
As cyberneticians we must climb down the client’s idiosyncratic ladder of abstraction to unpack these abstract notions into the concrete realities to which our informant is currently referring in the particular organization we happen to be working in—a process we call ‘deframing’. Once unpacked, they are viewed from the heights of an entirely different ladder of abstraction, viz. through the lens of the theoretical calculus of cybernetics, which is concerned, like physics is, with the universal laws defining the inviolable constraints on how things can actually work, without reference to our particular reasons for being interested in them. The general science of cybernetics, you might say, is concerned with meta-constraints—the universal constraints on the ways in which particular constraints can operate.
Once we have deframed the situation and viewed it at a fairly high level of scientific abstraction, we can select certain key patterns—almost invariably entirely idiosyncratic and often putatively negative—and see ways to utilize them positively as a means of transforming other patterns. Our own consultancy approach has for this reason been described as a form of ‘organizational judo’ (The Economist, 1990, p. 171). Again, the approach merely mentioned here is more fully described and illustrated elsewhere (Wilk, 1986, 1987, 1989).
8.8 Rapid, Across-the-Board Transformation
Many of the wider constraints on patterns, the constraints that keep those patterns as they are, are contextual in nature. They take the form of context-markers (Bateson, 1972; Wilk, 1986, 1987, 1989), the abstracted aspects of communication that serve to differentiate one context from another. These operate in an ‘across-the-board’ manner, maintaining a host of patterns across a wide area. As is particularly dramatic in the field of changing organizational behaviour and organizational culture in large corporations, it is partly for this reason that major transformations can be brought about in all-or-none fashion by means of highly minimalist interventions:
What is called for in transforming organizational culture, as in all forms of change, is nothing very dramatic. 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 of those holographic, across-the-board constraints that operate in the form of organizational contexts. To shift those contexts never—I use the word advisedly—requires anything more than to delicately manipulate the key context-markers on which they depend for their continued existence, and that is only a matter of selectively, judiciously introducing little pieces of communication. (Wilk, 1987)
8.9 Minimalist Intervention
There are a number of change methodologies for designing contextual interventions capable of creating major transformations by shifting contexts in this way. However, such contextual methodologies constitute only one of a range of change methodologies based on this alternative view of change, all of which enable the maximum desired change to be brought about through the minimum possible intervention. The range of such approaches is surveyed in our paper on ‘the art of the nudge’ (Wilk, 1987).3
Next: Some radical implications of adopting the revised view in practice
© Copyright 1990, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
A syllogism of the form: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal.
Stewart in fact defined “work“ as “justified intervention” and his felicitous term was repurposed in this paper; the justification for this, and the connection with Stewart’s seminal work on Ternality Theory, were not taken up in this paper.
Note that Stewart’s term “nudge” which I adopted in the mid-1980s was used here in a highly specific, technical sense, which bears little relation, conceptually or practically, to the contemporary use of our term, whose meaning rather degenerated over the years as it morphed into something rather more anodyne once stripped of its original theoretical foundations.